Shopping is an experience in Warsaw. We are lucky to have a new, modern shopping mall within easy reach of the flat but sometimes we don't have time to go there and it's necessary to call in to the Carrefour supermarket in the Wileński mall in Praga. I like this mall because I know it's safe. I know it's safe because there's a little sign on the entrance: a pistol in a red circle that tells people they're not allowed to bring their guns in. Comforting.
Outside, when the Pope came, the supermarket set up a stall selling the most holy of accessories: water and biscuits. Other people sell strawberries, cherries, potatoes from stalls, or hang around waiting for buses, smoking foul-smelling cigarettes and scratching equally rancid armpits. Only 58% of Poles aged between 18 - 24 have a shower on a daily basis. This rises slightly for the 34 - 44 age bracket and then falls sharply to only 16% for the over-65s. Why? Communism. That's the usual excuse. Communism is the reason people don't wash. As logical as anything else here really.
Shoppers too, are worthy of note. Like the guy in the small supermarket near the flat. Dressed in paint-splattered white overalls, completely bald and with a huge walrus moustache he passed through the checkout, before ten in the morning, purchasing a French stick, a litre of tomato juice and a three-quarter pint bottle of vodka. Once through the till, the loaf was snapped in two to fit the carrier bag and off he went. Presumably back to work and several Bloody Marys...
On another occasion, I was behind a woman, at 8.30pm, in a city centre supermarket. She was middle-aged, well dressed. She had a small dog in her shopping bag and in her basket? One Domestos toilet freshener. At Wileński there is a woman who uses a green, plastic clothes peg as a cigarette holder...
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