For those of you who are intending to come on exchage to Europe, especially Maastricht, you will find this post useful.
Shopping in Maastricht is rather different from shopping in Singapore, especially regarding the opening hours. Shops close at about 6pm (local time) here and do not open for business on Sundays (except for the 1st Sunday of the month). This is the basic difference between Maastricht and Singapore. As we are so used to shopping after the sky turns dark back home, we have to adjust ourselves to get everything that we want or need before 6pm. Since they do not operate on Sundays and the whole street do feel like Chinese New Year period in Singapore, we have to stock up food and other stuff on fridays to avoid starving on Sundays.
Other differences include the 'Bring your own shoppign bag' and th
e refund policy here. When visiting the supermarket here, which we do frequently, buying a plastic bag from the supermarket will cost you approximately 15 euro cents and they might not ba able to hold the heavy weight of the stuff that we purchase. So the style here is for us to bring a backpack to the supermarket when we shop, doing our part for the environment.
Refund policy is pretty open here. If you buy a product that you do not like, simply bring the product and the receipt back to the shop and you may get a refund. Unlike Singapore, the shops aare 'OK' top such customers, but don't do it too often..!
This is a shot of what happen to us the 1st time when we went to the supermarket.
We had quite a few situations happening at that time.
1. No bags
2. Bought too much stuff that we can't carry home
3. Obviously not used to the cold weather yet
No comments:
Post a Comment