Tackling the Supermarket!

You know every day can't be about castles and sailing the Atlantic... we are in our real lives here whicham was painfully obvious today. After weeks of eating pizza and pasta, it was time to do some real cooking, which of course meant real shopping at the grocery store. Those of you who have not been here, might be picturing quaint little corner stores where everyone is ready to help you out.... wrong! Our supermarkets here are the same massive impersonal variety as in the U.S. only they seem even more overwhelming and even more crowded than a Super Wal-Mart. After taking the kids to school this morning, I sat down with my cookbooks and my French/English dictionary and spent over an hour writing out a list and writing down the French translation in case I needed to ask someone or read a label. I then headed to the store and spent more than 2 hours doing enough shopping to last us for a few days. It was quite painful to try to find the general location of things so that I could begin the even more tedious task of reading the labels on items to get exactly what I wanted. I did pretty well on most things.... The most difficult items were the spices (we had to leave all of our spices behind and have to replace them all!) and the baking goods. I love to bake and am very eager to do so but had to give up on baking soda, baking powder, buttermilk and marshmallows! Gonna be tough around here if we don't figure those things out! Any way, it was very nice to cook a real meal for dinner tonight and everyone ate the jumbalaya like crazy! It was rainy and wet all day today so I didn't take any pictures. I am going to include a picture of a map of our area so that you can see what I"m talking about when I tell you the places that we go. We live on the tip of the little peninsula in Port Anna - our village is Sene - that is where Max and Calvin go to school. The city where we lived in the apartment is Vannes and that is where Quincy and Taba go to school. To give you an idea of scale, the tip of Port Anna is 4 km to the heart of Sene. Remember that if you click on the picture, you can get it to go to full screen size!