February 3, 2011- Grocery Shopping!

     One of the things us island folk look forward to when visiting the states is shopping at the grocery store.  Believe it or not, going to the stores here is truly overwhelming after just 6 months on the atoll since our last stateside adventure.  We stopped just to get a box of linguini to go with the shrimp dish my boyfriend was making the family for dinner tonight, so as we headed into the store, my sweetheart says, "Okay, now you are going to have to keep me focused when we go into the store."  "Okay," I said very seriously because I knew exactly what he meant.  We walk in and are immediately greeted with a bright array of perfectly ripe and beautiful fruit and vegetable stands, and I head straight for them. "Oooooh, let's get one of these veggie trays for appetizers tonight," I delighted in saying while thinking about how delicious that would taste later.  "Okay," my boyfriend says, "That's a good idea."  So, we continue to meander around the store, without a cart because we only needed to get linguini, and of course, now, the vegetable tray.  As we cruised around, we decided there were a couple of other things we could use for dinner and for ourselves that we didn't bring with us (like chapstick as the dry climate has wrecked havoc on our lips and skin-In fact, my boyfriend's hands were drying out before we even hit the ground stateside, and my lips are terribly cracked already. All this after only 2 days in a different atmosphere-), and finally, we relented and went back to get a cart, or "buggy" as I call it.  Apparently, that's a Southern term for a grocery cart.  Anyway, as we were looking for yogurt to go in the fruit dessert we decided to add to the menu, a store employee asked us if we needed anything, and my darling replies, "No, we are just marveling at all the variety."  That must have sounded strange to her because she lives with that variety in the grocery store every day. Well, we don't have that on the island, so it's hard to pick even one item without wanting to check out each brand and label first.  We are lucky to get a single brand of most necessary items in the one 4 isle grocery store called "Surfway" on the island where I live. My boyfriend's island has only a convenience store with very limited produce, dairy, etc...brought up weekly, if they are lucky, from the grocery store "downtown" as they call the island of Kwajalein. So, a standard size grocery store like Safeway in small town Oregon is huge to us and provides more than we could ever want or ask for.  That's one of the upsides of living on an isolated atoll. You learn to live without things you thought you had to have before, and you learn to really appreciate the little things like ripe strawberries without fuzz on them or fresh vegetables and a variety of them. The perspective you gain from not having everything right at your fingertips all the time is priceless and makes life so much more enjoyable than you ever knew it could be, especially when you are able to return to the life and family you once took for granted. Needless to say, the original plan to stay "focused" on the task at hand at the store, which was to get a box of linguini, failed miserably, but we had such a good time shopping, and we left with a pile of fresh ingredients to enjoy creating and sharing a home cooked meal with family to boot.  Who knew grocery shopping could be so exciting!