Aldi

Oh my God.

I've just come home from work, and on the way home from work I stopped at the grocery store, because that is what you do if you are German, you buy groceries every freaking day and pull them home in a little wheeled cart behind you.

I do not have a little wheeled cart and so I've used two plastic bags. (In Germany, if you commit the sin of not having a little wheely cart, you have to buy bags - ten cents each at the counter.) The bags are still full, behind me, their yogurty Milchschnittey radishey contents spilling out onto our bedroom / study / living room floor, because I have to immediately write down what just happened.

Nader and I have recently realized that, far from being a mind-numbing chore, going to the grocery store can occasionally turn into an exciting game of cat-and-mouse. After finishing work on Tuesday, for instance, we went together to catch the final moments of Fasching (Fat Tuesday, Karneval, whatever) in Marienplatz. I always thought Cologne was the big city for this, but Munich did a really bang-up job celebrating; people of all ages were dressed as nuns and schoolgirls and clowns and Frank from Donnie Darko and nameless things with veils and wigs. Everyone was drunk and banging drums and throwing champagne bottles around, and it was ten times more revelryous than Halloween, and I will never again mock them for not understanding how to dress up.

It was cold, though, and everyone was too intoxicated, so we'd walked around for an hour then made our way home. But we had no milk, so we decided to stop and buy some at the supermarket.

We didn't realize that the fact that most other shoppers had been drinking all day would turn it into a battle zone.

Five minutes into shopping, we turned around to find our cart missing. That wasn't such a big deal - we only had a bottle of wine and a few apples in it - but where had it gone? In its place was one with a full backpack, a few cardboard boxes, and some sparkling water. Totally mysterious.

Nader and I searched, to no avail. It was - fruitless. We were almost laughing too hard to continue shopping, but eventually we found it. On its own, our cart had somehow made its way to the other end of the store, its contents untouched. We shrugged, picked it up, and spotted - a short time later - an shuffling young guy pushing the cart with the backpack in it.

"Hey," Nader said earnestly. Instead of turning around, the guy took a few running steps away from us, turning his face towards the milk. Nader persisted - "you took our cart!"

"Meshoum mehuusnnhm," the guy said.

Well, what do you really say in that situation?

We put it off as the inevitable result of an all-day drinking festival (through which we'd both unfortunately had to work), and that would have been the end of it, HAD IT NOT HAPPENED AGAIN.

In the cracker aisle, we turned to debate peanuts for one minute, then we heard wheels behind us. A white-haired man had seized ours competently by the handle and continued shopping. We could not explain it, and stood there openmouthed as he got at least ten feet with it.

"No," Nader said, weak, "that's ours..." and the older man's hands flew away from the handle, and his eyebrows creased in shock.

Okay. That was Tuesday.

Then today - two days later, we go through lots of groceries - I was coming out of Aldi. I'd been hit on by an Australian guy with large ears, yes, but nothing much else weird had happened, and I was preparing to chalk up the previous visit's weirdness to the whole Mardi Gras atmosphere that was in the air.

I headed towards the elevator, hands in both bags, and reached it at the same time as an elderly couple. The woman had a small pink face, bright-red lipstick, a plump body, and spun white hair under a camel-skin hat, and the man was all nose and unobtrusive khaki.

For whatever reason, I did not wait for them to press the button. Perhaps I figured their elderly arms were frail. Perhaps I wanted to be gallant, or - likeliest of all - I thought I was being funny.

I stretched out my booted toe and tapped the button.

The elderly woman initially did not know what to do with herself. Then she knew EXACTLY what to do. "If you have your arms full, then wait for us to do it," she hissed at me in vindictive Bayerisch. "It is NOW TOTALLY DRECKIG," which means filthy but sounds so much more evocative and is, like, the worst word a German can throw at you. "DRECKIG," and she pulled out a wrinkled Kleenex from her sleeve, and wiped it. Just so, you know, the next person would touch her snot, not my toe-dirt.

Then they both proceeded to GET IN THE ELEVATOR WITH ME.

This is so German. Any other culture would not tell you off and then walk obediently into a small room to exist with you for the next twenty seconds. Floored by this, I did not know what to say. I oscillated between feelings of shame and bewilderment. I considered taking the stairs, but that would have been admitting defeat; I considered pointing out that it is a train station and pretty much everything around us is filthy, but that would have been worse, and I sort of didn't want her to hear my accent and make generalizations about Americans.

So I stood in silence, bags on the filthy floor, and the woman turned her back to me like an angry horse. I swear I could see her husband laughing. When the door opened - eons later - she stomped out, feet in her tiny pumps, and hurled the Kleenex into the GARBAGE, TO SHOW ME. I hustled out of there, still not having said anything, but I couldn't take it any more; I turned and passive-aggressively coughed into my sleeve something that sounded like "Bitch!", which was the only less-than-absolutely-perfect part of the whole encounter.

I can't wait to run out of food again.