Wednesday, Dec 7, 2016

Big shopping day today. Toilet paper was at the top of the list! I never thought I would miss, or even notice, the finer aspects of quality TP, but living in Ecuador has brought that to my awareness. What they call toilet paper here is really a raw deal. 😉

Easton arrived home around 7:30 am after an all night bus ride back from Quito. He didn’t get much sleep on the bus, and I think with everything he and Paul had been doing for the last several days he was worn out. Chase, Heidi, and I left the house at 1 pm and he was still in bed sleeping.

The sun was out in full force while we made our way to the store. It was hot and I was loving it. Heidi not so much. But hey, as soon as it clouds up the temperature easily drops 20 degrees, so I always enjoy it while I can. We stopped for lunch at a place we like, Fogon de Nico, for great open-flame grilled chicken.

cheese

Cheese…jeez

After lunch we picked up some groceries and I bought $30 worth of cheese. I didn’t mean to do that but I looked at the price wrong. Cheese is expensive here and I found some that I thought was a little over $4 for 1.3 pounds. That seemed like a great price to me so I decided to get three of them. When I was at the checkout however, each one rang up over $10.

Shopping in Ecuador can be a bit hazardous. Nothing here is clearly marked, and some things are not marked at all. It just is how things are done. In the bigger stores there is usually a scanner somewhere that a shopper can scan the product code to find the price. If one isn’t available it requires asking an employee, if you care. Sometimes I care and sometimes I don’t, and sometimes what I end up paying for something shocks me pretty good.

Buying produce in Coral is a strange experience as well. I rarely do this but since we are here for the toilet paper and need some veggies, what the heck. After selecting the produce you want, you have to take it to an individual at a single scale to have each kind of produce weighed and priced. This usually requires waiting in line.

The clerk at this scale will put each type of produce in a plastic bag, stick on the label with the weight and price, close and securely tie the plastic sack, and then hand it back to you. The produce itself is then paid for at the regular check out with all other items purchased. It seems like a lot of extra steps to me.

Anyway, we got what we needed and hopefully won’t have to do any “heavy shopping” for a while now. Heidi was happy we exceeded our “maximum weight limit” of groceries for walking home, so we took a taxi back.

The rain started just after we got home, so it appears another well executed outing in Cuenca.

Chau.