Scotland - 6. Shopping Hunt & Where's the wifi?

Don’t you love grocery shopping? For men, I have heard this compared to ‘contemporary hunting’. In a strange city, the hunting is even more exciting because you never know what new product you will come across! There are not many major cities in the World any longer where you would not find the fundamental ingredients for what you want to cook. Most foods are quite global, and although a grocery store may not have my particular brand, they have the same basic food item. Even so, every time I come to Scotland, I am asked to fetch ’99 Scottish tea’, Galaxy bars, Penguin bars, and Breakaways. (Okay, mostly tea and chocolate cookies, but they are good and unavailable where we live.) There is also a Müller yogurt my children love: one corner of the container has a sweet (chocolate flakes (again) or fruit) that you fold over into the yogurt. different in another country.

What do they have here that we don’t have in North America? Soccer shoes, or ‘football boots’, come in a variety of sizes shapes and colours in Scotland that we would never see in stores in Canada with all of the hockey equipment crowding the aisles. And cheeky T-shirts and club wear are everywhere in Glasgow. Shopping is just

Is it just me, or should wifi be everywhere by now? My husband and I travelled to Dublin for a job interview in 1998, and at the time we were very impressed by how technologically-advanced Dubliners were. The economy was strong, and everywhere you went people were texting, or hooking into open signals. At the same time, in North America, only one in 20 people even had mobile phones.

Today, when I travel, I just expect there to be wifi. On this trip, I think this alone really illustrated the growing economic crisis for me. It was difficult, if not impossible, for me to find a café, library, or open common space with wifi. Today, I am posting three of my blogs together for that very reason. I had to plan my work day out so that when I found a signal, I could send all of my emails and communications out at the same time. This, for me, was the modern-day equivalent of handwriting all of your letters and bills, then walking them over to the postal box to mail them. That is essentially what I did. The unavailability of wifi would not be so unusual for me if I had not become accustomed to the UK being so advanced.

Not any more my friends. With cutbacks everywhere, if you travel to Europe now, you will be asking yourself, “Where’s the flipping wifi?”