One time last spring, I came home from school on the early
bus because I had some shopping that I needed to do. Since I was going out
already, my roommate asked me to pick up some spring roll wrappers because we
were planning on having spring rolls for dinner, and she wasn’t sure if we had
enough wrappers.
Before picking up the wrappers, I went to the buy some other
items that I needed at Fomax (a grocery store in my apartment complex). One of
the things I needed to pick up was 36 chocolate bars as prizes for spring trip.
They didn’t have enough, so I asked the lady if they had more in the back, and
she went to get me more. While I was waiting, a man standing in line looked at
all the chocolate bars that I had in my basket, and he told that if I ate all
of those chocolate bars that I would get fat. I explained to him that they were
not for me; they were for my students, but he still seemed concerned that I
would get fat.
After purchasing my chocolate bars, I went to the small
Korean store that was supposed to have the wrappers that I wanted. My roommate
had told me where to find them, but they were not where they were supposed to
be. I did not know what they were called, so I looked them up on my ipod and
asked the clerk where they were. He told me that they did not have them and
that I needed to go to a Chinese grocery store for them. So I went back to
Fomax and asked one of the workers where the spring roll wrappers were.
However, she showed me spring rolls. When I explained to her that I wanted make
spring rolls, she said that they did not have the wrappers, but she told me their
name. Then I went back to the Korean store and I told them what I was looking
for, but they still seemed confused. They searched and searched and finally
they pulled out wrappers, but they were the dough kind. I wanted the kind that
was made out of rice paper. I explained to the man that they were in
a green package and they should be right here (and I pointed to where they
should be). After saying this over and over again, we had a eureka moment, and
he knew what I was talking about; he explained to me that those were Vietnamese
spring roll wrappers. He looked for them, but he said they didn’t have any, but
he went to another Korean store next door to see if they had them.
I don’t remember how long this whole ordeal took, but it
seemed to take a long time. While I was waiting for the man to pick up the
spring rolls from another store, I picked up some crackers; I wanted to buy
something else because I felt bad that he had gone to all this trouble for me.
When the man finally came back, he said that the other store did not have them.
At this point, I was just ready to go home, so I left. However, as I was
walking down the street, I realized that in my flustered and frustrated state,
I had not paid for my crackers, so I went back to the Korean store and paid for
them.
I went to two more stores looking for the wrappers, but they
did not have them/I was too worn out to try to communicate with them what I
wanted. Giving up, I went home.
It turns out that we had more than enough spring roll
wrappers, so my hunt had been in vain. As irony of ironies would have it, later
that week my roommates and I went to the store, and we found spring roll
wrappers at the one store that I did not go to that day.
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