Asian Grocery Stores

I have spent way too much of my life in Asian grocery stores. But you must admit, they're fascinating places.

Asian grocery stores, as far as about 99% of the Asian population is concerned, are the only places that sell edible food. Asian stores are filled with strange and exotic smells. Shelves and shelves of tins of weird looking foodstuffs with Chinese labels badly translated into English. Just reading these labels would take a year and you would die of laughter halfway through anyway.

Frequent trips to Asian grocery stores are inevitable when you grow up in an Asian family, but I don't like them much. It's full of old Asian people who garble Cantonese at you, and then start yelling in more Cantonese because you don't understand a word. It's about crammed spaces, and the entire place reeks of cheap incense. People chatter away in all sorts of rough Chinese dialects, changing abruptly, disconcertingly, to English whenever convenient, then back to Chinese again. It's about little children with better Chinese than mine (which is not hard), it's about...well, it's about Asian grocery stores.