This is the wee shop in Bunbeg.
It's useful when we want to dash out and get bread, milk, eggs, etc, because we can be there and back in 10 minutes or less. They have some groceries also--whole chickens, sliced ham, frozen, canned, and fresh veg, some fresh fruit, bottled and canned goods, coffee and tea, biscuits, crisps candy--a bit of this and a bit of that in small quantities. There's a card rack with greeting cards in Irish, most of which seem to be about babies. And there are a few cleaning supplies and stuff like toilet paper. The place is only a room and the wall space in the front is taken up with more convenience store sorts of stuff--bottled drinks, a coffee/tea to-go station with pre-made sandwiches and baked goods, a deli area where people can get sandwiches made (I am not sure this is actually in operation, but the case is there) and a small ice cream area where people can get a scoop or two--they have maybe 8 or 10 tubs of different flavours. Sometimes fishing nets and hula hoops are available, too and there is always the fire supply stuff as well. All that crammed into the room.
One day I was looking up the directions to the library on google maps and I saw that this wee shop is on the map characterized as a shopping mall. I find this quite amusing. I don't suppose anyone would actually show up expecting to find a shopping mall in Bunbeg, but if they do, I suspect they'd be pretty disappointed. 😉😆
17 comments:
Haha, dear Shari, shopping mall is really a delightful exaggeration. But the shop offers pretty much everything you need - maybe even better than a shopping mall, which is often much too big and therefore confusing and impersonal. In any case, the house looks nice and inviting :-)
Happy November and best wishes,
Traude
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Yes, wee shop is definitely better than a shopping mall! It's been many years since I was in the latter and I have to say I don't miss it! 🙂
Well, for a village that´s a mall, everything is a bit smaller, and often more friendly, too. Like our little bakery, they know me by name and even with mask and (sadly soon again) winter-bonnet.
Yesterday I confused them cause I not only got Ingo´s bread, which I pre-order at 06:38 a.m., but added onion-cake they had for the season! Huh?! (They never ask me "anything else", because... Ingo´s bread).
I like such personal places.
And this green house looks cute. And kinda... how I would imagine an Irish house.
I hate such huge shopping malls. Always have to check if it´s the way out I want to go. They have two confusing options and I want the third. No orientation...
Always good to surprise people sometimes, like you did at the bakery ;-)
It looks charming and kind of handy but sometimes big shopping has to happen. I think I'd use it as often as I could.
It's convenient for picking up a few things quickly. Any trip to a regular supermarket is a time investment, since we are either walking to the next village and carrying groceries home in our backpacks or taking a bus to the town where we used to live to go to Aldi and/or Lidl. Happily for me, grocery stores here are much smaller than any I was ever in in the US. I would hate to be in one of those again!🙂
I grew up in Columbus, Ohio and it had a population of 539,677 when I moved when I was 16. We moved to a town so small it was actually The Village of Oak Hill, Ohio and had a population of 1,673. I would call that a Wee Shop!
Definitely! Wee shop it is! 🙂
It must've been quite an experience moving from a city to a small village, especially at that age!
Hmm. If their understanding of 'a mall' is a place where you go to 'get just about anything' (not with a lot of choices necessarily), then maybe they have with some estimation of quaint village humor, 'managed it'? Did you mention clothing? Could you get any sort of top or jumper or pair of pants/skirt or something to wear in a pinch? Maybe the idea of having a deli, an ice cream shop, basic foods, various gifts etc really does 'meet the challenge'? If the items were pretty well selected and met the general interest of their community, why not? Perhaps they need some new cards (are new babies that common) since they (and others) do grow to have birthdays that need cards too? It would be really cute if they had a survey to ask what people would like to see on-hand and then managed to have a lot of it. Then maybe people would only take the rare trip in to places like your old town? Let's be honest, some malls aren't very well appointed, you could search for hours and not find anything you'd really want. If they do better than that generally or 'in a pinch', then I say Mall it is! If tourists come expecting a strip mall or indoor mall, I think they can tell by the map that it's not that big but I mean that's not why one is in Ireland in the first place. They can have the food courts and other randomness back home. If that Deli has salsa and other types of 'flavor' to put on things, (Asian, Italian etc)that's a food court lol. I know when I lived in a small Scandinavian Village it was comprised of a health centre, the compliment of necessary schools, a store/petrol station at each end of town, a few churches and a partridge in a pear tree lol. (They all had some random tourist spot that was something interesting somehow.) Who needs a mall. I don't really remember seeing a mall. Shopping district on one street in 'the city' where all the buses converged ok, maybe that. With internet shopping tho you can probably order-in most anything you really need if you can wait for it a while?
Irish life seems to suit you well.
Joy--Nope, no clothing. Other than the charity shop, I haven't seen anywhere to buy clothes here.
I don't think the deli is in use, unless a random person comes in and wants a sandwich. There are no sandwich fillings in the case, but I once saw some rolls in there--just two or three. And sometimes there's a small thing of mustard or something. No salsa/Asian/Italian. I suspect that what might happen is that if the pre-made sandwiches are not in stock by the to-go coffee/tea, someone could ask for a sandwich and they would open a packet of cheese and lunch meat and toss together a sandwich. That's just a random guess. The villages here are similar to what you describe, except with the addition of pubs-usually several. Most have bookies, too.
Linda--yes! I am so grateful to be able to live here!
The name over the door is in the old Irish script....lovely to see it still in use or maybe its a very old sign!
It does look like an old sign, but Irish is in everyday use in this part of this Gaeltacht, which is wonderful! There is at least one more sign down the road that is in this script which comes to mind on reading your comment. :-)
How interesting that it's so similar about clothing. We could buy the random tourist T-shirt at a Kiosk or something in a pinch, but we had to go to 'that shopping district' in the town where the buses converged to get the rare bit of clothing such as jeans (from Russia, it was $75 for denim-shaded burlap) and perhaps kitchen appliances. They had a few department store type places. I'd have been grateful for internet shopping back then as I am now (with the pandemic). People made a lot of their clothing, mostly by knitting, or sewing but now as I think of it I really don't recall much by way of clothing options either. I guess all those men in work uniforms and suits must have traveled to the really big city by commuter train for those.
What will you do when you want a new pair of pants or something? Does it tend to take a long time to order things in? Maybe we did have a little second-hand shop now as I think about it which is probably where we got our yarns and things. We had a pub somewhere by the town Kiosk center where the tiny diner was. I think they had to be 'a certain space' away from churches and car places. Oh come to think of it that's where the chemist was, it's all coming back lol. (They still managed to have multiple options for each type of RX tho like holistic, homeopathic, Chinese and a few other things other than the RX. They'd say 'which type of treatment do you want?' I'd say, what do you use/give your kids?) LOL I never knew what I was going to wind-up with but it almost always worked better/faster than what I'd have gotten here (and no side effects).
Maybe by small village Irish standard it is a mall? A little graft and creativity, perhaps a survey, and Bob's your uncle lol. That's fun too about the sign. I noticed it but you had mentioned you were in 'that region' so I didn't think much of it. Do you know what it says?
No one thinks it's a mall--it's just a google screw-up. I've learned that sometimes google maps can be useful and sometimes lead us astray because they're simply wrong. In this case, it's the latter.
Clothes--We don't ever go clothes shopping specifically. We try to pick up things at charity shops when we see them--Bill just got a couple pair of brand new jeans at one a couple weeks ago. I get hiking sandals online from a place in Ireland. But I rarely buy clothes. A friend has been giving me stuff she doesn't want anymore--some of it brand new with tags on--for years. I still have stuff she gave me 15 years ago and she sent me a few more shirts and a pair of summer pants this year. As I don't care about fashion, this suits me--I juust wear what I have--LOL I make my winter clothes. I did buy a couple pair of sweatpants in Aldi and Lidl through the years, but that was not recently. When we buy anything online, it is usually from a natural foods store in Galway, which is somewhat regular. Next frequent, but still occasional, would be books. Other than that, it's just occasional stuff we might want--a refurbished computer to replace an older one that's not working properly anymore or mp3 player in the same way. Bill needed earbuds recently, so bought some on ebay. We don't use Amazon and we don't buy from the UK anymore because of Brexit, but our online shopping is not a regular thing. Our needs and wants are few. :-)
How wonderful that you have someone sending you clothes! I 'make-do' in most cases too but like you enjoy the random sweats or comfy clothes now and then. With zoom meetings re covid now I have shopped for overstock (read deep sale) tops because I have some people who see me regularly and remember if you start repeating the every few weeks. Not that I care but it can be a little awkward.
Are you familiar with the story "The man who went up a hill and came down a mountain?" I guess I was 'having one of those moments', but in support of the locals lol. I thought maybe they called it that or knew about it and said 'let it be we like it'.
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