Went to the mall today. It’s not everyday you are in a modern western style shopping mall, and see women carrying their shopping bags on their heads.

We stopped by the theater and was impressed with the prices. First run movies from the USA were the majority of films, a few British and some home-grown African fliks made up the rest. Price for an adult, unrestricted ticket was $3. Large popcorn, large Cola and candy came to $5. They even have a special deal, 4 adult tickets, 4 lg popcorn and 4 lg drinks for $21.

Gasoline is about the same as Poland (our last post), about $5 a gallon.
Internet is expensive too. It’s going to run about $150 – $200 a month for DSL. And that’s with a 10 gig download cap per month! Yikes!!!

The grocery stores here continue to impress me. In Poland, 90% of the store’s products catered to an Eastern European palette. Here, 90% were a wide mix from all over the world, with lots of Oriental, Indian, Arabic, and French influences. Since I love to cook – this is a very good thing! They even have the equivalent of a Whole Foods – something I never saw in Poland. Regular groceries were about 1/2 to 2/3 the cost compared to American stores, while the exotic and organic foods were about the same.

They do have UHT (Ultra High Temperature) milk, which is very cheap and has a 6 month shelf-life. I got used to this in Europe, and have no problems with it. Many Americans shy away from it – often just because of the foreign aspect of buying room temperature milk with such a long life span. But once you open the box it has to be refrigerated as “fresh” milk does, and the benefit of having smaller 1 liter boxes, stored in the cupboard makes for a whole less waste – both in the home and in the stores. The amount of “fresh” milk thrown away in the USA is staggering.

Poland did have more cheese varieties, and of course far more sausage choices. But also fruit and vegetable choices were impressive. Having a fresh vegetable stand just down the street is wonderful!

Oh yeh – we stopped by a restaurant in the mall and they had several sandwiches that included bananas as a main ingredient. Like bacon, cheese and banana, or ham, tomato and banana. I’ll have to try that sometime.