Saturday, November 24, 2007

Departmental Obsersvations

Departmental Observations

On the main tourist road in Pokhara, Nepal, there are 2 departmental stores. We went inside one looking for snacks.

The doorway is lined with bottles of water and stacks of big, soft rolls of toilet paper. After our time in India, such a display is as appealing as the Hope Diamond would be in a jewelry store.

The second aisle offered snacks: a hundred brands and flavors of chocolate including M&Ms and Cadbury lots of European dark chocolates but also prepackaged bags of nuts and trail mix.

Nuts sounded good so I picked up a couple of packs of almonds and cashews. Hey, they were packaged in nice, sanitary, plastic bags. Wasn’t that great? I carried them around the store and looked at a huge display of scissors, soaps, teas, socks, paper and more cookies than a town full of trekkers could dunk in morning tea.

Then I found two men sitting on the floor in the back. One reached into a large sack of cashews and measured the nuts on a scale. When he had the right amount, he picked up a bag and poured them in. He handed the bag to the other man who held the edges of the bag in a candle flame to seal it thereby creating the sanitary packages of nuts stacked so nicely by the chocolate bars.

I returned nuts to the nice sanitary display.

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