When I’m travelling overseas, a trip to the supermarket is both a must and a highlight. Call me weird, but I find a trip to a supermarket that’s foreign fascinating. But visiting the supermarket in the UK after so many years of living overseas is a combination of comfortingly familiar and strangely fascinating. I am always surprised by the plethora of choice and always feel warm and fuzzy with nostalgia.
My mum lives around the corner from a super-sized supermarket and I never need an excuse to pop in and wander the aisles. In fact, I consider a trip to the supermarket part of my fitness regime because it’s so big and takes so many steps to navigate, I write it off as a calorie burning exercise!
If you want to know what sets the UK supermarkets apart, come with me on an armchair tour, and I’ll show you all my supermarket highlights.
Flowers
Supermarket flowers are the pick of the bunch. I love me some blooms and I love that the blooms from the British supermarkets are so affordable. Flowers are so reasonably priced that every week can be a good flower week with full on bouquets ranging from 6 to 10+ pounds. They’re just so beautiful, so affordable and so long lasting.
Fresh Produce
The range of fresh fruit and veg is not just vast, it’s affordable. I am in awe of the range of produce that can be purchased all year round, and you don’t have to break the bank to buy it. I can spend hours walking around gazing at the plethora of produce on offer and converting all the pounds to dollars. It’s so cheap, it makes me cheerful.
The Bakery
I love the bakery section at the supermarket and can never resist the smell of freshly baked bread. Said bread looks as white and fluffy as I remember, and once you’ve chosen your loaf, you can slice your own, unless you’re a scaredy cat like me and then you can ask the supermarket baker to do it for you instead.
Confectionery
I have to say when it comes to sweets and chocolates, British is best. Walking up and down the aisle is like walking up and down Memory Lane, fantasising over the sweets of my childhood, with all the candy I know and love. I rarely leave the supermarket without some kind of candy in my bag and I spend most of my time in the UK planning what candy I’m going to bring back to Oz and how much case space I have to fit it in. FYI, Fruit Pastilles are my favourite and I never leave “home” without them.
Crisps (as in Chips)
British crisps are the business. No one makes a cheese and onion chip as good as the Brits and the other flavour possibilities are endless. I love salivating over my old favourites, like Monster Munch, Wotsits and Hula Hoops. But let’s not forget the super duper new fangled flavours, like Crispy Bacon and Maple Syrup, for example. I need more of these in my life.
Clothes
While I’m one of the rare breed that actually enjoys grocery shopping, for many it doesn’t count as retail therapy. To buffer the boredom, the supermarket offers a vast range of on trend, affordable fashion for the whole family, with a range that covers everything from underwear to outerwear and every kind of clothing in between. So you can pop in for tonight’s dinner and/or tonight’s outfit. This is fashion that’s easy on the eye and easy on the wallet too. Win, win.
Homewares
This is pretty much the only aisle of the supermarket where I can look but not touch, or at least look, but not buy, but only because the things are either too fragile and/or too bulky for my globetrotting suitcase. That doesn’t stop me from roaming the homewares aisles coveting all the things.
I hope you enjoyed the virtual trip to the supermarket as much as I enjoyed the real life version. Tell me, do you love a tourist trip (or any trip) to the supermarket too? Do you have a favourite aisle? If you were living overseas, what’s the one treat from home you could not live without?
Linking up with Kylie for IBOT and Van, Marcella, Lauren and Isabel for Wanderful Wednesday.
