The Club Unimarc tour

Since I have to be up early for a tour and my hotel doesn't serve breakfast but has a kitchen, I headed to Unimarc, a Chilean supermarket, for supplies. It's also a small way to connect with the culture; i could do the David Byrne experiment and eat the same groceries as local people and see if I start having the same thoughts. Maybe my Spanish would improve too.

The first thing I looked for and the one that took the longest time was yogurt. There was a profusion of brands and flavours, most of them unfamiliar (I don't know what chirimoya tastes like, so I did by a whole container of yogurt flavoured with it, though I'll try the fruit if I get a chance. I finally had something picked out when I realized that even though it was in the yogurt section and in a similar container, it was really some kind of "milk drink", not yogurt. Maybe just fine, but not-this not-that turned me off. I did eventually locate one that was yogurt, in a familiar flavour (vanilla!), and with bacteria. A litre of the stuff cost about 2 bucks.

Fruit was next. The produce section was surprisingly scanty. There may be a farmers' market somewhere in town that everyone goes to for that kind of thing, but I don't know where it is. What was on offer was none too cheerful either. I picked up some sorrowful apples and pears, and a few oranges that looked more human, er, orangy.

Next, bread. Three generic buns that didn't feel like they were made of spider webs. I noticed that the other people who were buying bread were taking it to a weighing station so I did the same. A light bulb went off and I asked the clerk if I had to do this for the fruit too. Yep. Good thing I noticed that, even if a bit late.

The only milk I saw was in the hermetically sealed lasts-a-year type of container, so that's what I picked up. And some slices of Gouda cheese.

I had been there earlier in the day and did some price comparisons but the only one I actually remember is that 750ml of Bacardi rum costs about $10.

Anyway my purchases (which did not include rum) came to about $8.

Off to see penguins tomorrow.