Our first shopping trip here was pretty eventful, any shopping trip after you move is overwhelming I think, you always feel like you need to stock up on things and buy all of those things that you can't live without (ie...flour, sugar, brown sugar, canned veggies, etc...) you get the idea. Well when you live on an island you don't just go to the store walk down the isle and find those things if the store has flour and sugar they are divided in to ziploc type bags and you have to make sure you grabbed the flour and not powdered milk. When you get it home you have to find some way to get it air tight so that the humidity doesn't get to it and when your living in student housing your not exactly equipped with those things...(I have pancake mix in a pyrex bowl with a lid sitting on my microwave right now). So needless to say I am learning...slowly!
Now back to the actual shopping trip...so we walk in to the grocery store Super J here its kind of like the Wal-Mart of the island because there are 2 of them...LOL.... so the first thing on our mind is budget...budget...budget, so we begin shopping knowing we have to keep Kohl in mind and find things he will eat...we bought like 8 packages of ramen and 4 boxes of apple juice, Kohl can survive those are his 2 staples we are looking for anything we recognize...we grab PB&J the all in one kind they call it stripes here I think it is called Goober back in the states, we figured we were killing 2 birds there cause now we didn't have to but both peanut butter and jelly...(we are thinking we are flipping smart at this point). We grab other things mac and cheese, dry pasta, hotdogs, bread, and the essentials like TP and paper towels etc etc...we get to the meat section...They have chicken, beef, pork and GOAT! Yep goat (insert gagging here). We quickly realize beef is not an option it is way to expensive, so we move on to chicken its all drumsticks, wings and BACKS! Not 100% sure I knew you could eat a chickens back but you can in the Caribbean! I have never been an avid cooker of chicken on the bone so it scares me a touch so we decided to pass on that for this trip 2 things left pork and GOAT...pork was about as pricey as beef so we also choose to pass on that and I was not going near the goat!
We decided that we would just substitute our protein with other things like eggs and PB so were hit the frozen section just to see what we could find and low and behold they have pre packaged ground beef there so we check it out and its still pretty pricey but I see another ground prepackaged meat next to it so I grab it because it was only $6.60EC so that's roughly $2.80 US that's totally affordable so I check it out and its ground turkey...not exactly the most appetizing thing but heck we will give it a try for that cheap (had it tonight...not good).
so we do one last scan around the store and grab some fruit and veggies and head to the check out we had about a half a cart of groceries so I was thinking this isn't going to be too bad and we could survive a week on what we have. The price just keeps going and going and I was like this is nuts! The grand total $532.00 EC I almost fainted! It was just about $200.00 US and I felt like we hadn't bought anything hardly! I wanted to cry! We are never going to survive here!
We get home and unload everything and I still feel like we have nothing! We sat down that night and made a list to e-mail to family of food to send us...our families are AMAZING they all went out and bought everything we asked for and it is on it way here! YAY!!! we aren't going to starve! We love our families we would be lost without them!
So on a positive note we have gotten better at shopping our first Saturday here we went with the weekend driver to the store and he took us to a different market called the Sunrise and it is a lot cheaper than Super J but you can't get as much there so we now go both places and are beginning to figure things out!
We truly do love it here! The Vincentian people are amazing! However the next time you go into Walmart relish in the fact that you are paying only $.98 for Mac and Cheese we pay almost $2.00 for a box. I have a lot more shopping experiences I will share in later posts! Just another day in Paradise!
This is us waiting for the bus to take us grocery shopping! Were just 3 beach bums and our daddy Dr.
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