13) Shopping

Once we were living on our own we began to find out what life in Australia is really like. I found the shops a bit of a nightmare. First of all there are just so many of them, there seems to be a big shopping centre around every corner and in each centre there were far too many shops. Mostly they have two supermarkets each. Woolworth’s or Coles being the most common ones. Once one has made up ones mind which to use, which is hard, as they all seemed much the same to me, one goes in and is immediately faced with the fruit and veg counters. They are mind boggling, ten types of lettuce, five or six kinds of cabbage, carrots as big as my arm, apples that literally shine, cherries, strawberries, plums, nectarines, peaches, oranges, mangoes, melons, paw-paw, grapes, pineapples, pears, litchis, bananas (all about 12 inches long), there are about four kinds of tomatoes, potatoes that are unwashed some that have been washed and others that have been scrubbed by the look of them. There are many fruit and vegetables that I have never seen or even heard about before. Everything looked so good I wanted to just spend all our money there and become a vegetarian but I don’t think Jonny would appreciate that and so I pressed on. There are so many kinds of everything that it is hard to decide what you want, milk of all kinds, loads of cold meats, fresh fish and prawns and all sorts of seafood. The meat is good and pretty cheap if one does not convert dollars to rand, but more about that later. The only thing I was not been impressed with was the bread, the supermarkets only seem to sell cotton wool bread and one has to go to the bakery shops to get half way decent bread.
I was also very puzzled by the way the supermarket shelves are laid out. It just didn’t seem logical to me. I can’t for the life of me work out why baked beans are not amongst the tinned vegetables but they are always next to the tinned spaghetti. I know they both come in tomato sauce but that is the only common factor as far as I can tell. One would expect to find flour near the baking products but it is often on another shelf far away. Peanut butter is not always with the spreads and things like that, it does make it difficult if you don’t know the place, but I am getting the hang of it now I just hope they don’t go and move everything now that I have learnt where things are.

They don’t have packers in the supermarkets as we had in South Africa, the check out girls have to pack everything but they do have the plastic packets held open on stands and they just scan everything and pop it straight into a bag and they are pretty good, one does not get ones detergent in with ones butter ever. They also weigh the fruit and veg at the till. I spent ages on my first trip to the supermarket looking for someone in the green grocery department to weigh, bag and mark my veggies, they way it was done in South Africa.

It was a bit difficult to work out if things were cheap or expensive. When we first got here we converted everything to Rand and multiplied it all by five (the exchange rate) so everything seemed quite dear. Bread is $2.60 multiply that by five and your paying R13 for a loaf of bread. Petrol was $1.10 a litre x 5 is R5.50; our rent was $240 a week (about R4800 a month). Lamb $4.50 a kilo x 5 still cheap at R22. Tomatoes $4.50 a kilo, bananas $2.90 a kilo, potatoes $4.80 a five kilo bag. Butter $2.50 a kilo and margarine about $2.80 a kilo so guess what we are eating. We saw semi skilled jobs advertised in the paper paying $18 an hour and worked out that as they worked a 40 hour week it added up to $684 a week or almost $3000 a month. If one converts that to Rand by multiplying by five as the exchange rate was when we first came here one gets R3420 a week or about R15000 a month and we were sure that semi skilled workers in South Africa were not getting anywhere near that amount. We realised that we would have to give up using the exchange rate as a way to decide if something was expensive or not and found that for the most part we could just forget about the exchange rate and think of a dollar and a rand as being equal. This is not so easy when each of the Australian dollars that one is spending have been paid for with five South African Rand. It is only when one is earning money in this country and one can forget about the Rand. I remember that at the time Jonny and I decided that except for housing, Australian people did not have to work as many hours as their South African counterparts to buy the things that they need and looking back to what we paid for things six years ago when we first arrived I can see that the inflation here is nowhere near as bad as it was in South Africa. There was a huge spike in the petrol price a while ago but that has dropped again and most of the prices quoted above are fairly close to what we pay now.