Grocery Shopping

Yes, I am writing a blog about grocery shopping. It may sound dull (and it may very well be by the time I finish), but as it turns out this is a good sample of the service-oriented society. Many places in this country offer assistance for almost any aspect of your daily life. Most of the restaurants offer delivery to wherever you are. This even extends to fast food establishments.

So back to groceries. At home in the US, we went to the store once every 2-3 weeks and did a monster load to restock the cupboards. With the smaller refrigerator we have here we need to replace that big trip with more frequent but smaller trips. The shelf life for perishable foods seems shorter as well. Our theory, at least for the local breads and such is that there aren't as many preservatives.

We went to the Abela store not far from our flat to get a load for the upcoming week. It is very much like the British stores (Spinney's, Waitrose) here with their selection of foods, meaning that we don't recognize many of the brands. There are enough familiar American names around to keep us happy, though. We even saw packages of Phillips Crab meat (a Baltimore brand). The label indicated that it came from Indonesia, though!

If you have read this far, you are probably wondering where this is all going. At the checkout line at the store, we pull our cart up and before we could start placing items on the counter for the cashier, one of the workers took over and emptied our cart for us. He then walked around and started bagging. That's service I have not experienced at home. On top of that, he pushed the cart to our car and loaded the groceries into the back seat.

This is just one example of how there are people all over the place here to help us through any task that requires effort. There are some people who are quite happy with this level of service, but we are much more of a do-it-yourself family so we are still getting used to this.

Spring Break

We are in the middle of the school's spring break which lasts for 2 whole weeks. Initially, that sounds great but in reality the kids have got pretty bored already. The thing to do here is to take off for a vacation or a trip home to visit family over the break. We were busy getting settled here at the time we would have had to make travel plans so we missed out on an exciting spring break trip this year. We wanted to take the kids to Atlantis in Dubai over the break but we changed our mind after looking up the prices online. The normal rates are something like tripled during the break. It's not worth $3000/night! When break is over, we will get to hear from friends who have been in: the US, Oman, Paris, Sweden, Egypt and various other places.

Diana, Allison and Katrina got to take a mini-break of their own. The church we attend here planned a retreat for the past weekend in Al Ain. The retreat was for 12-14 year olds and Diana went as one of the chaperones. They were gone from Thursday morning to Saturday afternoon. Al Ain is on the far eastern end of the emirate of Abu Dhabi and borders Oman. It features the only mountain in the emirate, Jebel Hafeet which the girls got to run around after dinner the one evening. Megan and I got to spend the weekend together. Our activities featured time on the beach, splashing in the sea water and lots of time in the pool.

We are looking forward to our next break which is at the end of the school year (at the end of June). We are trying to work in a few days in London on the way home.