Grocery Shopping (Monday, August 2)

Before I go too far, I just want to remind everyone of HOW INSANELY HOT IT IS HERE!! I've never experienced anything like this. I think the ice cream is even warm around here.

Anyway, after heading over to Matt's school to finish up a couple of things we went grocery shopping for our first time here. We've pretty much eaten out for every meal but since getting our apartment, we were anxious to be able to cook some at home. Not too much however, as we don't have an oven. :) A normal staple in our home is (was) onions - you can normally pick up a 5lb of onions for a couple of dollars, rIght? Well, to buy onions here - you get 3 onions for $5+. Aunt Martha would be appauled!! Oh, and ask Matt about peanut butter. I'm sure he'll have a couple of things to say. :)

We did manage to buy a couple of "known" foods - baguette, tomatoes, basil, cheese (can you guess what we ate for dinner??). I was also able to navigate over to the sweets section and find myself some delicious dark chocolate. The rest of our shopping was basically a guessing game. There were about 900 bags of rice - all in a different color bag but everyone of them looked like plain, white rice to me. How does one choose? I guess if I could read the bag I would know what the difference was but since I can't, I picked a cute colored bag and moved on to the next aisle. I will say the most interesting section was the meat and seafood department. Matt hung out there for awhile but I was convinced that most of the "products" were still moving so I keep on moving myself. Needless to say, shopping is going to be a little challenging for the next couple of weeks (or months).

After we paid for everything, we carried it out to our new set of wheels! A car?! No, my bike with 2 huge baskets - 1 in front and 1 in back. This ought to be good. Me on a bicycle, in Japan, with glass in front and in back. I made Matt carry the eggs - no way was I going to be responsible for those! Once we loaded up, we were able to take off after I swerved back and forth trying to get my handle bars under control. Somehow Matt had no problem steering his bike, he was even able to snap pictures as we road along. I think next time I'm going to make him drive the grocery-getter!