We went grocery shopping Friday evening. Turns out that is not a good idea. Mornings are the way to go but we didn't know. The grocery store was packed Friday evening. I mean, Thankgiving or Superbowl packed! I had my list in hand, I even had my list organzed by sections of the store, like diary, meat, canned goods. This didn't help and just let me explain. 

 

It was a combination of finding the food I wanted and the shoppers that made my life difficult. Some shoppers will actually run into your cart and not even acknowledge they bumped you. Many of them stop and shop with their cart in the middle of the asile. They don't move out of the way for you to pass or even share shopping space. They just stand there staring at the food until the find what they want, with no recogniton you are there. I would try and go around them but it is so crowded I can't even make a path. I ended up leaving my husband with the cart and then embarking on my own to find food from my list.

 

I would say about 80% of all the food in the store is imported from another country. All produce and meat is 100% imported. This could be from Holland, China, South Africa, USA, New Zealand, Australia, pretty anywhere but here. With all this food being imported from various locations the prices vary a lot. There are two things you have to do before placing an item in your cart. First, check the expiration date. They are usually ok but not always. Second, figure up the exchange rate. For example, I wanted pecans in the small snack size cansiter but when I did the exchange in my head it came to $26 US dollars for one! That is crazy. Some foods are really reasonable when you compare the cost in US dollars but not always. It makes it very time comsuming to figure this out for each and every item. Not to mention that we only brought so much cash and had to make sure we didn't pick out too much food for the money we brought.

 

 So, I had made it all the way to the meats and produce section of the store and my list was halfway complete. I was pretty happy as I found many things I wanted. Most of the time I realize half way through that I don't have all the key ingrediants for the recipes I planned and have reinvent the recipes in my head, while shopping, or just give up and put the ingrediants back and start over.

 

 In the produce section, all fruits and veggies must be weighed before you go to the cash register. Just like in the states, I pick what I want and put it in a little plastic bag. But here I take my bag to a little counter in the produce section and some young men weigh the produce and place the price sticker on the bag for me. This sounds fine and great when you aren't in the middle of a huge crowd of people shopping. I would try and make a line but people here don't understand lines I guess. They would cut in front of me and literally stick their bag of produce on the scales to be weighed, right in front of my face. It didn't matter how close I stood or if I changed spots to another scale. They still cut in front of me. I was getting pretty fusterated and started actually marking random things off my list....celery...who needs celery? Thankfully, I finally finished shopping or you could say I called it quits as I didn't finish my list. We checked out and went home. Who knows what food we really have to eat. Has it always been this difficult when we went grocery shopping, no. But, I think I will stick with Friday mornings from now on. Just to be safe.