Granada, Nicaragua
Whole Foods Market, Hingham, MA
How about some soap?
Don’t see what you need?
Get it before you leave, because the selection here is not quite as vast:
Isla Ometepe, Nicaragua
an independent on-line ministry of the Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein
We truly have a strange soap obsession in the US. I remember getting back to the US in 1987 after spending a year in Germany as an exchange student — I had lived in a fairly urban part of Munich and got my groceries by walking a couple blocks to a pretty big grocery store in a solidly middle class part of town. After spending a year there, the first time walking into a typical US grocery store was astonishing (and it’s gotten worse since then) — I was completely dumbfounded by the number of soap options available here.
Yes, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Humbling, also. How much of the Whole Foods produce was flown here from another hemisphere, do you suppose? But the pictures really are worth 1000 words.
For years, unless I’ve needed to (because I smell!), and because I’ve lived in places where water was not straight out of a tap or necessarily clean and potable, I’ve showered every other day. People–that is, Americans–are “disgusted” even though I’m perfectly clean with healthy hair and skin. We are so obsessive. And don’t even get me started on anti-bacterial soap!
Glad you had such a marvelous time. Blessings with re-entry, and may the migraine be an anomaly.
[Thanks for writing, Lela. One thing I loved in Nica was the beachside showers for 5 C (approximately less than .1 cent American!) I would swim, go rinse off well, and not have to shower for a day or two. I grew my hair longer so that it could go unwashed for three to four days — just wore it in pigtails or a bandana and it was fine. The thing that strikes me now about that soap inventory is that it doesn’t even include the “ordinary” soaps like Dove, Ivory, and all the others available at drugstores. Madness!! – PB]