The randomness of the supermarket - shopping around the world

OK, I don't mean to sound like a chronic complainer who is never happy with anything but since I am, here we go..

Have you ever been abroad, shopping for groceries and not finding what you need but still being sure it must be somewhere there? I am quite sure there must be corn starch or potato starch somewhere in the supermarket somewhere in the Czech Republic but I haven't been able to locate it. Instead, there are at least 18 different sorts of dried beans (but no black beans, mind you), heaps and heaps of pasta, pasta sauce and rice.

In addition to pasta and rice, all kinds of cheeses fill the shelves, all kinds of meats are stocked there, waiting to be sold to the hungry customers. They even have tempeh (Indonesian soy bean-based product, distantly reminds me of tofu) and inexpensive tofu. Pumpkins of all imaginable varieties. But the Albert store in our building doesn't sell soy sauce. Nor does it sell spices other than salt and pepper, or so it seems. But here we must bear in mind that I am not very good at finding things anywhere, not even in Finland where I can red the labels on the products without any difficulty. When I was living with my parents it was a common occurrence that Mom sent me to buy something which I couldn't find in the store but which actually was in a very easy place when Mom showed it to me.. Poor Mom, she probably hoped to create someone a bit more bright..

Trick or treat? 

Every country (except Ireland) I've been living in has surprised me somehow when it comes to food. In South Korea fruits were expensive. Even apples and especially the more "exotic" things like oranges. But they had tons of different noodles and hot pepper pastes, flakes, etc. In Poland a supermarket could just run out of a specific product and it could be gone from the shelves for days. There was a time when my next-door grocery store didn't have cucumbers for days. What the hell happened to cucumbers? Did all the delivery trucks drive off the road?

Australia is a chapter in itself. First of all the prices are terrifying, secondly most of the produce there is Australian grown. For someone coming from a very cold country where only very persistent, humble things can grow during the short summer, it is amazing to think that some place can produce so many kinds of different fruits, vegetables and berries. Well, not all of them taste that great, though, Originally, the plants were apparently used to a different kind of soil..

I will end this rant by telling you this: I went to Albert and they had sold all the zucchinis. Not even a single zucchini was left for me. So no fried zucchini for lunch, hey.