Anatomy of a Grocery Receipt

For the purposes of this post, one CHF (Swiss Franc) is currently worth about 86 US cents.

Most Americans (especially families) go grocery shopping once every week or two for the bulk of their food with just a couple small trips for odds and ends peppered in between "big" grocery days. When I was growing up, grocery day was a BIG DAY and the whole family went - we had to because shopping in the military grocery was such a phenomenal pain that mom and dad would fill two grocery carts to keep the number of these trips to a minimum. If mom and dad both went (one cart per parent) that means my little sister and I also went. This brings us to the story of the canned mushrooms and, on a related note, the possible reason I didn't like mushrooms until about a year ago. That story, however, may have to wait for another post because this post is about grocery shopping in Switzerland.

People here typically go to the grocery shop every day or every other day, excluding Sunday, when everything is closed. Most people use only small shopping baskets - if you're shopping for a crowd and need a cart, it's going to cost you a 2 CHF deposit (which is return when the cart is.)

The first item (1) on my receipt ties in to one of the biggest differences between grocery shopping here versus the US - my 30 cent grocery bag. The grocery here does have very very small bags you can use for free, but they're like the bags you use to bag your produce in the US - you might as well carry your groceries in a piece of tissue paper. I always bring my own cloth bag with me, however on this trip I needed an extra bag as I ended up purchasing just a little more than I had planned.

The reason for the extra bag is... there was a great sale on MEAT! (See items 2 and 3) I acquired a pound of ground beef for 7.95 AND 6 chicken breasts (Just under 2 pounds) for 9.85. The chicken breasts I buy are normally about 7 CHF for two, so you can see this is a great deal. Everything is divided and stowed in my freezer now - yipee! The item you might notice hiding between two and three is the 106 grams (or 3.7 ounces) of sliced ham I bought for 4.20. Ouch.

Moving right along, item 4 brings us to the spoiled rotten kitties. 7.95 for a bag of litter and 2.20 for a four-pack of kitty wet food, turkey-flavored. The kitties split one pack of wet food a day for dinner and have dry food to snack on, so the four pack lasts four days, unless they get whiny-cute and I feed them an extra packet.

Item 5 takes us to produce - a box of cherry tomatoes and my other find of the day - a kilo (2.2 pounds) of clementines for just 2.95! Item number 6 is a tasty loaf of fresh bread - it was still warm when I picked it up.

Thanks to today's shopping, we're good on meat for a couple weeks. Hurrah! Have any grocery-adventures of your own to share?

Anatomy of a Night Out

Today we present another lesson in Swiss Life - the Irish Pub.

Saturday night our friends called around 9:30 and asked if we wanted to join them at the Irish Pub near our house for a drink. Taking a quick inventory of our wallets, we decided we had just enough for one round of drinks and a little bit of conversation.
You're probably glancing at the receipt to the right and realizing we may have misunderestimated our friends' beverage-consumption prowess. You would be correct.

Back to the topic at hand - how a night at a bar is different in Switzerland than a night at a bar in the US. We'll start with the prices. Corona - almost eight dollars each. Vodka and Coke (that's me!) just under nine dollars. Each. Kilkenny and Kronenbourg (two more beers) from 6.50 to 8.00 ... depending on what time they were ordered. Apparently drinks either get more or less expensive depending on the time of night - but I'm not sure which.

Annnnnd then there are the shots. Before our parents book flights to stage an intervention, I would like to add this was a tab for seven people,not just Mr K and I. The shots were tequila... and the first time they came out accompanied by a plate of lemon slices. Mr K and I LOL'd. Many people here are from the citrus is citrus school of thought and don't understand the importance of LIME in key situations. And speaking of limes, I think the 3 DASH 3 entry at the bottom of the bar is the charge for the limes/lemons to go with the shots. But maybe not. For all I know that was our foreigner surcharge or a tax on glassware or the cost of the table for three hours - I'm really just not sure.

What I do know is I had to provide my own aspirin the next day and this country really needs a Waffle House.

PS If you're thinking about what I said earlier about the state of our wallets and one round... well we have some really good friends. We love you, M and D and S!