Our first weekend: shopping

It's nice to have a little bit of internet time today. If I had more internet time (they just give you 30 minutes) I'd tell you more about our house-hunting experience, our job experience so far, and so on... but instead you just get to hear about shopping! Sorry! Maybe later on in the week.... (oh, excuse the grammar, I didn't re-read this and it might be terrible)

This weekend is the first weekend when one of us is NOT sick so we actually got to get out and do some shopping for our place. We needed to buy almost everything for our place, except furniture. We have "loaner" stuff until next weekend.

We found a really cheap place called "rups big bear" where we had our very own personal helper the entire time we were shopping! He followed us around with the cart! So funny. I would tell him what we were looking for, and he would just take us and take care of our cart. Then he went and “tested” all the small appliances we bought (iron, toaster, electric kettle) to make sure they were working before we bought them. I don’t know if we were supposed to tip him or not…Tipping doesn’t really happen here it seems like.

“Rups” was cheap, but that meant that stuff was pretty ugly or just really bad quality (expect for the small appliances we bought – they seem great – and made in Japan!). But dishes, towels and sheets were not any good from there. So we went to a place I read about on the internet that is supposed to be a Costco subsidiary! We walk into this place and it feel like we just entered a warp zone and are back at home! It was so similar to Costo – except for the yummy polish dogs. It’s called “Cost U less”. No membership required so that was nice. And they had all the yummy things of home, like Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, miracle whip mayo, low fat popcorn, etc.. you name it, they probably had it. Now this was a great joy for us since our other grocery store was very lacking in “American” food. They seem to just have a lot of one thing…like an entire isle of biscuits/cookies… anyhoo, that was a real joy for me as you can imagine I went down every since isle and “ooh-ed” and “ahhhh-ed” at everything. Now if we were super rich we could have anything we wanted form here.

We did splurge and buy taco shells, low fat popcorn, trail mix bars, Earl Gray tea, pasta sauce, pasta, and that’s all I can remember. And I say “splurge” because groceries really don’t seem cheap here. I guess I never realized how cheap things are in the States until I started traveling…stuff costs a lot more overseas it seems like.

One last stop of our shopping adventure was our usual place. A mall that has the grocery store we usually shop at. On the second floor you can find clothing and household items. We ended up spending $200USD there on towels, sheets, silverware, plates, cups, and one pyrex dish. It seemed a little overpriced, but the stuff was good quality and should last us our entire time here no problem.

We were exhausted from all the shopping so the rest of the day we just rested. Matthew watched the Rugby 7s tournament and I just sat around or unpacked our goodies. It was a great Saturday.

Now it’s Sunday and we are having our usual internet time here at a coffee shop in the centre. We walk down here from our place, just about a 15 min walk. We usually go shopping afterwards for groceries, so we must take a taxi back. Today I’m making Matthew go back to the stores to pick up a few more things we didn’t get yesterday…poor guy…so much shopping on our first real weekend! Fun for me though ☺

Swell