(no subject)

[contrarianarchon]

The silliest thing about moving to a new country is that I'm having to reindex all of my intuitions of where to go to buy things and it's terrible. I haven't spent years walking through malls here and I don't know what's good for college-student tier lunches and where to go to stock my apartment with X or Y or what to do when it's 3am in the morning and I am two continents away from the only bottle of heartburn medication I am personally assured exists. (I get heartburn once every few months if that so bringing something for it didn't come up when picking medication for travel but when you have it and you can't sleep because pain then suddenly that's a much bigger deal; also - been super sick these past few days among which heartburn was one of many things. Feeling better now though. Mostly)

Does anyone have advice for catching up on a new city/country/continent's state of material goods and where to obtain them?

Comments

[brin_bellway]

>>what to do when it's 3am in the morning and I am two continents away from the only bottle of heartburn medication I am personally assured exists.<<

Google Maps generally knows operating hours, so you can search for nearby pharmacies and look around for one that's open at 3 AM.

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>>been super sick these past few days among which heartburn was one of many things. Feeling better now though. Mostly<<

While it could just be bad luck, I found I got sick a lot my first couple years after moving. All those new germs to catch up on, perhaps.

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>>Does anyone have advice for catching up on a new city/country/continent's state of material goods and where to obtain them?<<

Ask the locals for tips. Go exploring: ideally in-person, though looking around online can help too. Twelve years in, I currently aim for one [wander through a plaza or shopping district] per non-winter month, and I often still learn stuff about what's on offer where.

[contrarianarchon]

>> Google Maps generally knows operating hours, so you can search for nearby pharmacies and look around for one that's open at 3 AM.

Yup, this is what I did (while listening to a song on my playlist complaining about how we're consumerist scum for "pulling out our phones to decide where to shop"), but it turned out that the only 24-hour place within easy walking distance was at the central station and that place is easy to get lost in and honestly wandering around the metro central station at 3am while half-asleep and sick felt like asking for being mugged or otherwise having a stupid disaster instead. So I waited until 7am and went to one that opened then.

>> While it could just be bad luck, I found I got sick a lot my first couple years after moving. All those new germs to catch up on, perhaps.

Indeed, I basically take a bit of random sickness as being a likely price of long-distance travel. One of the reasons I'm not prone to tourist-natured things much, I suspect.

>> Go exploring: ideally in-person, though looking around online can help too. Twelve years in, I currently aim for one [wander through a plaza or shopping district] per non-winter month, and I often still learn stuff about what's on offer where.

I should commit to actually doing something like this! ... once I feel better, obviously. I'm Not going out in the cold more than I can avoid it right now with this throat. I got that much organically back home because the university I went too was less than a block away from the biggest/best shopping district in the city, pretty much, so wandering through it seeing what it had was an obvious thing you spend time doing. But here my university is in the suburbs...

[mindstalk]

Yeah, not knowing the equivalent of CVS/Walgreens in Japan was annoying. Finding an actual pharmacy would have been easy but not their collection of household goods.

[contrarianarchon]

Indeed! The list of things people here (As in, in the same student housing as me) only know to buy from ikea is painfully long...