Satruday Night Grocery Shopping

For some reason we decided at 9:15 p.m. on a Saturday night we needed groceries. H and I grabbed our little tote box thing with wheels and our recyclable bags and we went around the corner.

The whole experience took an hour for a few reasons:

1. Any time you want something from the deli counter you need to set aside at least 20 minutes of your life you won’t be getting back.
2. H likes to shop, even for groceries. So when it comes time to picking ground beef it is a 10 minute ordeal as each and every package is compared to one another.

But it isn’t our shopping habits that caused me to write on this Sunday morning but rather two things we saw at Ralph’s. Now remember, we are just grocery shopping here – something millions of people do each day all around the world. But of course in downtown LA it’s a little different.

• Two women dressed in Victorian dresses. They were both really long with buttons all the way up the back. One of the garments was an ivory color and the other was black – both were see-through. Neither woman was wearing a bra and it was quite obvious. They raced around a section of the store we were close to shouting out things like “I found the cheese! The cheese! It’s over here, I found it!”. The other would join with their cart of miss-mashed items and begin to hold different cheeses and speak loudly about what they should buy. They moved at a fast pace and reckless abandon in their trampy old-school period dresses, shouting throughout the store about what they needed next.
• As we are standing at the deli counter, a guy and girl enter the store. They are dressed normal enough, just walking around with a hand-held basket instead of a cart. Nothing out of the ordinary except for the hula-hoop she has with her. The hula-hoop is around her neck, hanging down at her side as they walk over to the deli counter and chit-chat. H and I are talking and getting our 1/2 lb. of deli meat as the woman wants to move up and down the display case to see what is available, but she can’t get where she wants because the hula-hoop is sticking out and might hit someone. At no time did she drop it to her waist and start ‘hula-hooping’ which at least would have been entertaining. Instead we same them a few more times at the store, picking up a thing here and there, all the while with the hula-hoop dangling from her neck.

So to recap for everyone what you see in the grocery store on a typical day here: Victoria slutty girls discovering cheese and crackers for the first time this century; girl wearing a hula-hoop and she browses the aisles and reads magazines at the checkout.

You never disappoint in the long run downtown LA, never.