City Super

There are very few days like this in Hong Kong, so when the sun comes out and the clouds dance happily over the harbor, you take note - and pictures! It's "picture perfect" here today, a rare and wonderful phenomenon for this magnificent international hub, and I intend to use every last ray of sun to help me get back on my feet after the 22 hours I spent traveling to get here.

Today is a recuperation day. Fortunately, Chris has set up an office in the apartment and can get some work done while I use whatever small amount of energy I have to accomplish the basic essentials of life: grocery shopping for the next two weeks and a manicure. Life's two essentials, food and nice nails, and fortunately, here in Hong Kong, we can easily find both!

Hong Kong is a city that boasts some of the finest international food, restaurants and cuisine in the world, and we're fortunate to have one of the best supermarkets in town right downstairs from our apartment building. Although it can't compare in size to the mega-grocery stores of the U.S., and it may not have every Western food item we use, the wide variety of international goods on sale at City Super makes for a shopping experience like no other - when Chris and I first arrived in Hong Kong after two years of living on the food available to us in Fuzhou, we used to love going down to City Super and simply wandering through the aisles, reveling in all the amazing things for sale, all right there at our fingertips!

Conversely, grocery shopping in Mainland China is an aerobic event that very often requires a full day of schlepping from one grocery store to the next, scouring the wet markets, searching the Walmarts and Sam's Clubs trying to find even the most basic necessities for a Western diet and the procurements of daily life. The biggest challenge, of course, is finding fresh food that's been prepared in a healthy way and stored in a sanitary environment for maximum freshness and basic food safety. Fresh food in China is very often prepared without any type of preservatives, so it goes bad quickly, and most items will have a "made on" date rather than an expiration date as seen on American grocery items. Food quality remains a challenge for most places in China, and after many years living here, we've become highly sensitive to what we eat and how it's prepared.

Besides the concern over freshness and food handling, actually finding typical Western foods in China is also a challenge. Sure, you can find every type of rice, noodle and tea you've ever imagined, but just try to find a jar of Skippy Peanut Butter or a bag of Ruffles! And when you do find that elusive jar of Hellman's Mayo, Welch's Grape Jelly or Ragu Tomato Sauce, you don't buy just one, you buy three, because there's no telling when you'll ever see it again! We often joke, my Western friends and I, about how we've become "food hoarders" of the worst kind - you've never seen so much excitement over finding a bottle of Ranch Dressing, Heinz Ketchup or Vlasic Pickles! Coming from the Land of Plenty, I never imagined I would appreciate the simplest items on the average grocery store shelf - China has insured I will never take my Truvia Sweetener, Snapple Ice Tea or Heritage Oat Flakes for granted ever again!

Over Easter holiday I took our 13-year old daughter and one of her friends to a supermarket in Virginia, and, being bored, the girls started doing cartwheels down one of the aisles. Reluctantly halting their fun before an entire shelf of canned fruit ended up on the floor, my first thought was how different this mega-store was from anything you would ever find in China. There's no room for cartwheels in a typical Chinese grocery store, that's for sure, and you wouldn't even consider putting your hands on the floor in a Chinese wet market. The sheer size, abundance and "American-ness" of our local supermarket came suddenly into glaring focus, and I actually got out my camera and took some pictures to show my friends back here in China.

One of the many things I've learned from our time living abroad is that in America we take for granted the countless number of brightly lit aisles in the local supermarket, the endless selection of items for daily consumption on the shelves of Walmart, and the towering pillars of consumer goods reaching to the ceilings of Costco or Sam's Club. True, at times I do long to put the familiar American items into my grocery cart, but for today I'm just very grateful to have here, right at my fingertips in Hong Kong, the freshest food and finest selection of international items on the sparkling shelves of City Super!