Groceries in Monaco and TV in French

Monday, September 8

Big event for the day was grocery shopping in Monaco. The tall woman at the front desk of the resort put an X on our map and drew out the route for us – certainly seemed simple enough. And we set off.

Jim and I have found, in our 20-plus years together, that we will always have a fight in the car when we are approaching an unfamiliar area. Knowing it doesn’t prevent it from happening. And finding the supermarket in Monaco was no exception. Suffice it to say that (as usual) he was making (what I thought were) stupid decisions about where to turn and I was making (to my way of thinking very helpful) suggestions (to his way of thinking criticisms) about what to do next to get back on track. By the time we parked the car underground and got back up to the surface to enter the shopping arcade that included the super market, we actually had to split up to go cool off. And we did. And it was all fine after that.

We watched while several people got shopping carts from a locked chain. They appeared to be putting a coin into a slot in order to release a cart. We had to pay to rent a shopping cart?? We approached the line of chained carts and saw that the place to put the coin was attached to each cart. The slot seemed to accommodate 50 cent, 1 Euro and 2 Euro coins. Hmmmm. A puzzle. We finally took the plunge and put a coin into the slot – where it didn’t disappear into the container but sat there, half poking out of the slot. We were able to unlock the cart and use it. Turns out that the money was released back to you after you locked the cart back up. Incentive to return the cart! If you had too many groceries to return to your car without the cart, there was another cart lockup in the garage! They were thinking of everything!

We also learned that you have to bring your own shopping bags to the grocery store. No choice between paper and plastic – no bags if you didn’t bring your own! Or purchase bags at the store itself, which is what we ended up doing. Sarah and I now each have very chic reusable shopping bags from Monaco! Was food more expensive? Yes and no. The produce seemed very reasonably priced – a package of 3 mixed color peppers was 2 Euros, which was about $3, usually costs us almost $5 in the states. Other stuff? Hard to remember but we spent 100 Euros, which included 4 coffee cups (I haven’t yet mentioned that the apartment had 2 sets of 4 coffee cups that were small and smaller), toilet paper, and other stuff we don’t normally include in our weekly shopping.

After getting back to the apartment and putting away the groceries, we ended the day eating in, reading, and playing games – we had brought cards, dice for Greedy, and a travel version of Rumikub.

A word about our television in the apartment. Jim and I love to watch TV and while there was TV in the apartment, all the channels were French except for one channel in English that was BBC World. So, it was CSI in dubbed French or news in English. CSI in French loses any charm after about 2 minutes, so we learned about the financial meltdown in the US from the BBC. And I was foolish enough to look at the balance in my 401k when we got back. Ugh.