1/17/89 Tuesday - First day at work in Spain

1/17/89 First full day at work, so I kept busy. The morning flew by. At lunchtime I ate in the cafeteria with Rita – salad and chicken. There are always open carafes of red wine on the lunch tables for everyone to share. I can't imagine a company offering wine in the lunchroom in the States, but it doesn't seem to cause any problems here.

We worked until 7, then went to Eroski. It's a very big store, a combination of K-Mart and a grocery store. They sell clothes, linen, appliances, utensils, groceries, wine, they have a large fresh fish counter and an attached restaurant. There is a big parking lot and an even larger parking deck under the store. There are at least 24 checkout lanes plus a bank-card machine which ate my card once and took about 20 minutes to return it. Like most of the people in this area, the staff at Eroski did not speak English. Eventually I learned to speak enough Spanish to get by, and until then they were very patient with me. At least once, when I when shopping on my own and before I was comfortable with the currency translation, I just held out my billfold and the cashier took out what I owed. This night we bought some groceries and supplies. For dinner that night we had fried squid rings (they came in a box, like frozen onion rings) and cheese.

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