Shopping in Melbourne

On a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’d get myself a 5 for shopping. I enjoy this activity somewhat, but most of the time I shop out of necessity. Don’t blame me for being boring or old fashioned, but I found out what shopping was when I was 24 years old, during my first visit outside Romania, in Paris. In Romania we had small stores with limited, very limited choices of any item, and one large general store, which seemed to be a bazaar with items from all the small stores gathered in one building. People shopped out of necessity, not for pleasure. My trip to Paris was short, yet, there I met the mall and the haute couture. My mouth never quite closed on that trip and I came home equally impressed with what I saw in the Louvre and the Printemps. The problem was that I left Romania with $20 for the entire month I spent in France with my friend Nicole, so I didn’t really do more than window shopping and gratefully accepted the gifts Nicole gave me. A year later I moved to the US. The shopping scene bent me over. I still remember the first trip to the mall in New Jersey and the first walk down Madison Avenue in New York. So in all these many, many years in the US I learnt to shop, I shopped sales and then new-season items. But the Romanian girl remained frugal while enjoying the dizzying number of choices, the fun of trying on “stuff” and browsing even late at night. The perfume, the music and the people, i.e., the atmosphere of shopping… mmm…. Well, so this is the hiatus. I arrive here in Melbourne and discover these things: very few sales (when was last time you saw a 5 or 10% sale in the US?), a lot fewer choices, and 9-5 opening time! Ok, except Thursday and Friday, when the stores close at 9PM. Except the liquor stores (called Bottle Shops here), which are open late every day… My manageable shopping pleasure and desire are now suffering in Melbourne, and I haven’t even discussed prices yet! So I am ending my post today with a nostalgic comment: overall, what I miss the most about the US and I cannot find here is “the” choices. Wait! Except for these tulips. When it comes to tulip color, you can see that choices are endless!