Culture of Confusion

So today i felt the biggest impact of the original condominium government as i went grocery shopping. There are really only 2 big grocery stores in the capital city, Leader Price and Au Bon Marche. So the first one has a completely english sounding name, the second one sounds very french. I decided that i'd give Leader Price a try first because many of the volunteers talk about how cheap it was but they warned that all the products were in french so they didnt know what certain things were. So as i entered the store all of the signs on the outside were in English, saying exit, entrance, Leader Price, etc... upon going into the shop every product and description of them as well as tags with prices was completely in french. Une kilo de bouef fume 750 vatu. After wandering around a while looking at all the exciting food, i left buying only a single box of chocolate petals cereal, because without refrigeration there wasn't much point in me purchasing a large amount of food. I stood in the check out line listening to white women speak to each other in french, then men behind me spoke in bislama, the woman at the check out counted out the change in french and then told me the total in english and followed it up by telling me to have a nice day in bislama. I was still laughing by all the languages as i headed in to the Au Bon Marche because Leader Price's toilet paper was sold out. So Au Bon Marche is completely an english run super market. Everything is in english and almost all of the products are from Australia with a few coming from the US. Again i went walking through and saw a woman speaking in french to the deli counter about the fish, a pair of women were speaking a local language i didn't understand, a chinese man was on his phone speaking chinese, a store attendant asked me in english if she could help me find something which i responded to in bislama, and finally when i did my check out the woman start off speaking french to me and tried to comply but she realized my french was poor she switch to english which i laughed about and told her we should just stick to bislama. I left the store laughing to myself about how crazy language is in this country. The fact that even in the capital city people don't have a straight language to speak to each other boggles my mind some days. I can't imagine growing up speaking a local language, then learning bislama as i got older only to be schooled in english while i take french classes occasionally.