A day at the market...

So, I've talked in the past about markets here but I thought I would try to go into further detail since it is so very different from shopping back home. So, every neighborhood has a market and some markets have more stuff than others. A market here is basically a collection of stores, the closest thing I can relate it to is a strip mall, only the stores are (usually) very small and chock full of stuff. Usually you walk in, tell them what you want and they will collect it for you.
In my neighborhood the market is pretty small but it has the basics. There are a few "grocery stores", which means a store about the size of a pantry where I can get bread, rice, etc., etc; there is a pharmacy, a dry cleaner, an electrician. The basics. Some of the other neighborhoods have much bigger markets with more options as well as restaurants and other stores (like book stores and shoe stores). So, every other weekend I will visit one of my preferred markets.
This weekend it was Khan Market. Khan Market was actually built for the British back in the day so it has a good amount of foreign stuff. There is also a restaurant there that I really like to go to for lunch. So after lunch I went to my favorite little grocery store there, I like it because they always have the yogurts I like in stock and I buy a bunch of them (I eat yogurt here like crazy because buying milk is slightly annoying and I need my calcium - but the milk story is for another day) and, as usual, there was another foreigner shopping there. She was there with two little girls, probably around 9 or 10 years old and the mom asked the girls to pick out what type of goldfish crackers they wanted when the girls saw fruit roll ups on the shelf. The girls were so excited and were begging their mom to get them saying "fruit roll ups are so rare!". I can only imagine if I was thrilled when I saw Pop-Tarts just how exciting it must be for a kid living in India to see some of their favorite snack foods from back home.
After stocking up on my yogurts I went to try and visit two other stores. First a book store in my constant quest to find a soduku book here since I went waaay ahead on my page a day soduku calendar (interestingly there is a book store called Crosswords, yet they don't sell Crossword puzzles), only to find that the book store had closed for lunch. In Europe that happens all the time but I haven't seen that in India before. The next store I tried to go to was closed because they were at "a family event" for a few days.
Such is the saga of shopping in India, at least for me. You aren't always sure what you are going to find, and sometimes when you know what you want the store is closed for some odd reason or other, but sometimes you get pleasant surprises like, for those little girls, fruit roll-ups, or for me this weekend, finding pesto sauce - very exciting!