Tuesday!!! (Sept 9)

[jennybee1018]

Morning ladies!! It's September all ready?! What happened?

How was your weekend? Did you do anything fun?

What's on the agenda for today?

QOTD: What is grocery shopping like in your host country? Do you try to shop weekly? Every day? How many stores do you usually go to in order to find ingredients that you may need/want? Are they mostly local items or are there imported items available?

[potatopie]

Morning. DH is away for 10 days so it's just me and DS. I don't mind too much because I'm using the time to spring clean the house and start packing for our trip next week (going to the US for my sister's wedding).

QOTD: It took me awhile to find my stride with grocery shopping, but it helps that we live in a more residential area now (stores stay open later and on weekends). I usually rotate between 3 different stores every few days. One is better for ready-made and higher-end stuff, another for my basics shopping, and one is good for the big shopping trips.

[dorothyinAus]

I know.  I can hardly believe it's September, and almost mid-Septemner at that!

The weekend was easy, mostly.  DH's birthday was Sunday, and it was Father's Day in Australia, but he was getting over the flu, so we took it easy.  We had planned to walk a 5K route together to finish my 6-week walking program, but I ended up doing it by myself (in 57 minutes, at an average speed of 3.3 mph, according to my iPod app.  I am very proud of myself -- it's the first time I have done anything like that since high school!)

Today was a quick 20 minute walk to keep up the walking program, and I was going to head to the grocery, but I only just made it back from my walk before the skies opened up so I just stayed home and did some party prep for DH's birthday party this coming weekend.

QOTD:
What is grocery shopping like in your host country? -- Fairly similar to the US, though there os much less variety on the shelves.
Do you try to shop weekly? -- I plan meals and shop weekly.
How many stores do you usually go to in order to find ingredients that you may need/want? -- Since I walk to/from the grocery, I try to keep it down to one store per week.  I alternate between the two major grocery chains here in Australia.
Are they mostly local items or are there imported items available? --Mostly it's local items, but there are some imports, mainly English.  I almost never bother with imported ingredients at the grocery.  We head to the specialty US food importer at least once a year to stock up on things, but mostly I've learned to make do with what I can find easily, locally -- though I miss a good number of things:  grits, real Cheerios, shelf-stable shortening (Crisco), biscuit mix, and heavy/whipping cream are the biggest things I curse the stores for not stocking.

[jennybee1018]

Morning! Time is really flying this year!!!

Weekend was good - pretty busy actually! Friday I ran errands with a friend, and then relaxed at home with DH. Saturday, we went out the car dealer to pick up some stuff out of my car (they've had it for a month, ugh)! I also registered for a cake decorating class with my friend. So fun!

Not too much going on today! Just looking forward to finishing up the day at work and heading home. Then out to run a few errands!

QOTD: I try to shop weekly but sometimes need to stop at the store mid week for something. I have about 3 -4 stores that I'll go to (not all in the same day) to find the items that I need. It's interesting because many stores will important different brands/types of food, so it just depends! There are lots of local items here, and we also have a pretty wide selection of imported items (even from the US), you just need to be prepared to pay for it ;-)

[poisonkisses]

My weekend was good, Saturday we went to a bicycle shop in town to check out bikes, luckily we had glanced at bike prices at some other places so we weren't overcome with sticker shock. The owners speak no English and we no (useful) German, so that was fun, lots of arm gestures. Then Sunday we went down to Aachen for a big market, unfortunately nothing really caught my eye that I wanted to buy.

Nothing exciting planned for today, just waiting to see if the store calls to say the furniture we ordered for our bathroom is in.

QOTD: We go shopping more frequently here than we did in Canada, usually twice a week. Partly because our fridge and freezer are much smaller than we're used to, and partly because we only have one really big bag for groceries. We usually just go to the two grocery stores in our village, sometimes we go to the bigger grocery store in town. I haven't seen any US/Canadian food imports in the stores, but if we want those we can go to either the NATO base or the American base. We haven't gone to the American base yet, but we did stop at the Natex recently for steak and brown sugar.