Parks and Grocery Shopping (Thursday)

Today after we set up our German “Haspa” bank account, Ken went to work. I had a conscious choice to make. The jet lag and loneliness set in when he left, so I decided to get out of the flat and go running. Ken warned me before he left that I’d better be careful since I did not know my way around. I told him that I only needed to go east and I’d get to the Alster Lake. I had wanted to run there since we toured the city in January. He then asked me the brilliant question, “Which way is east?” On a cloudy day, I admitted that I hadn’t a clue. He said that our street is east/west, so that helped. I started out walking south and found a nice park with a ¼ mile running track. I ran a mile on that before getting bored. I’ve been so spoiled running in Lawrence. I then walked on and actually found the Alster. I needed this boost of encouragement- to find something here without Ken’s help. I ran a little there and came home.

In the afternoon, I ventured to Budni and the grocery store. Budni is a CVS or Walgreens type store without the pharmacy (a separate store). My adventure there was to buy laundry detergent. I had my handheld translator, but all the words were not in the dictionary, so I had to do some guessing. We’ll see of our clothes turn blue or something!

The next stop was the grocery. I only bought about 15 items and spent well over an hour there. You know how challenging going to a new grocery in a different city is. “Your” Kroger is arranged in a specific way and even if it is another Kroger, things are in a different place. Then add the challenge of having all the food in a foreign language. Buying cheddar cheese had me nearly in tears. I walked up and down the packaged cheese aisle and translated each type hoping that it would come out Cheddar. (Of course my dictionary did not have that word, so I did not know what I was looking for.) I finally found it in the deli. I was blessed with an English-speaking employee there. He also helped me buy a ½ kg of hamburger.

As many of you know, my comfort food is ice cream, so I headed to the ice cream aisle. I couldn’t see anything that was vanilla other than “Bourbon-Vanille”. I really did not want liquor ice cream, but after the stress of shopping, I needed ice cream desperately. Another lady saw me keying in the word“Bourbon”. She knew English and told me that it didn’t have liquor in it. She also helped me find the mayonnaise. I had a headache by the time I left.