In a city where so little of daily life feels specifically German, the supermarket is always there to remind you that you’re foreign. Walk into a typical Berlin supermarket and you will first notice that it is small by American standards, the aisles about two shopping carts wide. With space so limited, you may be surprised that your neighborhood grocery store finds room to carry things like chocolate fountains, ladies’ bathrobes, and decorative garden baubles. Approach the supermarket with a shopping list and you will learn how it makes room for the chocolate fountains: by not carrying spinach. Or chickpeas. Or avocados or couscous or chicken breasts or black beans or risotto rice or any number of other things you used to think of as kitchen staples and now learn to view as exotic items sold only in specialty shops.

Cycling or walking through Berlin, one sees startlingly few billboards. One of the city’s charms is the absence of the consumerism-as-barrage that marks cities like New York. On a good day, the supermarket seems to be part of the same pleasing austerity. Nobody really needs the number of products an American supermarket holds, after all, and isn’t a relief not to have to make the number of minute consumer choices the American supermarket demands? (White or orange cheddar? Block, pre-sliced or pre-shredded? Full-fat or reduced-fat? Berlin supermarkets will not waste your time with any questions beyond: Is there cheddar at all?) But on a bad day, when the Kaiser’s in your East Berlin neighborhood doesn’t have any salt, you grumble that these people might as well just go back to communism already, cause they’re really bad at capitalism. A supermarket that doesn’t even have salt! you marvel to yourself on the walk home, your anger dissipating into wonder.