Fun at Carrefour

Joanna and I ventured out to Carrefour today in search of a better litter box for Smudge. The one she has right now barely contains her and it offends me that she’s come all this way to crouch in what looks like six inches of space.

So in lieu of Walmart, we tried a Carrefour instead, which is just the French version of the big box store. But still very much China, with all the chaos, lots of salespeople shouting, and aisle after aisle of brightly colored packages of some kinds of snack food. What, we weren’t sure. I was hoping to avoid seaweed-flavored snacks. I certainly didn't see any croissants or good cheese.

First order of business was finding a litter box, which we finally found with the cat food and some toys. Done.

Then Joanna wanted to get snacks. We looked at spicy duck chips, little panda-shaped cookies, and all sorts of packages that had lots of colors and lots of words in Chinese, but no real indication about what they were. For instance, we bought what may or may not be pumpkin seeds. They were in a section of pumpkin seeds, but cheaper. We’ll know when we open the bag.

And I bought a box of what looked like the Chinese version of Pringles. I never even buy Pringles in the United States, but here, snack foods are an adventure in themselves. And these are certainly different. Judging from the picture of the steak on the package, I think I may have just bought steak-flavored chips. They certainly taste kind of steak-y.

We got Bob a box of Cheerios, and I found a tiny tiny little box of Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime tea. Score!

After about an hour of the noise and lights and utter chaos of the Carrefour, I kind of froze, and needed to retreat, so we paid for our stuff and took a cab home.

It was a different kind of adventure than my interview with the beautiful, funny, and gracious Amy Tan (I’ll post the link to the story soon), but an adventure nonetheless.

Oh, and when I finally got the litter box home, I realized it was, oh, maybe an inch and a half larger than the litter box we had before. That’s the end of that quest. Smudge will just have to make do with less space, just like the rest of us.