Shopping in Bulawayo

Bulawayo is an expensive place to live. People don't earn a lot, but everything costs a lot, especially imported food, which is most of it. Also it is hard to find things that you would very easily get hold of in for example South Africa.

Today Maria and I went grocery shopping, as we alwasy do on Saturdays. We have gone around town now the last two times to see which shops are the cheapest ones and you would be surprised by the difference in price on normal things like coffe, cooking oil and butter. In one shop butter cost nearly eight dollars and at another it cost five and a half. For the exact same butter! So to maximise your wallet you have to run around town to find the cheapest of everything. But we have now found that we can manage going to just three shops, buying different things at each place.

Because here you know there are still the specialized shops like the many butcherys, dairy shop, vegetable shop, lots of bakeries, hardware shop, chocolate shop and so on. Of course we have the bigger super markets that have basically everything, but it isn't at all the same as in Sweden, where there hardly are any specialized shops left. I love it like this, except when you're trying to find one special thing and you have absolutely no idea where to start looking. Thank goodness I know people here.

The last few days have been nice, I've jammed with Vuzi and Sam, had dinner and late chat at Sam's and slept eleven hours. Yesterday Jeanette, Michelle and I went to a dancing performance with lots of lovely kids and teenagers who did things with their bodies that I will never in my life even come close to doing. One of the dancing studios here is an acrobatic dancing studio so you can just imagine... and then of course there was ballet. The whole last half was only classical ballet, which has beautiful costumes, but it did get a bit boring after a while. Everybody in the audience was freezing of course. We are probably having our last cold spell before summer now and this one has been awful, really really cold nights. Six degrees in the morning, and the house has no insulation at all...

Anyway, now skype time! See you there!