When I'm on vacation, I usually don't have to buy anything ordinary. I might have to pick up some sunscreen or a bottle of shampoo if I forgot to pack it, but that stuff is easily found in a grocery store. I just spend money on irreverent t-shirts from museum stores. This vacation, however, is a whole new world: never have I been gone from home for a month, and needed something ridiculously ordinary.
In this case, I needed socks. Yes, socks. I always say socks should be free, because there is no joy in buying socks. No one gets excited to see that you have new socks. You just need them.then you destroy them and you need some more. Dullsville.
The thing is, I'm in a place where I walk more than I have walked since living in Chapel Hill. Parts of my feet are bleeding and/or self-amputating daily. I need some serious socks for people who beat up their feet. But where in hell do people buy something like athletic socks in Barcelona?
We got all Sherlock on Barcelona's ass. The first stop was an asics store, where they not only sell high end running shoes, but they also have an in-store treadmill with complicated-looking devices for -- I dunno, maybe performing neurosurgery while you run. The socks sold there were ultra-moisture-wicking, space-age blah blah blah jillion-dollar socks.
This is getting irritating, I thought. Let's just go to the mall. (When I say, "Let's go to a mall, " it is a clear sign that desperation and hysteria are setting in.)
At the mall, there were more stores with mega-expensive specialty socks (wool socks for mountain climbers! funny socks with faces printed on them!) and not a useful sock to be seen. I was about to give up and let my feet bleed themselves down to stumps, when we found the store Decathlon.
To imagine Decathlon accurately, you must envision Sports Authority. Then you must make it the size of Target, and include things you would never see in Sports Authority. From the front of the store, for example, I spotted karate gi hanging in the back. I went back there and discovered that the martial arts supplies (including many colors of obi, which seemed odd) were hanging next to the ballet leotards and shoes. A sports store that sells ballet supplies? They also sell rhythmic gymnastics gear, wet suits and other diving equipment, camping crap, and bikini tops and bottoms sold separately (first sensible thing I've ever seen in bathing suit sales). My favorite of their products was a set of bikinis in which you could replace all the strings/straps, and they sold replacement strings in funky colors and patterns. So you could buy a bikini top and bottom that didn't match, and you could make them even weirder by changing up the straps.
I love this shit. I'm never voluntarily wearing a bikini again, but I love looking at the way people shop, the things they think are fun and valuable. Apparently they have decided, in the this beach town, that the very strings of the bikini should be a matter of individual choice.
Cool. But there's no more avoiding it. I gotta get socks. So, after looking through the soccer, basketball, baseball, and bicycling sections, I finally found the tennis area and found some socks I could live with.
Which brought me to the cash register, and the realization that there is a form of Spanish at which I suck. It is the part where the cashier asks if you have a Special Points for Big Spenders Card. The cards at each store are all called something different, as in the US, and the cashiers rattle off the question so fast that I always stare at them.
They stare back and then realize they are dealing with a human of sub-standard intelligence. "In English?" they ask me. Of course they are right, but just once I would like to say, "No, I would like you to say it in Aramaic, please. But if English is all you've got..."
It really is the ordinary stuff that tells you how people live, but I still want the irreverent t-shirts.
No comments:
Post a Comment