Going Grocery Shopping

Off to the grocery store...

On the boat to Bahia de Caraquez

Market in San Vicnete

Here in Canoa, on the weekend and evenings we do our own cooking. From Mon to Fri our breakfast and lunch is provided for us at the hotel for a fee. As our food supplies were getting low we ventured out to Bahia de Caraquez which is the closet city to Canoa which is where we are staying. As Mike had previously mentioned, it takes way longer to accomplish anything here, like getting groceries! Here's the process for us to get to the Tia (equivalent of a Walmart Superstore but comparable square footage to 2 gas stations) and the market in Bahia de Caraquez. Our hotel is located off of the highway about 2 km outside Canoa. Bahia is much further south, and on the other side of a big bay. To get there, first we wait for a bus to come and flag them down outside of our hotel. We take this bus to San Vicente, then walk to the port.  Here we wait for enough people to come to the port to load the boat which takes us across the river, where we then walk to the market (about 45-60 min one way from hotel to the market/Tia). Then repeat on the way back.

Our groceries today include bags of milk, bag
of eggs, huge carrots and a small papaya

Here's a few odd things I have noticed about their Tia, market and food:
1) Cheapest milk comes in a bag, otherwise you buy it in a tetra pack. Milk and eggs are never refrigerated when you buy them.
2) Peanut butter is hard to find, we learned today that we need to go to the market in Bahia and they will grind the nuts for us into peanut butter. I guess the nut man is just next door to the sausage man in the market. The other options at small stores or hole in the wall places in Canoa is that they have often have a huge container of peanut butter under the till and when asked if they have the peanut butter they bring this out and scoop the portion you would buy into a little grocery bag!! I am reluctant to buy a baggie of peanut butter as  I'm not sure the main container has ever been sealed securely and that flies aren't laying their eggs in there.
3) They have enormous papayas! I finally found a pequena (small) one today about the size of a football. No joke, yesterday in the market these suckers were about 2' tall and the diameter of a 4L jug of milk
4) They really have no frozen processed foods in the Tia. If you want pizza then you either make it yourself or go to a restaurant, there is no Delissio pizza here. The packaged food here is also very expensive for things like cereal, brown bread, jar of jam or peanut butter.
5) They eat salty cheese and I have not found cheddar cheese here. It's more like a mozerella cheese consistency and color just salty. In the market a big slab of this just sits out unrefrigerated and not covered on a counter next to the unrefrigerated meat
6) Pasta sauce, what is that? We have had a curry sort of sauce on our pasta and when we went out for supper Mike's meal didn't even come with sauce! How odd

Today while in Bahia de Caraquez we hiked up to a giant cross on the hill which overlooks the city. We just threw all our groceries in our backpack, including our bag of eggs and bags of milk, and hauled them on up with us. The path we went up was in what I would guess is a poor neighborhood but seems to be on par for many neighborhoods I have seen so far in Ecuador. We try to find little free things like this to do when we can.