Son las pequeñas diferencias.

(Son las pequeñas diferencias. = "It's the little differences.")

This will be one of many "slice of life" posts. No striking Beaux-Arts facades, no massive Velázquez canvasses, no manicured gardens; just a little piece of life in Spain. 

VINCENT: I know, baby, you'd dig it the most! ....but you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?

JULES: What?

VINCENT: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same sh*t over there they got here, but it's just, just, there it's a little different.

This scene from Pulp Fiction goes through my head at least once a day as we walk around. It's not as if we pulled up sticks and migrated to the Alaskan wilderness or a remote Uzbek village; this is a modern first-world Westernized city. It has traffic lights, gas stations, and all the other things you'd find back home in the States.¹ But those little things you have internalized to the point where they're an integral part of your mental map and you don't pay attention to them anymore..."little differences" add up; even a decent analogue of your home city can seem a strange and exotic place. 

Take Madrid supermarkets. When walking in the front door they seem just like shopping in the States, but there are subtle -- and not so subtle -- differences. First of all, at least in central Madrid, they are *much* smaller. The "big" Mercadona (with an actual parking lot) near our AirBnB is maybe 2/3 the size of the "basic" (i.e., non-deluxe) grocery store we frequented in L.A. 

Second -- again, at least in Madrid proper -- there are many more of them. Look below:

With only 1-2 exceptions, all of the little "grocery store cart" icons you see in this 6-7 block radius are supermarkets. And the various brands have no compunctions about just plunking their stores every which where; there is a Mercadona about 2 blocks from another Mercadona, and a Lidl about 4 blocks from another Lidl.  

The in-store experience is also different. Yes, there are fruit/veg, cereal, soda, laundry detergent, potato chips and the like. But when was the last time you saw one of these gents and his plethora of pork products in a U.S. grocery store?

Most stores seem to have a huge section of what I'm calling "ready to eat" - meals or food items that look like they were actually prepared in a kitchen somewhere and put in containers that you can take home and heat up (or in the case of tortilla,² just eat straight).  

The array of fresh and frozen fish is also staggering -- we're really going to need to lean into eating fish now.

Every supermarket we've been to so far has had one of these -- a fresh-squeezed orange juice machine.

You can even buy a vacation-in-a-box! At a grocery store! (I had to look this one up: You buy a box with a theme, like a getaway, spa day, or fancy dinner. The person you give it to picks the exact place from a list on the website, books it with the code inside the box, then just shows up.)

And I can't forget the yogurt. Everything you see in these pictures is yogurt or some sort of yogurt derivative. The Spanish definitely love them some yogurt.

However, all of these seeming wonders come at a price. When you don't have a large store to begin with, and you occupy huge parts of it with an array of hamhocks plus dude-with-sharp knife, a fish counter likewise staffed, an orange-juice machine, several racks of prepared food, and two virtual walls of yogurt, you lose space for other things. So choice is limited. Where a US grocery store might have (ex: ) 30-40 different types of deodorant, a Spanish store will have maybe five or six.

And brands vary considerably and mysteriously among stores. At one store I picked up a yogurt protein shake I liked. When we went to a different store to pick up more groceries, I thought "that shake was good; I'll get another one," but that brand of shake -- even that type of shake -- was nowhere to be found. Imagine if you could only get Chips Ahoy at one specific grocery store in your neighborhood. To get Fig Newtons you have to go somewhere else, and to get Pepperidge Farm Milanos you have to go to a third store.3 That's what the selection at the Spanish grocery stores has been like. The differences even exist at stores in the same chain; the stock at one Lidl will be different than the stock at the Lidl four blocks away.

And finally, there's the fruit. We came here from farmer's-market-loving, home-to-half-the-nation's-fruit-production⁴ Southern California, where we were positively rolling in delicious fresh produce. In addition to having considerably smaller produce sections, the actual quality of fruit and veg at the Spanish grocery stores has been rather lackluster. We've since learned that to get decent produce you actually need to go to a whole different kind of store -- the fruitería. If you become a regular and make friends with the storekeeper, they'll clue you in to what's fresh and tasty and will even pick out some good ones for you to take home. 

So there you are -- thanks for coming along on our grocery run. Tune in next time, when we scour the neighborhood for decaffeinated Earl Grey....⁵

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¹ Yep; I started typing "back home in the States". It's still sinking in that Madrid is "home" now. ↩︎

² At the risk of sounding even more pedantic than my norm, "tortilla" in Spain does not refer to a flat corn/flour pancake, nor to the same thing deep-fried and cut into chips. It is a thick omelet of eggs and potatoes -- JUST eggs and potatoes if you're a purist, although people can and do gleefully add more -- meant to be eaten at room temperature or even cold. ↩︎

³One more difference that deserves mention; American cookies are crap. In every country I've ever been to, the variety and sheer sweet chocolatey/creamy/nutty/fruity deliciousness of the cookies blow away the stale cardboard confections on American shelves. ↩︎

⁴Really! You can look this one up: https://naturalresources.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=368934 And you thought all California produced was botoxed celebs, hippies, and tech bros... ↩︎

⁵SPOILER: We found it at the chi-chi mega El Corte Inglés store in the chi-chi Castellana neighborhood. More on the cultural significance of El Corte Inglés in some later installment. ↩︎