Some of the simplest tasks have become infinitely more complicated here. Tasks grocery shopping, which has been a time suck and a source of frustration for me. I LOVE to grocery shop, with and without the lils. At home, it became our saturday morning escape. We would pack up and head to Loblaws early, and willy would sleep in. It was a mostly fun time for the three of us, where the lils were helpers and observers and generally got along. If there were times when it was not, a solo trip to the store always restored the balance. I loved to wander though and look at all the shiny, fresh new produce and products, getting lost in my alone time for an hour. I have not found this bliss here.

Most of my shopping excursions have resulted in me coming home tired, cranky and somewhat empty handed. Often with two small people who were equally tired and cranky. There have been many a trip too. I feel like I have to run out every day to with a list a mile long. Many of the stores are small and very cramped. None of them have carts that can seat two children, which leads to fights, and one child sitting in the basket part of the cart either breaking the eggs or squishing the bread. They are often built on at least two stories and lacking in elevators that work. Lugging one or two small children up and down stairs with a basket full of groceries is never fun.

Items aren’t often organized in what I see as a logical fashion, and often aren’t grouped with similar items. It is not uncommon to find cereal tucked away in all four corners of a store, because that is where it fits. Eggs are not with the dairy, they are just where ever the pallet was placed that day. The inventory moves from location to location, day to day, so I wander around aimlessly trying to figure out if I was dreaming when I saw that item on a previous visit. Asking staff is hit and miss too. This is not because they don’t understand English, it is because the products often have a different name here. Flour is atta, okra is lady fingers, spinach is palak… They are also sized differently, often in smaller sizes, which led to underbuying of the staples I did find.

Then I found online grocery ordering and delivery. Thing were looking up. I spent the better part of an afternoon searching one outlet’s website, using every way I could think of to describe products. This store, that I had been shopping in, carried a number of the items that I was looking for, I just didn’t know how and where to find them. So I placed and order and hoped for the best. It arrived within hours of my hitting submit, but sadly contained only half of the items that I wanted. I tried a couple of days later, and the new order was much slower to arrive, and again missing many things. I surmised that they didn’t know where to look either, and went back to the drawing board.

The online shopping experience wasn’t a total loss. It taught me that I needed to broaden my thinking on what things might be called, and to look a little harder when I am in the stores. Each subsequent visit has been a little more successful, has led to a few more items scratched off the lists. We now have a maid who will watch the lils when she is here, which lets me do a solo trip and concentrate on the shopping alone.

Today I feel that I conquered grocery shopping. I went to one store and got ninety percent of the item on my list, remembering things like extra loaves of bread and cartons of milk. For the few items that I missed, I was able to either substitute, or know where to buy them and am saving that shopping for a promised solo trip with Woo on Saturday. The best part? It had been a week since I had last grocery shopped, save for one quick trip to pick up two items I didn’t know our cook needed. Success. Next up, finding and conquering all the markets!

Now if only I could open a bank account and transfer money into it.