Carrefour

Most of you must be wondering what the heck Carrefour means.....actually, even I have no idea.....but it’s the name of a chain of supermarkets in France....and now you must be wondering, “what in the name of crap is this guy doing blogging about a damn supermarket”.....well....I guess my boredom is the culprit....it’s making me blog about all and sundry that exists in the mess that my brain is.....

But, actually, to me it’s not such a weird thing to blog about.....I loved that place, the supermarket, for reasons that even I can’t make sense of.....I remember the first time I went to Carrefour.....it was late at night and was the last sunday before Christmas....guess that was the only reason it was open on a Sunday....somebody had suggested that we visit the place before Christmas, for there might be a sale out there.....did he really think Indians were cheap enough to not let any sale go by?.....so there we were, sitting on the bus to the supermarket.....

There was a tiny little glitch....we only had enquired about which bus to take, but forgot to ask where to get down....on the way, one of us suggested it might already have passed......we got down at the bus station “la village” and looked around....we might as well have got down at a crematorium, there wasn’t a soul to ask around....we then spotted a map of the bus which we had just de-embarked....a few stops ahead, actually the last stop, was a place called “centre commercial la vatine”.....I guessed it meant the commercial centre of a suburb called la vatine....so we waited for the next bus, and got down at la vatine....and VOILA ,there it was......CARREFOUR....

The car parking area of that place seemed to be bigger than the market itself..... I cursed this one fact, for we had to walk all the way to the entrance in the -7 degree temperature....damn it was freezing....the first thing I saw when I got inside was this huge SUV parked right at the entrance...I was like, I hope we came to the right place.....actually we did...it was indeed a supermarket, to be exact, a hypermarket.....they even had cars there for display......that place was one of the most beautiful things I had witnessed in the 7 days of my French sojourn...the Christmas decorations gave it a festive look and it was awesome...

I went to that place every week for the next six months.....every Friday evening, to be exact, with religious consistency.....but I never bought much there...it wasn’t as cheap as the other supermarket, E-leclerc at Saint Sever, where I went for my normal weekly shopping on saturdays.....well there wasn’t much difference between the two....I guess I saved two euros every week goin to E-leclerc instead of Carrefour....and two euros was, actually, a big deal for me :P.....another reason for going to E-leclerc was that it was located in the city centre and I could have a little walk through the centre ville on a nice sunny Saturday morning before I actually went shopping....my friends used to laugh at me going to Carrefour every Friday even when I had nothing to buy.....but that’s me, half the things I do don’t make sense to anybody else :P.....actually they don’t even make sense to myself....but who cares...I like spending hours at a supermarket looking at stuff I am never gonna buy....I like walking miles along the bus route even when I have an unlimited travel bus pass....

I remember one of the last few times I went to Carrefour.....it was just days before I was to come back to India.....a friend of mine had her birthday soon and I wanted to buy a little gift for her....she’s more like my baby sister....so I went to the kid’s section to get her something.....all it took to gear down my over enthusiasm was to look at the tiny little price tag stuck to one of the teddy bear’s neck....I then looked at other price tags...they might as well have stuck diamonds instead of eyes to the teddy bear.....I bid a final farewell to that section and went to the more traditional gift section of the market.....I found a cute pink diary with a dancing Disney princess printed on it.....obviously my eyes went to the price tag before they could be allowed to admire the princess.....cheap enough, cute enough, small enough, I thought.....and bought it....the whole process from deciding to buy a gift and actually buying it took more than one visit to Carrefour.....I guess it wasn’t really because I was being selective, it was actually more so because I kinda needed more reasons to visit the place on days other than Fridays :P......

There are so many stories, so much to write about my visits to Carrefour......but then this page would become more of a journal than a blog....but rest assured, you would get to read many more weird blogs about my experiences J

So until then..... Arrivederci !....