Shopping weirdness..

Living here is a life of opposites. On one hand there is amazing beauty like I shared on my last blog post. On the other is the frustration, at times, of living here! Yes they are first world problems. But still they affect our everyday lives..
Take shopping for groceries for example.
There are beautiful modern supermarkets. Air conditioned and filled with all kinds of things.
One of the local hypermarkets has shopping festivals where they highlight a nations particular foods. With 65+ nationalities living here its sweet that we can sometimes get comforts from home..

Once a year we splurge and hunt down any American chips that we can find for our Superbowl Party!

It cost around $40 dollars for these home comforts!
So for most of the year we stick to local produce which is cheaper of course.
There are the usual food celebrations, the annual Mango festival with over 100 varieties available!

There is the festival celebrating Pongol which I found out is an Indian Tamil harvest festival.

Then we have the Arabian foods such as camel meat.

 And the annual Ramadan foods which consist of gigantic tubs of dates which folks use to break their fast as well as the massive Vimto towers which no-one which knows why they only appear in Ramadan,but they do! Vimto is a fizzy fruit drink but the local supermarkets seem to have a competition to see how grand of a tower they can make theirs!

There is then the genuinely unusual or weird to us foods.
A giant sugar cane display was here a month or two ago!

And something called Jack Fruit which is huge!

All this makes for a pleasant experience. We get to sample foods from nations we would otherwise never get the chance to have. 

But then there is the flip side..
My weekly shopping list is never successful. I make my menu for the week and every week I have to adapt as there is something I cant find from my list. I'm not very good at last minute or adapting!
It makes for a frustrating time each week. Yes its a small problem in the grand scheme of life. I am thankful for food and for enough money to be able to feed our family..yet still I complain..

One week this is all we could get for milk!

My boy Kiddo can only have UHT milk and this was the great choice. No other choice of milk for 3 weeks!
I'm still on the hunt for sour cream to make My Sweets birthday cake (from December!). 

 I'm embarrassed at how shopping each week upsets me so much. Small, first world problems.