First Time Shopping

After writing yesterday, I did in fact make the trek to the grocery. Sainsbury’s (http://www.sainsburys.co.uk, if you’d like to see) is the only grocery within walking distance from campus, though the return trip is more uphill than expected. It was fairly busy, which I’m told is not unusual for a Saturday, and there are signs everywhere for recycling and reusable bags and so on. The store is not laid out at all like I’d expect, but I imagine I’ll get used to it soon. It does begin with the produce, though, so that’s where I began.

Sainsbury’s offers lots of different fruit and veg, some refrigerated and some in boxes tiered on display shelves. You can get it pre-bagged or you can bag it yourself, just like here, and there are usually one or two organic options for each item. Sainsbury’s offers a generic store-brand of just about everything, so for instance you can get gala, pink lady, or Sainsbury’s Basic apples. They were offering a £1 special on Sainsbury’s Basic blueberries, so I got some of those, and also some SB grapes, which were cheap. All of the fruit was labelled with its country of origin: my grapes are Greek, by blueberries Polish.

Meat is available mostly pre-packaged, and the small meat counter was quite crowded with people so I skipped it. There was a whole refrigerator aisle devoted to pies, so I skipped that as well and will go back another time to investigate. Sliced sandwich meat is very thoroughly labelled, including not only that whatever inside is processed, but exactly how and with what. The chicken I got, for instance, is held together with potato starch. Good to know.

Milk is available both refrigerated and not, and most of the refrigerated is organic. I chose refrigerated this time, but intend to experiment with the shelf-stable kind another time. Juice is available in almost every combination you can think of. No POG, but I did find juices that contained Passionfruit... instead I chose Orange, Mango, Guava, which is close. I hit the cereal aisle next which was between canned veg and baby items. There is so much shredded wheat available, and also lots of Special K. I found the Sainsbury’s Basic version of multigrain Cheerios (called Hooplas here) and picked up a box.

The bread was all the way at the back, but fortunately, wholemeal baps (Brit for whole grain rolls) were available for cheap. Instead of a condiment aisle, things are scattered around. Mustard was on an aisle labelled “Spreads” which included things like prawn spread, which didn’t particularly appeal. Then there were generic meat spreads, which I did not investigate, because I finally spotted the yellow mustard. Coleman’s Original English was much, much less expensive than French’s, so I chose it. I half regret this now because I just made a sandwich with it. Think the smooth version of straight up mustard seed, which is rather a lot like straight horseradish. Absolutely not what I was expecting and next time I will be using far less of it. On the bright side, my sinuses are clear.

Sainsbury’s, like Wal-Mart, has a home furnishing section and a small clothing section in with the other home product sorts of things. They were crowded, so I skipped browsing and headed for checkout. There were signs for the store reusable bags, available for 9p with a free trade-in policy. The ones I got have a squirrel that reads, “I’m nuts about recycling!” which as an advertisement I decided was preferable to the elephant, which read, “I’m sturdy”. You bag your own groceries while the clerk rings up your order and tells you what you owe. My stuff altogether was £10 and change.

Walking home I noticed the pedestrian signal signs, which will actually stop traffic for you to cross. Being from Richmond, I am used to waiting for traffic to clear and heading out into the road. I’ll have to observe a bit before deciding whether or not this approach is acceptable.

I checked in with reception last night to find out if my bedding or kitchen things had arrived as they were supposed to. I found that the very basic packs had arrived, but as my order was not among them, the fellow at the desk placed a call. Apparently, uni-box, the company from which I ordered my stuff, did these things separately from the ones the school got in. If I decide to settle for the one the school has, I either trade them what i get if/when my order comes in, or I purchase it from the school. I opted for writing a forceful enquiry to the company, wanting to know what was going in with the order that I placed several week s ago for delivery on Friday. Hopefully they’ll do something about that on Monday, and until then I’m sleeping in my quilt and having my cereal and milk separately.

Over the course of the morning I started and re-started my new knitting project half a dozen times. I’ve made it to row twelve of the sixteen-row pattern, but those twelve rows took an hour and forty-five minutes. Ridiculous. I didn’t end up exploring at all today, but I will definitely be going out tomorrow. The temperature is dropping into the 50s and I’m going to nip outside for a few minutes before bed.