Sunday night and I’ve survived a whole weekend on my own with Ella without tearing out the frizz-ball that used to be my hair. I’m sure the coming week will be much better because we have some things planned, but weekends are a bit of a trial if Darren is working. Yesterday we went looking for a toyshop that no longer exists. We did however find a much better branch of Coles supermarket with wider aisles and plenty of halogen lighting. Don’t ask me why this makes the shopping experience more pleasant, it just does, and they don’t play piped music like the one in Randwick.
As advised by Jo, I’ve been trying to do the food shopping the old fashioned way, which means meat from the butcher, bread from the baker and so on. Apparently it works out cheaper, which might be true, but at this stage (and in this heat), the idea of Sainsbury’s on a cold January afternoon (with a shopping trolley that steers properly) is enough to make me come over all dreamy. I’m all in favour of the small independent retailer, but it is quite a task to do the shopping this way when you’re also pushing a buggy and when you’re still not sure about the currency. The shopkeepers could be short-changing me left right and centre and I wouldn’t have the foggiest.
Shopping for food is odd because there’s a reduced range of the things you are used to buying and then there’s a whole new world of products you’ve never seen before. The fruit is gorgeous, it all looks and tastes so ripe that I feel much more inclined to eat it, so this week we’ve been having plums, peaches, avocado and mango as well as Lebanese breads and hand-made pesto sauce. The chocolate might be disgusting, but the cakes look amazing and the yoghurts taste more creamy than the ones back home, so it’s not all bad.
Shopping for clothes is also a bit of a trial, or rather, a process of trial and error. Almost all of the shops at Bondi Junction’s Westfield centre are unfamiliar to me, aside from Laura Ashley and Crabtree and Evelyn. Clothes shopping becomes quite a humiliating experience because you unwittingly go into (a) shops where you can’t afford anything, (b) shops where nothing would fit you anyway, (c) shops for much younger people, (d) shops for much trendier people and perhaps least painful of the lot (e) shops for much older people (at least you leave the shop feeling smug about something). In order to survive this process with any shred of dignity intact, it becomes necessary to appear completely aloof, even when you have white mosquito-bitten legs and you are wearing a tee-shirt with half of your daughter’s lunch smeared on the shoulder. That’s quite an act to pull off, and it’s a real relief when the lift is empty and you can relax your face muscles between floors.
In the end, we hung about the petshop, which seemed a less painful option. The shop assistant looked about nine years old, so I managed to persuade her to open up the doggy pound and let me hold one of the puppies (a shih-tzu crossed with a poodle – I have no idea why, whether shih-tzus fancy poodles or what the ensuing offspring is called, and being about nine years old, neither did she). The price tag was $1300 so there’s one souvenir we won’t be bringing home.
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3 comments:
Didn't you know, the puppies are called Shihtz-oodles. And that's not because of their heritage.
I'd be tempted to call it a 'Shih-Poo'!
As for adults with lateral s's i see them all the time, they want a magic wand to fix it, and when you tell them it takes practice to change it they don't come back unless they're mad Romanian, deaf women. That's my experience anyway!
Tamsin, you just have it in for them!
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