They Nailed the Dishwasher but Epic Fail on the Fridge

We've been here for 14 days and guess how many times I've been grocery shopping? No…no…and no….the correct answer is 14 times! Now I'm like you and love grocery shopping (except for the part where you make a list, go to the store, fill your cart, pay for it, load it into your car and then put it away). We tend to think the Europeans love to shop for supper at the market on the way home from the metro: you might picture some French guy sniffing a baguette and pinching some tomatoes to see what he might enjoy with a splash of Bordeaux tonight. But the truth is that we are not talking about a cultural difference, the difference is caused by an APPLIANCE!

The refrigerators here were designed by little old ladies who might like a tiny spot of jam to go with their homemade scones. Our fridge back in Edm has its own address and property tax bill. We once hung a hindquarter of beef to age in it and still had room for the 5-gallon pail of mayo from Costco! When we shopped for milk, we bought 4 - 4 liter jugs for a week of consumption. They don't sell 4 litre jugs here! They don't even sell 2 litre jugs! We need to buy - (all my engineering friends have already cranked this out on their HP calculators) - 16 separate litres of milk if we wanted to stock up. Of course we don't - we just go shopping every day.

Don't even think about leaving the house without your bag full of bags! There is no such thing as a cheap plastic shopping bag. If you forget your bags you must pay for the good kind  made from strong plastic and then you can add these to your bag full of bags. You look like a real amateur when half your grocery bill is for the bags to carry it home.

Rick proudly displays his "bag of bags" including his favorite Netto bag

The grocery stores are rather small but at least half the floor space is filled with beer and wine. This is a good thing. Less food choice, more booze choice. In a country where everything is quite expensive, the beer is cheap! 40 DKK = $8 CAD = 6 cans of tasty beer. It's even cheaper if you buy a plastic returnable crate with 30 bottles (which, of course, I do).

So if half your fridge is full of cheap beer and your fridge is half the size of a Coleman cooler, this leaves room for about 2 litres of milk; exactly what we consume in a day. Wait…gotta zip off to Netto….I think I just heard the kids making chocolate milk!