It’s not just the bread and cake shops that confuse me in Spain. There’s a-whole-nother area of shop difficulties associated with chemist shops and drug stores.
In the UK we have chemists. Inside a chemist shop you’ll find the pharmacy counter where you can buy your medicines – or, hopefully, in the near future get your prescription made up free of charge. You’ll also usually find a photographic department, perhaps an optician, even, maybe, a wine-making area. This makes perfect sense to me. After all, the cameras and spectacles are all associated with lenses, and photo development and wine making need chemicals.
But – surprise, surprise – it’s not like that in Spain.
La farmacia is a shop apart. Many of them are tiny little cave-like places decorated with old fashioned pestles and mortars. (Incidentally, as can be seen from the photos, they all seem to be run by women named Lidia.)
They dispense medicine (I love the fact that the médicos here give you a “receta” – exactly the same word as a cookery recipe) and sell over-the-counter drugs as well.
In fact they sell most drugs over the counter even without a prescription, and the Spanish se automedican to their hearts’ content with antibiotics, tranquilizers and whatever mix-and-match remedy they fancy. But you won’t find lenses or even simple chemicals such as sodium bicarbonate or sodium metabisulphite in a Spanish farmacia.
Then there are parafarmacias. These don’t dispense medicines but they do sell baby food, perfumes, lotions and potions, and all the expensive non-controlled diet and skin treatments.
Mind you, you can get your potingues y perfumes and all the other cosmetic stuff in a perfumería, so I don’t quite understand the limits and overlaps here.
There are droguerías, too, some of which combine to be droguería y perfumería, selling soaps and detergents (basically all the stuff to keep you, your hair, your clothes, your family and your home clean and smelling nice) and some which offer just as much pleasure for the kids as the chuchería: here you can find cap guns and the plastic strings for making scooby-doos, beads, marbles, bows and arrows… This treasure-trove type of droguería usually sells paint and plaster, polyfilla and putty, too, not to mention potting compost, flower pots and fertilizer.
But there are still things they don’t sell. I wanted to buy a pair of pop sox this morning. In the UK, I’d nip into Boots (the chemist), but it was clear this was not something to buy in a Spanish farmacia, so I asked in the droguería. The guy looked at me as if I was mad and directed me to the mercería across the street. Ah, yes, I’m sure if there is still a haberdasher’s to be found in the UK they would sell such things.
don't confuse the narrator 