Since sliced bread...

I was at the grocery store today and it got me thinking about some of the things about food that we've gotten so used to here, that are not like the US.

When I first moved I found grocery shopping so stressful.  Not only were there different things available, but I couldn't even read the labels on the food to figure out what to get.  Now I've been around longer and I know my way around the stores in my town, plus my German is a lot better so I can read most things on the food labels or ask for help when I can't find something.

One of the more notable differences that I was noticing today is the lack of sliced bread. Technically you can buy sliced bread, but there are very few options, it comes in very small packages (with 6 or so pieces) and it just isn't commonly bought.  They have lots of choices of fresh loaves of bread and at some stores they have a slicer that you can use.

Apparently the person who used it before us wasn't happy that the slicer shredded their bread a bit.  We've never had this happen to us before, but today was the first time we had warm bread at this particular store (which is somewhat odd now that I write it, since we shop there a lot).  They must have sliced their loaf when it was even warmer and the slicer mangled the bread-so they left it on top of the machine.  It was pretty funny, when we put the bread in the bag it was so warm that it fogged the bag up and the cashier had trouble figuring out which type of bread it was to ring it up.

One of my favorite differences is that passion fruit (marcuja) is available year round.  It is my absolute favorite fruit and it is so nice to have it available all the time (in the US I could only find it about 4 months out of the year).

Something that I really appreciate about food labeling is that they give you percentages in the ingredients.  I haven't quite figured out the exact requirements for this because they don't give the percentage of every ingredient, but it is very helpful.

Here is a package of fruit bars that I like 33% raisins, 24%Apple 13% Whole grain wheat and so on.

We've had a pretty good experience with food here.  We definitely have a different diet than we did at home--part of that is that my husband, older son, and daughter are now vegetarian so we eat all vegetarian at home--but big part of it is cultural differences.  We've been mostly very happy with the food although there are things I miss sometimes.  Good Mexican food for one, we do make some that we are fairly happy with at home, but it isn't the same.  One of our bigger qualms is just can't seem to get tortilla's or tortilla chips right.  They also don't have my favorite snack here which is wasabi almonds-I really miss those sometimes.

I'm sure there are other differences that are pretty stark that I just can't think of now because I've become so accustomed to our way of life here.