4.5 hours, 800uah, and 35 kilos later

Grocery shopping is an ordeal here. Not merely for the fact that without a car you can only shop for as much as you can carry by hand from the store front to your front door, but also for the sheer amount of time it takes.

Each week I normally fetch water from the kiosk twice - that's 22 liters of water and 18 minutes per trip.

I normally go to the grocery store two or even three times per week- weights vary. On a milk run I'll stalk up on about 8 liters of long life milk and try to avoid buying other heavy things like flour or meat and cheese at the same time.

If you go to the grocery store any time after 4:30pm - you can figure on standing in a very long line of people for at least 20 minutes. The standing in line is compounded by the fact that you never know really what line is shortest because the practice is to go, find a place in line behind someone - tell them you are behind them and then go run gather up some more groceries.

Today I visited Metro, the European version of Sam's Club or Costco. Metro is a once a year adventure for us as we don't have our own card and while not extremely far for us - it is a bit out of the way. The advantage of metro is that you can find some things there that are very hard to locate in other stores and some things will save you some money, but you do have to watch and calculate prices.

So I set out, hiking backpack, regular backpack and two grocery bags in tow. 3.45 hours and 800 uah griven later, I emerged with 35 kilos distributed between the bags. a 7 minute walk (amid stares) to the first bus stop (fortunately the end of the line so I could grab the out-of the way back corner. Then at my bus stop it was another 10 minute walk to the apartment.