New Habits

Shopping habits are a funny thing.  When we were living in Northern California, I had my shopping gig down.  There was a particular store that was my place and I knew that store like the back of my hand.  I could whip through the aisles in less that 25 minutes and get a weeks worth of groceries for about $150.

We are starting some new habits here... our new place to shop is La Colonia.  There is one not to far from our house.  The produce is pretty good (notice the beautiful basil - D loved the basil so much he picked off several leaves and put them in a bowl by his bed because the smell reminded him of our a field trip he went on last year in kindergarten), the aisles are well organized and it's not too big where you'd feel like you would get lost.  I don't like "Pais".  It's a big grocery store in the mall that we went to a few times when we first got here.  Come to find out, it's owned by WalMart.  It's huge, has a lot of crap, and we tended to wander the aisles and back track to find what we needed.  I think the first time we went there, it took almost an hour before we were done.  It is cheaper, but not worth the effort.  Typically, we have been spending about $130 a week on groceries here.  Hopefully as we stock up our shelves with more of the basics, our weekly food bill will decrease some. 

We now buy milk in a carton.  That was a little weird at first.  The carton sits on a shelf in the store, not refrigerated.  We Americans are funny about refrigerating our dairy products.  But we have been drinking the stuff and no one is sick.  Of course, we refrigerate it after we open it.  L doesn't like it, but everyone else does.  

Zambos are plantain chips with a delicious spiciness to them.  Yummmmm.  Even L likes these.

Salva Vida's go down real easy.  I can't say that I'd choose to drink it at home when there are so many great IPA's to choose from, but when in Rome... We've also been buying Stoly vodka for about $8 a bottle.   I hate to admit that we also buy Coke now, but we also have a new drink in our repertoire - rum and Coke is dang tasty. 

Another new habit is getting our bottled water once a week. The water guy that comes around each Saturday morning at about 8 o'clock.  He stands on the street below our apartment yelling "Agua!" but it sounds more like "Awa!".  We tell him how many 5 gallon bottles we need, he hoofs them up 3 flights of stairs to our apartment, we trade our empties for fulls, and voila! we have drinking water for the next week.  A 5 gallon bottle is 30 lempiras, about $1.50.  We give him a tip for bringing the water up.  This morning, between Colin and Elisa and us, he brought up three 5 gallon bottles all at once.  We had the kids take down the empties.

The last photo is of the kids sorting through candy from a "pinata" D went to yesterday.  Pinata is what they call b-day parties.  At a pinata, a kid can score so much candy, it rivals a successful night of trick-or-treating.   To my chagrin, the kid's candy intake has increased one hundred-fold since we arrived.  Its an ever-present entity at school and pinatas.   Anyway, a boy in his class celebrated his b-day by inviting friends over to slip 'n slide.  Because we don't have a car yet, the boy's mother graciously offered to bring D home after the party.  He got back at about 7:30, with the boy, his mother and their Driver.  Come to find out, this boy's grandfather is a former president of Honduras (not the most recent former president, however).  Hmmmm, our life is really different here...