Walmart

We let our fridge get pretty empty sometimes. We have an honor system, basically, where if you notice that we're out of something, you go shopping. Or, as happens so often in the world of roommates, we think about going shopping, but instead send loud psychic messages to one another: "No, it's your turn to go." We all wait until we can't stand it anymore, and then all three of us go shopping, alone, without discussing it, on the same day, and none of us buy anything on the list in our kitchen. So the one recent evening, as we sat down to a late dinner of there's-really-nothing-else-to-eat pasta, I casually asked who would be able to go shopping the next day. Julian offered, and I offered to come with him, and then in a series of culture jokes gone horribly wrong (you have to know Julian to understand how this happens), we decided it would be really funny to go to Berlin's Walmart Supercenter and have a cross-cultural experience while buying everything on our list. Julian was proud to have remembered the list, and I was proud to have my camera along to document the historic occasion. I didn't know Walmart existed in Berlin, and can't quite understand how it could possibly make money in a country where the national sport is shopping at specialty stores. I know a lot of Germans (my former host parents included) who would be horrified at the idea of buying their cheese in the same store where they buy paper towels. But it is there, in Neukoelln, with a large (by Berlin standards) parking lot and its very own McDonalds.
Inside, it's an awful lot like every other Walmart I've ever been to, with the same bad lights and random, useless sale items (Julian thought these were pretty funny (in a painful way), and tried to buy himself this fleece-lined electric sock thing, on sale for just 14.99). It seems that Walmart could only go so far with its big-box plans, because half the store was actually in the basement. It took us a long time to find this, partly because the escalator is very well hidden, and partly because Julian kept getting distracted by the sale on 60 kilo bags of dirt. When we did finally find it, we were pleased to see that they had at least 16 varieties of everything we needed. Turns out that comparison shopping isn't very cross-cultural, though, and it wasn't long until Julian couldn't take it anymore and collapsed into a stack of toilet paper while I was trying to figure out the best value paper towels. He pulled it together, though, when he spotted the juice section. There, I nearly collapsed while he tried to decide whether or not to splurge and buy himself a carton of Happy Day strawberry juice. In the end, he bought it, and sang Happy Day (those are the only words in the song that he knows) all the way to the cash register.
No moral to this story, really, but I wanted to post the pictures of Julian, the second person I've ever met who can make a trip to Walmart a mostly fond memory (if not a successful
study in culturally grounded comsumer habits).