One of the things I really hate about travelling is furnishing a new apartment when I don't know where to find stuff. You just arrived in the country, you're tired and/or jet lagged, you don't know the language, and you have to get your place livable in two days because classes or work start on the third day. What do you do?

Living in Paris can be a fun experience after you find an apartment and finally make it comfortable. As a newcomer to this history steeped city, I knew neither where to find what I needed nor what places were good quality. It's taken me two years to discover where to shop for household stuff. The places here are where I now go.

Hypermarchés are another great place to find things. The best comparison for Americans would be hypermarchés are like a Super Target or small Walmart. The selection, prices, and quality varies greatly from store to store.

Géant Casino and Paris Store
Géant Casino is located in the blue building at 113 place de Vénétie and Paris Store is across the street. Both have a decent selection of household items and food. Great place if you're in the 13e.

Place d'Italie
Easily found at the Place d'Italie metro stop, there is a Carrefour underneath that had a reasonable selection of many household things.

Carrefour Hypermarché
There is a really large Carrefour Hypermarché located on 1 avenue Général Sarrail in the 16e of Paris. This place is huge, has a large selection of foreign foods, and many household and personal items I've only found on Amazon. Most mornings there is an open air market nearby with decent prices and selection.

This is the first entry in response to a topic request from a good friend. You can send in your own topic requests from the Write to Me! page.

Butter is very important in American cuisine. It is used for everything from greasing pans to an ingredient in dishes. Butter is so important it's even entered the lexicon in phrases like "bread and butter" and "butter me up". It's versatile and tastes good.

• butter is good for greasing pans
• butter tastes good
• butter is used in most cream sauces
• butter by itself is a good topping for various breads

 It also turns out butter is not the same everywhere and it doesn't have the same importance in every country. The butter I found in Morocco seemed to have a higher fat content than the butter in America. The higher fat content wasn't noticeable when doing pan frying or baking cakes, but it was a problem when making things like cookies. To some extent, adding more flour to a recipe helped with this, but there's only so much flour you can add. Cooking food on baking paper also helped a little, but many foods still came out greasy.

In Morocco, they use oil more than butter. This isn't to say that they don't use butter or it's hard to find; it's not difficult to find at all, almost every little store sells it. Oil is superior to butter for many things:

• oil doesn't need to be refrigerated like butter
• oil tastes better on salads than butter
• oil is better than butter for frying
• oil doesn't change the taste of food as much as butter
• oil is cheaper than butter

In Morocco, the word 'butter' isn't only used in reference to butter, it's also used for margarine. This isn't a sign that Moroccans are stupid, at least no more than Americans. After all, many Americans refer to margarine and butter spreads as 'butter'. When you stop and consider that margarine is used for the same purposes as butter, has a similar or identical flavor, and is more readily available because it does not need refrigeration, then it's understandable why they're given the same name.

While I was living in Morocco, I found two different ways to get butter.

The way most Americans are familiar with is buying it at the store. Whereas in America butter usually comes wrapped in wax paper and packaged inside a paper carton, it comes wrapped just in foil if you buy it in the large grocery stores in Morocco. Butter in America is usually cut into neat little blocks with markings on the wax paper for every tablespoon. The butter in Morocco sometimes is in neat little blocks, but sometimes it comes as roughly block shaped. There are usually markings under the edge of the foil for every 25 grams.

Butter can also be bought in  another form in Morocco. The hanut (rhymes with hoot), the small neighborhood stores, don't sell butter in block shape. They have a large block or contain of butter that can easily way in the tens of kilograms or more. You tell them how many grams of butter you want. The shopkeep will then cut off the amount of butter you want, wrap it in butcher paper, and give it to you. Needless to say, there are no convenient markings telling you how much is a tablespoon or 25 grams.

This topic is in response to a request made by a good friend. You, too, can be a good friend if you send $9.95 to...I mean, if you go to the Write to Me! page and send me a topic request.