Lauren and Tom go to the Italian grocery store

Attempt #1:  The guy who checks us into our apartment tells us there is a supermarket just around the corner and across the street.  We go to check it out and stock up on all our necessities for our 3 1/2 weeks in Florence.  Turns out that "supermarket" may be a bit of an overstatement.  They have 3 boxes of cereal, a liter of milk, some cans of beans, and a refrigerator case with something that appears to be some kind of organ meat.  The rest of the store is dedicated to wine and every kind of alcohol under the sun.  Hmm.  Maybe we should stock up on that.

Attempt #2:  Our art history teacher, a lovely young woman who lives and works in Florence, tells us that there is a Coop market relatively near here, and points it out on the map.  We are happy--we shopped at a Coop in Kandersteg and it wasn't huge, but it had everything we needed.  We set out in the morning to stock up on everything we'll need for our 3 1/2 weeks in Florence (sound familiar?), and tell the kids we'll be back in about an hour or so.  It's snowing and it takes us an hour or so to get there in the first place (including our stop to buy the Friends of Uffizi pass, another story in itself).  We walk in and must look like kids at Disneyland for the first time.  The aisles are endless and half the city is in the store, and they're all in a hurry.  We go to get a cart and are temporarily perplexed by the coin operated cart system, until an old woman offers us her cart for one euro.  We're not sure if we've just been ripped off, but we're just happy to have a cart.  We saunter into the store, only to be yelled at in Italian.  We don't know what she's saying, but clearly we've gone the WRONG WAY.  Who knew there was only one right way?  We walk back to the proper entrance and begin our adventure.  The wheels on the cart are all multi-directional and I'm finding it a bit challenging trying to drive the thing in a responsible manner.  Plus, I have to keep dodging the older folks with their wheeled baskets which they are pulling around behind them like small plastic puppies.  After 45 minutes or so, we have managed to purchase the 7 items on our list, along with a number of other things that caught our eyes (well, we're hungry at this point--it's practically lunch time!).  We get in line, pay for our items and leave the store with 4 bags, 2 of which weigh about 3 pounds each and 2 of which weigh about 10 pounds each.  Tom takes the two 10 pound bags.  Maybe he's being nice, or maybe he figures it will make up for the workouts he's missed in the past month.  We find the C2 bus and are very happy to get seats, especially as it becomes more and more and more crowded.  We can't really see where our stop is (even if we knew for sure where it was), and we're not positive the C2 is actually the correct bus, so we get off a bit prematurely and walk the remaining half mile home through the snow.  When we get back to the apartment, we find that the small bottle of laundry detergent we cleverly bought to avoid waste is actually bleach, and the good deal we got on the 4 rolls of toilet paper was actually for 2 rolls of paper towels.  Next time, we're bringing our Italian phrasebook.