Supermarket Experience

On Sunday we ventured out to do our first big grocery store run.  The supermarkets, as they call them over here, are located in their malls, so on top of the mega stores and super sized malls, you have to navigate through the hundreds of mall goers, to complete your grocery shopping.  Our first obstacle was trying to figure out where to park.  Their malls are ginormous, but you have to park next to the store that you are shopping at, as the carts are property of that store.  Our first attempt was a fail, but after 20 minutes of driving around we got a spot in the correct area.  The second obstacle was to get a grocery cart.  The carts are all locked together and you have to insert a coin into the slot to release the cart from the group.  Well what amount or sized coin was our question?  So we stood for awhile watched people get their carts, Andy tried to ask someone who did not speak English and finally figured it out.
The trip in the store was quite interesting.  While they have some brand names that are familiar like Nestle, Danon, Cheerios, it's all in Portuguese, so you are guessing in part what things are.  We left with a cart full of groceries, but not quite sure what we actually got for meals?  Some other interesting observations:
- Fresh fish, fresh fish, fresh fish = smells like fish (yuck!)
- Salad Dressing - few and far between.  No ranch (what am I going to do?) and the few bottles that they did have to choose from were a quarter of the size of our normal bottles in the states
- Pasta Sauce - comes in jars that are the size of small jelly jars in the states (We'll need 10 to make a pot of spaghetti)
- Mexican Aisle - does not exist.  Salsa, cheese dip - see you when we get back over the holidays
- Produce - produce is to be weighed and marked in the produce section of the store, not at the register (We found that out as we were checking out with a long line behind us and the clerk having to call in someone to go weigh all our fruits and veggies).  Still not sure where the stickers and scales were clearly located, but we will know for next time.