Grocery Shopping

I thought I'd take you with us on a typical shopping trip. Since we don't have a car, we can only buy what we can carry, so that means we go to the store about every other day. It's a short trip to the store: one tram ride and about 5 minutes. Here's the step-by-step process, minus the in-store shots because Matt thought we would get in trouble if I took pictures of food in Tesco (I'll get some later and post them when he's not looking).



Prep: Write out the grocery list, then try to find all of your items in the dictionary and write the Czech translation.



Step 1: Get on the elevator (or pose like a goof ball in front of it). You have two choices: the tiny one that feels like it's about to fall through the floor when you stop, or the big one that just jerks a little. We usually pick the big one unless we want a free roller coaster ride.



Step 2: Walk to the tram stop and wait for the tram. Or, if you're smart, you check the schedule and get there right before the tram does. The tram stop is in the middle of the road, kind of like a median, so cars are whizzing by on both sides. The picture on the left is walking from our apartment to the stop. The picture on the right is standing at the stop and looking back up the hill toward our apartment. See that truck parked up on the sidewalk? If you turn right there and cross the street, you're at our building. Yeah, we're that close to public transportation.



Step 3: Ride 3 stops (1.6 km) to Eden Shopping Park where Tesco is (kind of like a mall with a Tesco attached).



Step 4: Get a basket. You have to put in a 5 or 10 crown (Czech koruna) - about $0.30 to $0.60 - as a deposit to get the basket loose. You get it back if you return the cart where it belongs (genius! Maybe Walmart should take a hint).



Step 5: Do your shopping (this is the last picture Matt let me take inside the building).



Step 6: Ride home, loaded down like a pack mule, on the tram. Most of the time when we go to the store we have to buy water because the water here is too hard to drink and cook with. So pretty much every trip, we come home with several heavy water bottles. Guess who gets to carry them?



Step 7: Put all the groceries away, very strategically. Spacial reasoning is a plus here.
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And here's some other random pictures from this week...



In our attempt to live like the locals, we tried the local Czech-made cola... Yuck! It tastes like licorice with a cough syrup after taste. Just then we realized we don't see many locals drinking this cola. In fact, most of them drink Coca-Cola products. We can even get Coke Zero!!



And I made my very first homemade salsa! I just couldn't pass up Cinco de Mayo and a chance to eat Mexican food. Jars of salsa are about 4 dollars for a tiny thing, though, so I tried making my own. Matt says it's pretty good. We're going to eat it with tostadas!



And here's our 1.5% milk. Yep, just sitting on the shelf, not going bad. And yes, that's five cartons (one of them is whole milk for coffee). Most people here drink shelf milk - somehow processed to last through just about anything and for about forever. Even after you open it, it lasts for more than a week in the fridge. Surprisingly, it tastes just like the milk back home once it gets cold. I'll let you know if I start growing an extra toe or something, though. You can get non-shelf, refrigerated milk here; it's really fresh, but it only lasts for about three days in the fridge - opened or not.