In Search of Groceries

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It is a rainy Saturday but we have to head into town anyway to finally get some groceries for our condo, we can't eat in restaurants the whole month!

Our main goal is hunting down the ingredients for tacos for dinner since I brought some taco seasoning mix with me from home and a few other staples. We are walking and Ian has a backpack so we don't want to make it too heavy. First stop is the largest Supermarket right at the edge of town, the furthest away, around 1.5 miles walk. We were fairly impressed with the place, by far the largest and also very clean. Everything local is cheap, cheaper than home. Things imported, that's another story, a smaller size bag of Dorito's - yes that's right $12.95 BZ. I guess we won't be eating many Lays or other imported chips. There are some local varieties of taco chips around $4 BZ. We get some canned salsa and local hot sauce and a couple of other items like banana jam and mustard, we also pick up a locally made chocolate bar. The cocoa is grown here and this area is famous for their chocolate.

There's six or seven places for groceries in town. All the meat is frozen, there's no fresh meat to be found at any of the stores. The only really fresh protien in the area is fish, which we can get right from the boats if we can ever figure out what time they come in which seems to change from day to day or at least so far the locals have not been able to give us more insight. We pop into a couple of other grocerery stores in search of tortillas and luckily find some at the Everyday Market. Like most markets, it's not much to look at and has some interesting odors if you know what I mean. We stop at the closest market for frozen ground beef which comes in a tubed shape plastic bag. In the end, we figure out that all the stores carry exactly the same items and interestingly enough although there doesn't seem to be a large visible minority of Orientals, all the groceries stores seem to be run by Oriental people. Who knows.

We dodge a brief rain storm by popping into a barbeque restaurant for some lunch. Two chicken lunches (bbq chicken, beans, tortilla & coleslaw) two beers and sprite run us a total of $30 BZ (or $15 US,) why are we shopping again? Oh yeah, we can't be that lazy... or can we?

We hit the ice cream stand again which has been a regular stop for Ian to get his daily dose of ice cream and oh my gosh that is so good! So far, milk chocolate is the favorite, probably because of the local chocolate.

Our last pit stop is the produce stand to get some tomatoes, bananas, limes, onions and apples. The produce is all very lovely and fresh then we head back to the condo after our successful mission to make our own dinner and catch a movie we rented from i-tunes. Oh yeah, this is not lazy at all...

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