Grocery store paranoia and infatuation

In Portland, I loathed grocery shopping...from the stores themselves (does anyone love the Fred Meyer on W Burnside or the Safeway in the Pearl or the T'Joes in NW??), to the time I seemed to waste looking for everything on my list, it was the chore I put off as long as possible. Or tried to get Pelle (who likes it even less than me) to do. Sigh, it still usually fell to me.

In Penang, grocery shopping has become almost like a full contact sport. Which one of the 3 (3!) grocery stores I pass when I leave the apartment to catch the bus will have the item I need? Will I manage not to hit anyone standing in the aisles oblivious to everything around them? Will the checkout clerk understand my dumb, non-chip-enabled credit card without having to call over a manager? How many people will I catch openly staring at me? Will I remember that produce has to be weighed and tagged over in the produce section before checking out or will I be sent all the way back to the beginning again? Will the mind-numbing barrage of painfully repetitive grocery store musak finally drive me insane? 

In this harrowing hunt for familiar staples, exotic fruits, mysterious vegetables and incomprehensible canned goods, I have found aisles to treasure and aisles that could only be found in SE Asia:

The tea aisle (not just part of a shelf, but a whole aisle) is bliss.

The aisle of sauces boggles my mind, literally, because I can't understand most of the labels. But I am fascinated by the fact that there are several hundred different types of soy sauce, fish sauce, curry sauce, barbecue sauce, plum sauce, chili sauce and sweet/spicy sauce. I doubt I'll manage to use 10.

Racks and racks and racks of rice offer bags of 5 kg or 10 kg. For bigger families, there are 25 kg bags. That is a lot of rice. It's like a mini Costco down that aisle.

I didn't understand why plastic containers in a delightful rainbow of shapes and colors warranted their own aisle at first. But then I came to the shelves stocked with jumbo-sized bug-killing sprays. I circled back to the tupperware and loaded up.