Going to the shopping mall

It is so good to have a big weekend... and then come back to work for only one day !! He he... Yesterday was bank holiday in France and tomorrow I am going on holiday for a week ;-)
And when I'm back I will certainly be quite busy so I thought I would post something today, or I will lose all the lovely readers and commentators who have visited my blog for a few weeks now ;-))

I hate going to the shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon...
and I know it. So why do I keep going ? Well, that's a good question !
Every time we go to this big mall on a Saturday afternoon, it is the same : first, we gotta find a parking spot. So we start prowling around the parking lot like a raptor looking for a prey.
Mr T (my boyfriend) usually drives and he calmy scans the parking lot while I am like : "Hey! There's a space here!" and then "Oh sorry no there's a little car in there". Mr T doesn't even pay attention to me as I always give false alarms. So after a while I shut up and start cursing city life.
Finally we end up finding a space miles away from the shops we are going to, and my level of annoyance has raised from 0 to 3.

Interlude : looking for a word in English on the internet, I found this article : "How to find a parking space at the mall". Quite interesting. Apparently, some company conducted a survey in the United States and identified four main species of mall parkers : “search and destroyers,” “lay and wait,” “stalkers” and “see it and take it.”

"Search and destroyers roam the aisles, cruising endlessly for the perfect spot. Lay and wait parkers position themselves at the end of an aisle and wait for a space to open up in what they start to believe is their territory. Stalkers, the most predatory, slowly follow shoppers leaving the store back to their parking spot. The favored method is to see it and take it, where shoppers don’t care how far they have to walk."

I find this really depressing. I am not a native of Paris, nor its suburbs, I was born in Burgundy and I've lived in a small town of 9 000 inhabitants for 18 years. I would never wait for a parking space there. Most of the time, I had plenty of choice + I could park easily - and not have to pratice parallel parking...
I've been living in big cities for a while now, but I have still not accustumed myself to this. I got used to taking the metro, and spending an awful lot of time in trains, but I still get mad when I am in a traffic jam.

And then, when you finally get in the shopping mall, it doesn't get better.
I love shopping but I need living space. I cannot bear being pushed around a million times when I am looking at something in a shop, or being stuck behind a group of people when I am walking down an aisle. That is why I usually go shopping during lunchtime - but I guess it is not gonna be easy any more to do that often with my new job ;-)
So after an hour or so my level of annoyance has reached 8 and it is better not to speak to me at this moment !
An when we get home we are so exhausted, and I say : "This is the last time I go there on a Saturday afternoon!"
But we go back again.
I guess this is just the consumer society driving us mad.