Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Adventures in Shopping

I'm not a drapery person at all. I don't like dark rooms. But I do prefer night time sleeping in a room where I don't feel like somebody is shining a flashlight in my eyes so that's what lead to our shopping adventure. We decided to put up a black out drape in the spare bedroom. You know, we are having guests and we want them to get a good night's sleep. Lights from the jardine across the street shine in the room at night.

Just like always, I knew Chapur had a location downtown. Could we walk directly to it? Of course not, but we could hope to get close enough to be able to spot it. We've walked by it numerous times. It's in the walking gauntlet. We found it without too much extra walking and had to go to the top floor for home goods. And I spotted drapes over in the corner. The cool thing about shopping here is that there are plenty of people to help you. And they genuinely try to help you. Whereas it seems like in the US, customer service is going away but here it seems to be plentiful. I really like personal service. We looked and found what we wanted. The perfect size and all. It was a pair that measured 80 inches (not centimeters) across. So the salesperson takes the item you want to buy and walks over to a desk, writes up a ticket and then takes you and the merchandise to another desk where the cashier rings up the purchase, you pay, then you get to actually take possession of the merchandise. Just the way it goes.

We needed a curtain rod now, but Chapur doesn't sell those. The sales lady told us to go to the esquina and we would find Parisina. They would have them. We had shopped and bought from Chapur, but neither of us had ever gone to Parisina. It is mostly a fabric store, but we found curtain rods up on the second floor. We found what we needed and took the rod downstairs to a cashier. But as soon as we got in line, it was taken away from us by an authoritative looking gentleman and he took the rod over to a girl where she scanned it, printed out a piece of paper and handed it all back to the guy. We're following everybody around like two puppies. He takes the rod and the paper to another desk and hands the paper to the girl and places the rod to the side. She uses the paper to ring up the sale, we pay her and she turns around and gives the receipt to the authoritative looking guy. He takes the receipt and walks over to the rod and looks at the stuff piled around it like he doesn't have a clue which item we are trying to purchase. I knew what was going through Terry's mind and vice versa. It is rather humorous but we know there is an end in sight. Be patient. Eventually, we are handed the rather long rod and are free to walk out the door with it. You would have thought Terry was carrying a loaded gun as we walked through town. Every person we met on the street would stop and look at him. We aren't sure if they were just curious or just genuinely concerned about what the heck that long thing was.

We got home and opened the package. Remember me saying the pair of drapes measured 80" across. They didn't. They measured 37" each. Made in China! They looked like crap. Just to move ahead here, I ended up going back yesterday and getting another pair. Of course they are the same with the exception of being a different color. But, they blend and will have to do. They do serve their purpose.

To end our day of shopping, we walked to Chedraui and bought groceries and a new microwave to replace the one the ants got in and destroyed the electronic stuff. Terry tried to work on it but it was beyond repair. Since we bought a microwave I got to ride home in a bici-taxi with the groceries and microwave while Terry walked home. I felt so special being  transported - living in high cotton!

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