FIELD NOTE 1.21 – Who would have thought buying milk would be an ordeal?

One of the plus sides to having stayed at the youth hostel during my first weekend in Nantes is that it taught me the location of what might be the cheapest grocery store in the city (I say that, of course, knowing less than 10% of the city). The store itself looks like a weird cross between your average hole-in-the-wall grocery store and Costco with its four aisles of oddly arranged goods. The best part, however, has to be the pricetags that hang over every product – some of these are negative. I am beginning to suspect this has something to do with a discount, but I’m still not quite sure and will have to investigate further.

This weekend the French equivalent of Fruit Loops, Fruit-Rings, ended up in my bag. This of course meant that I would have to brave the milk, something I have been avoiding since my first foray in a French grocery store.
The milk here seems to come in two varieties: room temperature bottle or room temperature carton (and the French carton resembles a Tazo chai tea mix carton more than our notion of a milk carton). After standing in front of the various cartons and bottles for more than three minutes trying to pick which kind I wanted, I finally decided to use American logic. In America skim milk tends to be the cheapest, so I hoped that rule translated into French and picked the cheapest carton.
The carton is now in my refrigerator until I feel brave enough to see whether or not I chose correctly.