Shopping day...

[alexpgp]

After a restful evening, I took care of some last-minute details, and then Alla and I took off for one of the many Auchan superstores that dot the landscape around here (the store name is rendered as Ашан, in Russian, i.e., Ashan). Years ago, two such stores opened in Houston, but they did not enjoy sufficient commercial success and both closed. I found that pretty unusual because the stores had a certain Wal-Mart look-and-feel, but with what seemed to be a better assortment of goods.

Anyway, it took a subway ride and a "route taxi" to get us to the store (indirectly imposing certain size and weight limits on what we could buy, overall). The Auchan we visited was probably the anchor store of the mall we were in, but there were plenty of other stores doing business there as well.

My one good deed of the day occurred as I followed a young fellow bringing a "stack" of shopping carts from the lower level to the store level. It seems a young Russian woman was giving him a piece of her mind about what she thought of his work ethic, and was doing so in a loud voice. Myself, I had been too late to be among those lucky enough to grab one of the carts he had brought up on his previous trip, so I followed him down and then back up—I could not get in front of this guy—and got an ear full from the Russian yuppie as she yelled at the kid. When he answered her in roughly the same tone, she then escalated her volume and demanded that this... this... example of Dagestani trash not raise his voice to her.

In keeping with Mark Twain's rule about teaching pigs to sing (a waste of time and it annoys the pig), I merely lodged a complaint with the store management, about some crazy woman wearing such-and-so who seemed to get off an abusing their employees, and put in a good word for the kid.

After returning home, we had a nice dinner while watching the second half of the recent Casing Royale with Daniel Craig.

Cheers...