Here is a random post about some of the curious differences one finds when living in a foreign country. Many of these things have no major significance, but I find it fascinating when they challenge my assumptions about “how things are done”. “How things are done” is not the same everywhere in the world, which is one of the things that makes traveling so interesting! Take eggs, for example. In the U.S. eggs are packaged in cartons that completely encase the eggs on both top and bottom. The cartons used to be in a type of cardboard but nowadays it is becoming common to see them in several layers of plastic that will be around for thousands of years as trash. Probably when you buy them in a store they will put them by themselves in their own plastic bag(or 2), lest anything else in the bag bump into them and break them.
Here it is common to buy eggs in no carton at all, they are simply put in a small plastic bag and there you go. Or sometimes they are sitting in a cardboard type egg carton but covered on the top only with plastic wrap. And you can buy them by the kilo, so you can decide if you want to buy 3 eggs or 29 eggs, you are not limited to 6, 12 or 18. We Americans are so used to seeing them in so much packaging that we think it must be impossible to transport them any other way without them all breaking. But indeed, I can attest to the fact that I have been buying eggs for many months now with such minimal protection, and so far only one has broken getting it home from the store! And remember, the average road has potholes the size of watermelons everywhere! No matter where you are, it’s a bumpy ride!

But listen to THIS story: last week I was driving on a highway (with big potholes) and a few cars ahead of me I see a small pickup truck with the back truck bed piled HIGH with something. At one point some things fly off the back of the truck and hit the car directly in front of me. That car suddenly puts on their brakes, and I and all the cars behind me all have to slam on our brakes to not have a collision. It was a close call, but luckily, no one collided. The car in front of me gradually managed to pull over to the side of the highway and when I passed it I saw that the front of their windshield was covered in egg cartons and broken eggs! And then I passed the truck and saw that the truck was loaded up with about 30 layers deep of eggs just sitting in cartons with no other packaging or even boxes or crates to contain them. They were just crammed in the truck bed all willy-nilly. They were stacked so high they were almost falling over the top railing of the truck bed!! The top layer was basically higher than the front cab of the truck, which is why it went flying off to cover the windshield of that car! I was totally shocked and amazed at how dangerous that little scenario was.

I’ve been pondering this for some time now, and it seems that if lots and lots of eggs were breaking while being transported to the store and also from the store to people’s houses, people would come up with a better way and put them in more packaging. Economically it just wouldn’t make sense for an egg seller to lose half his eggs on the way to market. So it must be working well enough for everyone…..It’s working just fine for me, as long as I don’t get hit by a few dozen flying eggs as I’m driving down the road!

Other egg differences here…..
the eggs are not sold refrigerated (I learned that eggs can keep for quite some time unrefrigerated, but once you refrigerate them, you need to keep them that way or they will go bad)
There are no white eggs here, just brown.