Marks & Spencer Prague

Today, I "discovered" Marks & Spencer, or M&S. Yes, I have known that it has been prominently located in the middle of Wenceslas Square for quite some time. I just wasn't interested in it. It was another department store. Big deal. But then, I learned that it has a food hall. (Watch Heidi's interest perk up.) I have been reading "Watching the English," by Kate Fox, a wonderful ethnography about, well, the English. She basically discusses English culture by observing good, and by default, bad behavior. Inevitably, M&S is brought up in multiple contexts as a lens of sorts in determining an English person's value. Yea, yea, okay so what has this to do with me in Prague, you ask? Fox discusses the food hall in M&S. So, being the inquisitive person that I am, I googled the store and found the loveliness of this said food hall. The shiny and exotic food products that I can get there….Well, I just had to check it out for myself. On a window shopping expedition the other day – okay, I wasn't in the mood to shop, just scout – I found the corner of the store dedicated to making life for English ex-pats in Prague just a little more comfortable. A wall of free trade coffee and tea (including a symbol that says this grind can be used in the press pot that I have so now I know what to buy when my parents come to visit and need their morning coffee :), a corner of marmalades, shelves full of sauces like curries and creamy peppercorn, wines, chips, crackers, pasta, and frozen food...ready-made meals from every region of the old Empire, a pretty good variety of breaded fish, pasta, and fruit. And everything with instructions and names in English! So, there it is. I admit, my biggest problem right now in relation to my lack of language skill, is the ability to quickly and easily determine just what it is I am looking at in the grocery store. Maybe that's why I like the produce and bakery sections best – what you see is what you get! The deli and dairy sections, not to mention the canned foods, are not nearly as much fun to deal with. I go to the store armed with my grocery list in English and Czech, and then wonder if the zakysaná smetana is really sour cream, kyselá smetana, and what did I put this on the list for anyway??

So, while M&S is a bit expensive, and I can get pretty much anything that I want from the other grocery stores, it's just nice to walk in and understand what it is I'm looking at. But it's more than that. Although English, and not American, it's close to home food. It's the potential for food that is more familiar. That just because the words are from home, the taste will be too! I mean, I'm not into canned soups, I really don't care for curries (but might decide to give that a try eventually), and don't drink coffee...So, I bought some risotto and some frozen garlic bread. Not very exotic. But then again, no one really considers English cuisine to be exotic…which I would say is not completely true. To look at the offerings of M&S, there is definitely the idea of "world" flavors. So, I see myself wandering the small aisles of M&S on a regular basis, looking at the fairly regular offerings, with little changing but just imagining that there is a variety of food options in this land of somewhat bland cuisine.