An important travel tip

We stayed in a suburb south of Paris,  Vélizy-Villacoublay. We chose it because it's close to the Paris Temple, it's not far from the tourist sites, it came at a really good rate AND it has air conditioning!

Not far from where we stayed is a giant supermarket, Auchan. It's kind of like the European equivalent of Walmart. We went shopping there one night — and I got into trouble!

When you buy fruits or vegetables at Auchan (as I learned the hard way), you are supposed to bag your produce, weigh the bag on a special scale, print out a sticker and place the sticker on the bag for ease at checkout.

I held up an entire line of Saturday night shoppers because I didn't know about the whole sticker thing — and I got chewed out for that! (Not to mention the dirty looks from the shoppers behind me!).

I ran the bag back to produce, found a scale, but I couldn't figure out how to print out the sticker! Instead, I grabbed my phone and took a photo and ran back to the checkout line. The checkout gal rolled her eyes at me, made up a price, and sent me on my way.

That's not the way we do it at our local Safeway back home!

Editor's note: Ask about getting a shopping cart. It was almost as embarrassing!