This is no small win. After living over here in Greece and Montenegro, without speaking any of the native tongue except for the compulsory “Good Morning” and “Thank You” and a few other fun things to say, I’ve finally mastered the produce weighing machines.
Grocery shopping in a language you don’t understand is an adventure to say the least. It’s not uncommon for me to return to the boat and open a jar and discover it wasn’t what I thought it was. Every trip to the grocery store is a surprise in the making.
But buying produce is on another level. Usually, when I can, I love buying everything from a produce stand but when I’m at the store and need something that grows, it used to be a huge dilemma. Here in Europe, it is common to weight your own produce and print out a sticker bar code that is scanned at the register. Sometimes there’s someone there to weigh and print them for you and sometimes there’s not. These contraptions are not for the faint at heart when you can’t read the language on the screen. But over the past month, I’ve memorized the indecipherable sequence of buttons one must push to print out my produce stickers! And when it works, I scare everybody in the store because success at the machine always makes me shout “YES!” and do a little dance. Small victories make me happy!
This contraption doesn’t have any english on it, but I memorized the sequence of numbers and up and down buttons.
And when it prints something out I feel like I’ve conquered the world of produce like a boss.
And when no one questions my work at the register it’s a success story.