Even underwear is confusing

Ross & I are going to be spending the Christmas holidays in Eastern Europe. That's correct, we have chosen to go to the coldest part of the continent during the coldest time, just as we chose to go to Spain in August. We live for extremes, people.

For this holiday, we needed to get some long underwear. Wherever we travel, we always spend lots of time on foot, so we figured we had better bundle up. We went to Holland's equivalent of Wal-Mart, Hema. Hema isn't exactly like Wal-Mart in that it only sells the store brand. For example, you can't buy Maybelline make-up at Hema, you can only buy the Hema brand. Hema also seems to be classier than Wal-Mart, kind of like a mix between Wal-Mart and The Bay. Anyway, we went there today to buy our long underwear.

Not surprisingly, this proved to be twice as complicated as it should have been. We found the Hema-brand long underwear divided into three categories: Men's, women's and children's. They were packaged in sealed boxes, and we scoured the box for a size. After we couldn't find anything, we decided it must be one size fits all and bought a ladies top and bottom and a men's top and bottom as well. Almost immediately after paying for these, Ross noticed in tiny letters on the back of his box (in the barcode) that his top was a XL and his bottoms were an L. Anyone of you that has ever seen Ross knows this is a bit excessive.

So, back to the section we went and tried to find something more appropriate. I had a S top and an L bottom, when I think an M would have been best for both. After looking through all the boxes, it became obvious that Ms do not exsist. In Men's sizes, nothing other than Ls or XLs exsist. We concluded all the underwear was unisex, and the smallest size was labeled as "children's", the two biggest were "Men's" and the middle two were "Women's". The fact they went to the trouble of differentiating by gender made it twice as complicated as it should have been. Why didn't they just label it as "Adult, S, M, L & XL"? We exchanged our purchases, and both ended up getting "Women's" Ls for both top and bottom.

When we got home, we thought we should test out their warmth, and realized we accidentally bought three tops, and only one bottom. Will the adventure ever end?