Big Foot

At my goodbye dinner last week I was reminded of a culture shock experience I had when I first got to Luxembourg. I went shopping for shoes, winter boots specifically at the mall near our house and the memory of it has made me never go shopping for myself here in Luxembourg again.

To start out, I have big feet, and actually hardly anything about me could be considered small. But, before pregnancy, I hung onto the end of the 'normal' range in the states with a size 10. Being pregnant with Anna however, caused my feet to grow by 1/2 size. This makes it difficult, but not impossible to buy shoes in the states. Now, I move to Europe and need winter boots (it's cold here folks), so Anna and I take the bus to the local mall. I find some really cute boots and ask the sales lady for the equivalent of a US size 10 (thinking there's no way they would have a 10.5) and the woman got the most horrified look on her face. Let's also remember I am having this conversation in my broken french. After a few moments of very uncomfortable silence, the saleswoman picked her jaws up off the ground, verified my grotesquely large size and went to look in the back. When she returned, she assured me that not only did the boots I wanted not come in my size, but that in the whole store, there were NO boots in my size. I left, feeling freakish in my big feet and promptly ordered boots on Zappos.com and shipped them to my mother-in-law for her to bring to me in her suitcase.

I have subsequently heard that there are bigger sizes of shoes and clothing available for women in German stores, but after this shopping incident, I haven't been able to regroup for anything but online shopping :) Sammy's cute feet pictured above are after he crawled around the sand box at the park last week.