Liquor

I can spend hours in Hawaiian grocery stores, walking along the aisles, checking out the huge array of goods—not for purchase, but for the visual feast on offer. You’ll find not just one flavour of something on the shelf, but a dozen, or two dozen, variations on a theme, the pattern of repeated colour-coded labels making a design impact. Even the fresh food looks good. Trays of ahi poke in the seafood section (ok, so now I’m getting hungry), and in the bakery, rows of cakes with icing in colours that are surely not real. I particularly like the myriad bottle shapes in the liquor section, although in this store it was the sign that drew me in, the letters indicating that perhaps it had sampled too much of its own kind. Hic.