February 3rd, 2013 - Grocery Missions and Taxi Misadventures

Today's Random Photo: Sunrise in Panwa

Mission: First Solo Excursion into Phuket Town
Objective: Groceries

Groceries, as I’ve mentioned before, are weirdly difficult for us. I’m certain we are doing the grocery-thing wrong. I mean, they’re groceries, this isn’t neurobiology or anything. And I did take a neurobiology class (God help me), so I should be capable of this, right?

And yet.


Today, I made it my mission to be all independent, go to Tesco in Phuket Town and stock up on groceries. This seemed, at the time, like a perfectly reasonable task. I had a list and everything.

Unfortunately, my plans were thwarted before I even made it to Tesco.






I got a cab and was on my way. The driver was a really nice guy, though between the loud air conditioning in the car, the fact that I couldn’t really see him from the backseat, and the usual language barrier, our conversation was stilted at best. I mostly smiled and nodded politely, because hey, I’m a polite person. But language barriers are so easily exploited, you know. I should have been paying more attention.

He passed me a little booklet with a selection of local tours and such to take a look at (see below), which was fine. And admittedly, I was pretty engrossed in the thing. Not because I was really interested in the tours or anything, but because the English translations were making my left eye twitch with the urge to pull out a red marker and start correcting grammar. I mean, I applaud their effort, I really do. I certainly couldn’t pull off a Thai translation. I’m the foreigner here, and they are going out of their way to offer me things in my own language because I’m too lazy to learn theirs (Thai is hard). They shouldn’t have to cater to me, and I appreciate that they do. But for the love of god, just let me edit these things before they get printed, please.

Advertisement for The Kinnaree House, AKA The House of Lies

While I was busy being an uncontrollable grammar nazi in the backseat, we pulled up to a building that was most definitely not Tesco, to which my response was to point out the obvious, by saying, “Um, this isn’t Tesco.”

Now, this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been in plenty of taxis with plenty of sketchy taxi drivers (and good ones, too, of course), and let’s not forget all the overzealous time-share people in Mexico's airports. I’m always at least half-expecting to get into a cab and windup sitting through a two-hour sales pitch from someone trying to sell me a condo (and I cannot even begin to express how much I neither need nor want a condo time-share--it is perplexing that they would try to sell me one in the first place). It’s a necessary risk is what I’m getting at. But this was the first time such a ploy actually happened to me.

We pulled up into a driveway packed with hulking tour buses. I expressed my confusion, and for about twenty seconds I was torn between extreme offense at having been deceived and dread at the prospect of enduring some sort of mind-numbing, excessively long time-share pitch. I needed groceries. I didn’t have time for this. They weren’t going to shop for themselves. But then I remembered my resolve to be less neurotic and paranoid, so I decided, why not? It would be something to blog about! Hence, this blog post.

It turned out not to be as scary as initially anticipated. It wasn’t a time-share thing, or an elaborate human trafficking ring (I have got to stop reading the news so often), but rather a very large tourist shop called The Kinnaree House. I walked in with no intention whatsoever of buying anything. Don’t we always?

People kept trying to pressure me into buying this little silk tissue-box cover with elephants on it. I tried to explain to them that a) why would I possibly want a tissue-box cover? and b) you know what you need before you can have a tissue-box cover? Tissue boxes. From Tesco; where I should have been in the first place. Needless to say, I’m not dragging a kitschy tissue-box cover all over Thailand with me, so I declined. I have, however, been on the hunt for postcards for a few days now, so I picked some up while I was there (why not, at this point?). Some lucky people will be receiving these in the mail soon, by the way (and if you’d like to be one of those lucky people, leave your mailing address in a comment or message me and I’ll see what I can do). Then, finally, I was on my way to Tesco--for real, this time.

The actual grocery shopping was not as interesting as getting to the grocery store, so I won’t detail it. It was wildly successful, though. As Geo’s birthday is coming up, I got her a green waterbottle shaped like a frog, which she is unreasonably thrilled by.

The Frog. You may notice it is even helpfully labelled as such in case it isn't immediately obvious that it is, indeed, meant to look like a frog.

We now have two huge boxes of cornflakes, four tubs of water, various ingredients necessary to make food, cookies (very important), and something that may or may not be soap (I spent a good five minutes staring at the square green object in an aisle, trying to determine based on its location whether it was regular soap, a really pungent edible thing, or laundry detergent—jury’s still out). One thing I could not find for the life of me was sunscreen. There were shelves and shelves of skin whitening/bleaching creams, but no sunscreen. As always, our grocery status is a work in progress.

My taxi driver was nice enough to wait around the parking lot for me to do my shopping, and he helped me take it all inside, too, so all in all I think the trip was successful and I’ve forgiven the minor deceit.  This time. But even misadventures still count as adventures, right?

- LuckyStar