Sticker shock

This post is for our food and price obsessed readers. Given the dismal exchange rate we got at the grocery store, 500 g of butter was $12 (imported from South Africa), while the 750 ml Italian olive oil bottle we bought was $11. The fresh produce is reasonably priced if it’s local, but the package of garlic cloves I bought (equivalent to 2 bulbs at most) cost $3. While in South Africa, we should have bought 8 lbs of pasta rather than the 10 bags of snacks, as well as butter, rice, and flour. I felt silly buying 3 huge loaves of bread the morning we left Capetown but am now so glad I did since we’ve already blown through 1 loaf. Kyusik was up all night preparing for a board meeting today. At home, I was getting up at 5:30 or 6 am for early morning calls with Zim but can now do them at a more humane time of 4 pm. 

Viv has been a fabulous host to us, even exchanging $200 for us at a much better black market rate of 700 Zim dollars and giving it to us as an Ecocash card (compared to the 420 we got at the grocery store and 315 that you would get at the bank.) She remarked about how clean and crisp the bills were that we gave her and advised us that we should refuse to accept any change in USD that looks too “tatty.” The grocery store gave us a 16 cent credit bc people only have US bills. We have made a couple bookings for this weekend and the weekend after next. Many places rarely take foreign credit cards, as they prefer USD in cash. We are paying for one visit to a wildlife conservation center via PayPal and will have to send a wire to a UK bank account for an overnight stay on Sunday. We are slightly anxious about having enough cash on us to last us until I depart in early August. You cannot easily withdraw USD from an ATM and Zim dollars are also in short supply. 

I’m posting a photo of one of the interesting snacks we bought in South Africa. We also bought fruit chutney flavored Pringles, slightly sweet but savory, as I had bought them for the boys at the Joberg airport when I flew through in April. During our Capetown trip, we polished off a bag of onion and French baguette Lays that tasted more like onion than baguette.