Groceries and Food - So Necessary and so Loved!

One thing that’s different shopping here – the stores are very loud. Music plays over the main speakers; meat vendors shout out their latest/best price on some item; clerks talk to each other over all other noise; a speaker is placed in the middle of a display (like cheese), extolling each one’s virtues (we assume that part, since it’s not our native language!); samples are available for the brave; and a lady is promoting some “joining” (or other) benefit she has to offer.

Not only do the noises assault our ears, the smells assault our noses. We can’t identify the smells although we certainly recognize some of the items. But it’s not pleasant to our noses!

We bought some red long potatoes we assumed were sweet potatoes. They weren’t sweet, but they were good!

The carrots here are short and very fat, but good! I haven’t been able to find sweet, green peppers, but there are small green spicy peppers packaged about 4 to a bag. They do have yellow and red sweet peppers.

White potatoes are available bagged about 6 to a bag. They are small. I haven’t found any larger ones that would work for baking (so I’ll bake the small ones!). Celery comes with much more of the “base/root” than I’m used to, but it tastes the same. I cut it up for casseroles.

Yesterday we braved buying something that looked sweet with nuts – I call it Japanese peanut brittle, although it wasn’t just peanuts nor was it brittle, but rather quite sticky. We’ll buy that again – it was yummy! We also couldn’t find the milk carton we had gotten used to (sold out?), so we had to experiment with a new carton. As long as they have a picture of a cow on them, we figured we’d be o.k. We ended up with 1 liter whole milk and 1 liter non-fat milk, so we mixed the 2 and they taste just fine! Just remember to look for the cows!

We shop in 4-5 different grocery stores, and they all have different items. So we try to remember where we saw “such and such”. Cream, sour cream & butter are all somewhat elusive. We like to buy meat that comes from the US. Both beef and pork are available, if we are in the right store. Bacon is just as we were told – it doesn’t get crisp and doesn’t have much taste.

So much to learn - so little time! & neither one of us has lost any weight, so you see we're adapting well!