Sale Saturday

Yesterday in statuephilia I used a photo showing that a huge sale was going on at the store—for yes, it is sale season in Germany!

And there are some darned good sales going on—too bad I’m broke. At least when I am out shopping I don’t really feel too bad about not being able to afford what’s for sale. I even felt thrilled when I discovered that Levi’s were on sale here at the discounted price of 60€ — including the ones that I bought for $18 back at Macy’s in Denver.

All of the Weimar excitement didn’t stop me from wanting to hit up Erfurt to explore its Woolworth. The existence of Woolworth (not Woolworths) in Germany was announced by Cathy in a comment she left back on the entry where I discussed the purpose of travel—I’d gone to Woolworths in Cheltenham to buy Jellie Babies for a colleague who had helped me whilst I was in the UK.

Cathy was willing so she and I met up and headed to Erfurt. There we visited H&M (nice sales, but what I wanted wasn’t for sale), as well as a few other shops. We also headed into an expensive department store where the clothing is really expensive—lots of JOOP! clothing which I want but cannot afford. In the store we noticed that downstairs there was a gourmet food shop—not especially unusual for a department store in Germany, but new since the last time I had been in that department store.

So we headed downstairs into the Gourmétage. There we were impressed by the expensive bottled Coca-Cola, expensive cheese, fantastic wine, and more. It was just after I looked at Parma-ham hanging from the ceiling that I noticed Xenos, a cheap store that, from what I could tell, could only be accessed via the expensive Gourmétage. Cathy put down the 200g package of pasta that cost a mere 4€ and we headed into the cheap shop.

There she picked up a large package of pasta that cost only 2€.

Cheap and shoddy doesn’t begin to describe most of the crap for sale at this shop. It was a bastion of tastelessness that could only be accessed by wandering through 100€ blouses and 4€ tiny bags of pasta.

I almost bought, truth be told, a plastic placemat. The placemats came in three scents: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.

Yes, you read that correctly: Scent. The placemats were scratch and sniff—and they really did smell. The vanilla one smelled like vanilla, strawberry smelled like strawberry and the chocolate one gave off that disgusting vaguely chocolate-like smell I remember from the scratch and sniff stickers of my childhood.

Although they cost only a euro and came with a delightful English language misspelling (“To clean, wipe with a dump cloth.”) I decided against buying one.

We headed back to Weimar after all of our exploration, made pizza, and watch a movie. It was a perfect Saturday.