Just as there are topics that perennially, perhaps cyclically come up on Twitter (“Do you wash your legs,” (h/t Reply All) “Ruin a movie in one letter/Fat band names,” etc), there are pet topics that I can’t deny myself writing about every few years. Going to grocery stores while traveling is one of them.
Last year I spend a week in London and ate the same perfectly calibrated Tesco salad every night: spinach, “semi-dried” tomatoes (are they partially dried by the sun? Or are they dehydrated in some other method? They weren’t uniformly dry, which I appreciated), croutons, mozzarella balls, and pesto dressing. I usually ate it with a spoon because I didn’t know where to look for takeaway forks (I am loathe to ask questions in any establishment and the fact that the Tesco had self-checkout meant there was no way I was going to talk to a human) and my hotel room had spoons for the complimentary coffee.
…I just did a search back to my posts from last August to see if I raved about Tesco salads before, but instead found that, pre-London, my 2018 post was titled “London Calling” just like my 2019 post. How embarrassing!
So the non-creative title that I gave my London posts last year and this year stayed the same, but unfortunately Tesco did not keep their salads the same. Gone was my perfect caprese and in its place I only found a very dry falafel salad. This did, however, give me reason to expand my grocery ventures while in the UK. My hotel this year was near not only a Tesco but also a Sainsbury’s and a Waitrose. I did buy a few practical things there, like three-bean salad and toothpaste, but mainly trolled the aisles looking for the best gummies to take back to the US with me and the most hilarious-to-foreigners aisle directories. Sainsbury’s wins with aisle 23, which advertises:
Fizzy drinks
Long life juice
Squash
“Squash” was very thematic given that the gummies I found there were Squashies (delicious milk and raspberry flavored gums that look like two-tone pillows) and Randoms: Squish ’ems edition (which I’m sorry to report are not nearly as delicious OR as random as Randoms: Original edition, though I do like the symmetry between the llama-wearing-a-hat on the Randoms package and giraffe-wearing-a-fruit-basket on the Squish ’ems variety). Later in the trip I rectified this and got a bag of original Randoms, a “share size” (HA) of Haribo star mix, and in the airport, my greatest achievement – a bag of Squidglets (join our squidgy squad! they exhort from the back of the bag, and I do. I do.)
The gummies were on my mind so much that when the customs officer asked me if I bought anything in London, while I could have alternatively said “Yes, a shirt,” I instead said, “Um…gummies!” which I don’t think he was expecting. “Gummies?” he repeated. “You know, like…Percy Pigs?” I said, and then got nervous because Percy Pigs were probably the one kind of gummy I didn’t buy.
