flemmings | Chatty Cathy: I can has mooncakes?

I first had mooncakes last year at

paleaswater's wedding. They were good. I went looking for them this year and couldn't find them.

I know, I know- a twenty minute bike down to Huron and Dundas would have solved the problem in a jiffy. Alas, both my bicycle and I are unduly creaky these days, and while I don't necessarily mind biking down to Chinatown, the idea of biking back up the hill didn't appeal. I'd sort of hoped the big Korean supermarket ('Korean but not picky'- they carry yoghurt and o-senbei as well as kim chee and pig's ears) might have stocked them, but no. I wasn't looking *hard*, mind, or I'd have braved the ride south.

Whatever- today I'm up in the large yuppie supermarket, the likes of which I haven't seen outside of LA ('we sell lawn chairs, fashion crockery, skin care products, small kitchen appliances and of course food'). I'm picking up milk from the fridge back of the bakery section and turn to go when my eye is caught by a pile of very unyuppie-coloured red boxes. Mooncakes. From Alberta. Wrappers from Taiwan. What looks like a poem on the box. (Four lines of ten hanzi, written five and five. Suspicious, you know. Is it always the same poem, BTW?) I stop squinting at the hanzi and look at the price. 24.95 for the nice box of four big cakes, 22.95 for the not so nice box with six 'mini' cakes. Err- pricey, yes. But hey, special occasion. And pretty box.

Take it to the cash, she scans it, it comes out 26.95. Oh. I often misread signs, of course, and over $25 is more than I want to pay, or in fact have on me, but hey, special occasion. And pretty box. I use my debit card.

Then, most unCanadianly of me, I go double check the display. 22.95 and 24.95. Continuing out of character- what's a toonie among friends?-I go to customer service and point out the discrepancy. She pages the bakery section- several times, in fact- and finally sends a minion off to see what the display says, at which of course the bakery calls her back. "He says it's 24.95 for the small ones, 26.95 for the big ones," she says. "Err yes, but the sign says..." More time passes. Minion returns with the signs. CS woman does complicated things at the cash- 'How do you ring in tens?'- and asks for my debit card. "We'll credit it $10." The people in this store, seriously. "The difference was only two dollars," I remind her. "Yes, but for store errors we credit ten dollars." Sweet.

So there I am with my mooncakes for fifteen dollars. They are very good, aside from an understandable gaijin confusion as to what a serving consists of. They're confused too. They said 16 servings, meaning one serving is a quarter of a cake. But when you divide their 1 serving = 55 gms into the total weight, it comes out as 1 serving = a third of a cake, thus calming my panicked 'Did I just eat 800 calories of mooncake?!! reaction. 600 calories of mooncake. Too much mooncake, in any case. Shall save the rest for the day itself. Luckily that appears to be tomorrow.

Chatty Cathy: I can has mooncakes?

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