Grocery Shopping

I went grocery shopping for our dinner tonight.  SuperK is still being plagued by an upset stomach and requested some soup, a universal foodstuff.  I like grocery shopping in a foreign country.  Food is something that is shared by everyone.  Ya gotta eat.  I like looking at different things in different places - I can really get a sense of a place by what people eat, and often they eat very different things than I'm used to, which is occasionally frustrating but also a big part of the adventure.  It's very fun.

I looked for cans of soup but was stymied.  I found boxes of soup which I bought for, I believe, the first time in my life.  The instructions were, as you might imagine, in French.  I've traveled with my friend Little Westside Jonny - who is fluent in French, if by "fluent" you mean "hides behind his menu when the waiter arrives," but he was 6000 miles away so I was on my own.  There's an app on Google called Autotranslate so I plugged in the instructions for preparing the box of soup, and it spit out: "Step One: Shake the goat."

I did NOT shake the goat.  I WILL not shake the goat.

I tried again and got: "Step One: Shake the red brick."

You can't make this shit up.

I also noticed in the grocery store that had no cans of soup that there were a couple of different kinds of snails in a jar.  Perhaps the goats, once shaken, would enjoy a nice meal of snails, but I would not and in this rare instance, I believe I could speak for my wife.  There was also a hellacious selection of canned legumes, crackers and digestives and biscuits out the wazoo, and a bewildering array of fish products, floating in oil. 

I threw the soup away and had biscuits for dinner.