Our trip to the British/Australian grocers was surprisingly successful. Normally they’re these yuppified little numbers with nothing worth eating on the shelves and an overabundance of fancy teacups for sale, but this one’s in the middle of nowhere in a business park, and does quite the trade with expats. Lots of staples.
The main reason for our expedition was jelly babies, as I stole a few off the cosplayers at SDCC and remembered just how much I love them. They had two different kinds of knock-offs, which aren’t as good as the real ones, but for some reason you can’t seem to get those here. Something about carcinogenic food coloring? I guess unless I make a trip back to London I’ll just have to suffer with second rate confections. /cries.
We also got HP Sauce (it’s fair to say that almost anything is better with HP Sauce), an absolutely huge jar of Branston Pickle, Marmite (shut up, I like it), and a handful of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bars. I’m so pleased. Their prices are even quite reasonable, considering exchange rates and freight. We’ll probably be heading back reasonably often.
Gabriel was puzzled at why they’d sell things like cereal, dried peas, pasta sauce, etc. He’s never spent a long time in a different country, so he doesn’t really understand how it feels when absolutely everything tastes different. There’s kind of a strange variety of homesick that tends to be cured by the sorts of things you never appreciated back at home. I would’ve killed for an American Diet Coke when I was in Paris.
