Food Here Is Different (Duh)

Grocery stores are the weirdest here.  I went in this time with the simple task of finding baking soda and salt.  Just table salt.  Just baking soda.  I wandered around the store for half an hour looking for them on my own.  I found aisles full of soy sauce:

and shelves upon shelves of MSG:

all msg's

but no table salt.  Eventually someone led me to it, after correcting my pronounciation.  (I pronounced the vowel wrong, I have no idea what I said.  I pronounced the tone wrong and I said "salted" the adjective rather than "salt" the noun.  sigh.)  Salt was on the very bottom shelf in the very far corner of the soy sauce aisle.  There was only one type, one brand.  Some generic bagged rock salt--but it seems normal enough to me so now it's in Joel's salt shaker.

The baking soda... I asked someone to help me find it, but they led me to dried yeast.  Not the same.  I even had my Chinese app open with the six different possible ways to say it.  Finally the store person brought me to another store person who works in the "Imported Foods" section and she found it for me.  Joel told me that Chinese people don't bake much, but that's just crazy!

There were lots of other oddities at the grocery store...  Tanks full of live fish (some of the fish were swimming upsidedown, I'm not sure what that means), bins full of unpackaged raw ground meat (you scoop it out yourself).  Of course all of the odd bird things.  Piles of chicken feet.  Piles of chicken feet mixed with chopped raw onions and peppers.  Whole bird bodies, defeathered, flopped in mounds.  Hardly anything pre-packaged.  I'm not a germ freak, but I could've sneezed onto every single one of those meat heaps.  Strangely large fruit things.  And strangely small mangos.  Oo!  They have egg cartons, but they also *bag* eggs.  Which seems like an unnecessary risk to me..  Then they had bins full of tea ingredients, like chamomile flowers or rose buds or...other flowery tea-like things.  And TANG!  They have lots of Tang! 

I bought two tubes of stuff, one strawberry and one original flavored.  The picture on the tubes says this stuff goes on toast.  Or on fruit.  Or...to make popsicles?  It's Nestle, "Eagle Brand", and it was near the cans of sweetened condensed milk.  I'm wondering if it is sweetened condensed milk spread.

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I just tasted it, and I'm so right!  Well, now I have two tubes of it. 
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It's pretty tasty.
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I wonder why Americans don't eat sweetened condensed milk as a dessert-y thing.  According to Huffington Post, sweetened condensed milk "can completely transform a dish, and might even transform you".  High praise.
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Oo!  Apparently you *can* use it to make popsicles!!  Huh:  one can of sweetened condensed milk plus 2.5 cups of liquid like pureed fruit.  Sounds like a winner!  It pays to be food-adventurous!!!!

Sometimes it doesn't, though.  On my way out of the store, there was a guy with a stand selling some candy/dried fruit-like things.  I almost passed him, but then I was like, "I want to know what that is!  I want to taste it!  So the next time I pass him, I'll know what it is I'm not buying!".  So I stopped and asked for "yi ge" (one of) each.  Could it be simpler than that?  NEXT TIME COULD IT ACTUALLY BE THAT SIMPLE!?!?  He, of course, asked me a clarifying question.  In Chinese.  Because even though I'm pretty sure I asked something really simple, it can never be that simple.  In the end, I got a whole bag full of these two candy things.  Sigh.  At least it just cost a dollar.  Guess what my office-mates are getting from me when I get home...  ^^



Here follows a small photo gallery of all the weird things I have seen in Carrefour today.

 That last picture...I can't be sure, but I have a feeling that they are duck embryos.  Delicious?  :(