de tiendas I

One thing that remains confusing about living abroad, even after so many years, is the the shopping.

Not the opening hours, this time – though that’s a subject that can always get me ranting happily, and which I’ll no doubt come back to – but the shops themselves and where you need to go to buy different things.

You’d think that mostly there’d be a one-to-one equivalence between shops in different countries, wouldn’t you? But back in French class, in the 70s, I remember seeing that this isn’t the case. How do you translate pâtisserie into English? “Cake shop” just doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi. Nor is “deli” quite the same as a charcuterie, is it?

So I suppose I wasn’t too surprised to find similar problems in Spain. Here, too, there is a difference between the panadería, which basically sells bread, and the pastelería, which sells cakes. Then there’s also the bombonería which sells sweet things, particularly chocolates. So presumably the village bar the Bombonera – a typical Spanish family bar where the only food available is fried – is actually called the Chocolate Box.

Not so upmarket as the chocolate shop, but definitely popular with kids on their way home from school, is the chuchería which – although it doesn’t seem to be recognised as such by the RAE dictionary – is a fairly basic kind of sweet shop where you can buy pear drops, marshmallows and liquorice shoelaces.

Here in the village, the chuchería also sells aceitunas and other aperitivos en escabeche (what the Americans might call “pickles”) al granel. Those huge buckets of pickled onions and gherkins are about the least sweet thing I can think of, but, yes, you buy them in the sweet shop.