tuna fish

Today I went to El Corte Inglés to go the grocery store. We've ordered a couple times from this French hypermart called Carrefour, and the prices are fine but they ding you on delivery and they substitute a lot. So today, despite the fact that I have this cold/stomach flu thingy, because we had no food other than rice, lentils, and some melon and milk (the lentils and rice were too complicated and the melon and milk too gross) Ricardo and I limped over the the store.

We don't have anything like El Corte Inglés in the US. Imagine Bloomingdales combined with a Harris Teeter level grocery store, a travel agency, car repair service and rentals, Best Buy, and Barnes and Noble. Add to that a Tower Records (now defunct), a decent restaurant, a full liquor store, and a West Elm and you've got El Corte Inglés.

We hadn't intended to shop there. But we couldn't make it to the cheaper Día grocery closer to The Kid's school. And actually it ended up being quite reasonable. I got about 10 packages of pasta (each about .58 E/90¢ each) which was what our stomachs can handle, ingredients for chicken noodle soup which i plan to make tomorrow when I am not sleeping all day, some figs for the Kid, lactose free milk for Ricardo, tea, lemons, eggs, cereal, bread, butter, a couple kinds of juice (including real tropicana because juice here is really odd), herbs, and more all for 51 E/ $70.

But this is rather a long prelude to a more interesting obsession/phenomenon here. And that my friends is... tuna fish.

A one point during the shopping trip Ricardo had to excuse himself to find the facilities (it was bound to be one of us with this bug and had it been me, I'd likely have been vomiting) and this left me alone in the aisle devoted to tinned fish.

Yes, that's right, an entire aisle of tinned fish.

One whole side of which is devoted solely to tuna.

You can't log into the supermarket part of the Corte Inglés website without a Madrid zipcode (go to google maps and get one if you're curious). But if you were to do this you would discover what I did in my nausea and hacking cough haze of horror.

There are more kinds of tuna for sale in this basement grocery store than I have ever seen in my life. It comes in cans, in glass jars and in what look like juice boxes. You can get it packed in water, olive oil, virgin olive oil, vegetable oil or pickled. Worse yet you can get it in sauces. Either tomato or "picante." It comes in chunks, flakes and filets. It comes as light, white or albacore. You can have it in three packs, large containers or small. I've never seen the variety or the array of tuna products. It was stunning. I was held in thrall as I dragged my little basket on wheels of lactose free milk and (hard to find) salted butter from jar to jar, can to can, juice box to juice box. Even without the stomach issues I think this would have made me throw up a little in my mouth. As it was I was too shocked to even move at one point as I stood before the flesh colored chunks floating in oil in their red and yellow labeled jars.

This was where all the salads in Spain began. In this aisle. Now I understood. I would not ever need a vegetable peeler (which btw, I still have not found). All I need, is a can opener.