Necessities

I had a pretty nasty experience on my first attempt to buy milk...and grocery shopping in general. Food was recognizable but the details failed me. The hardest part was picking milk. The packaging is similar to the USA in that there are various shades of blue used to show different kinds of milk but there's also a red package. Growing up, in Texas, red milk was whole milk. In The Netherlands, red milk is butter milk. In my first run for groceries, I bought red milk.

I didn't find out about the hazards of red milk until I got a drink the next morning. Yep, sour milk, first thing in the morning. Blegh. It wasn't just trouble with the milk, though. I didn't know what kind of cheese was what, sandwich meat is even more perplexing, there's no grape jelly on the shelves, peanut butter is hit-or-miss, and on top of all that, my "kitchen" has neither oven or freezer. Thankfully, first thing Friday morning (August 20, 2010) a group to show the new international students "how to shop at a Dutch supermarket" and of course, I was first in line. It was there that I learned the right milk to buy.

I'm eating like a student, again. Sandwiches, snacks (they have really fun flavors of Lays like pepperoni pizza, just paprika, spicy thai, etc), pasta, and ramen. Oh, and soda. They have Dr Pepper here. Goet! Funny circumstance: I ate the first Big Mac of my life here in The Netherlands. I only did so because I needed wireless internet and felt guilty about stealing the wifi from McDonalds...so I got a Big Mac. Meh.

There were other activities available to us during that first weekend and the beginning part of this week. I went on a tour of the second-hand shops in town. They were interesting...nothing like the Salvation Army store in the USA. These were, for the most part, literal junk stores. And tiny, can't forget that part. My group for touring the shops was small. Our guide was a student from India, there was a girl from Finland named Nasti, a guy from Czech Republic named Tomas, and me. Yes, her name is pronounced "nasty". Sweet girl, though. The first store we went to had a bigger bowl like I was looking for. The bowl given to my by the housing authority is about an inch deep...useless, basically. The other two stores were larger than that first one and packed to the gills. The largest one is called "de Flinstones" but there were no cavemen loitering anywhere in the vicinity. That shop had a few second-hand bikes starting at 75 Euros and that was more than any of us wanted to pay. Little did we know that those would be the cheapest bikes we'd see. Unfortunately, the big bike-buying expedition wasn't on my schedule until the next day.