I have been back in Canada for a few months now, for the usual hockey off-season, and I can’t help but continually make comparisons between my two homes. When nearing the end of the season in Europe, I start fantasizing about things at home in Canada: all the foods I’m going to eat, activities I’m going to do, people I am going to see. Once here however, and all the Canadian foods have been devoured, summer festivals have been attended, and family have been visited, I start doing the same romanticizing about all the things I miss overseas. Read on to see what it is I adore and miss about Germany and Switzerland when home in North America, and those things I long for in Canada, when I am living the expat life in Europe. How many of the same would you include on your own list? READ MORE »
Posts tagged grocery shopping
Foods that are hard to find in Germany
I’m inviting readers (Americans especially) to help me compile a list. It’s a list that grows shorter by the year, but is still fairly lengthy: Foods that are hard to find in Germany.
It really wasn’t that long ago that an American living in Germany had difficulty finding familiar food items such as peanut butter. Today it’s easy to find peanut butter in German grocery stores and supermarkets. (But the selection is still much more limited than in a US grocery store!) Today you can even find Mexican food in a German supermarket (although it is often a bit too Germanized for Norte Americanos). Sometimes food products are available in Germany, but are difficult to find. On the other side of the coin, Americans who used to bring jars of Nutella home from Germany can now find it on the shelves of most grocery stores in the US.
Smart American expats learn to adapt and get to like German/European fare, but every once in a while we yearn for something that is difficult or impossible to find in Germany. READ MORE »
Grocery Culture
There I was on Saturday morning at the grocery store, my cart full, hastily putting my items on the checkout band. I sent two parties ahead of me to the cashier, knowing I would need a little extra time; my weekly groceries still filled the cart and my attempts to organize the checkout band for efficient packing were consuming precious seconds. The people behind me began to move closer, although I hadn’t moved forward an inch. Someone sighed loudly from farther back in line. And I began to sweat.
Finally, my groceries all lined up in perfect order on the checkout band, I proceeded to the cashier, who began her rapid-fire process of scanning and piling them for me to place back in the cart. I wasn’t fast enough, she dumped things in for me to speed things up. Desperate to keep up, I was of course unable to pack things in the cart in the order I had planned while placing them on the band. The heavy things were on top, the eggs near the bottom, and the potatoes just got dumped on top of the yogurt. Eager to end the transaction, I paid (with my debit card, which wasn’t possible just a few years ago!) and made my way to the car, where I again packed the groceries, this time at my leisure and in the order I preferred, into the reusable bags waiting in my car.
Whew. Grocery shopping culture here is so different. READ MORE »
Recent Comments