London & re-entry to society (or Supermarket Shock)

I'm in London now on my friend Jessica's computer. I was a little too busy during my last days of Ethiopia to post from there however I said my goodbyes and left without incident. I even got through customs on both sides of the airplane ride quickly! Hooray!

I spent sometime being touristy in London, but since this is a blog about Ethiopia, (it's in the URL and everything) I'll write something about that. So getting back to civilization on the first day was a little surreal, especially the trip to the grocery store near Jess's apartment. Living in Gondor has been a big change in the consumerist/shopping vein. I lived in a place where you didn't have much in the way of choice in foods and while you could find a nice choice of dry goods, pretty much anything that could rot was in short supply. Meats were limited, as were veggies, fruit, and dairy... frozen foods were unheard of. With this in mind shopping became a little bit of a different experience. I'll go with vegetable shopping for an example. In Gondor you could regularly find potatoes, tomatoes, chile peppers and onions. On good days you could also find avocados, spinach, carrots and pumpkins. I might be forgetting something, but you get the drift. If you see one of the rarer vegetables you buy it immediately (except the pumpkins, they were just too big). If you don't you might not see them again for weeks if at all.

Now take this new mentality and go into your average grocery store. It doesn't work! You sort of flop between wanting to buy everything and just staring blankly at the selection and trying to work out all the combinations of choice into something that makes sense. My shopping brain has essentially been destroyed and I'll have to rebuild it from scratch to make sense of the variety of foods (and probably everything else) available again. You think about culture shock, but you don't really think about reverse culture shock. Admittedly it was only a few months so I'll probably get back into the swing of things pretty soon, but if I ask you to hold my hand through a shopping experience you know why.