Grocery Shopping

Up until this point in time I never realized how important reading was to grocery shopping. I've been grocery shopping twice since I've been here and both times have been quite the adventure. What kind of cheese do you buy when you can't tell which is which, how about lunch meat, is it turkey, chicken, really bad ham? And milk. Is it whole, 2%, skim, soy? What if I was lactose-intolerant and needed soy, I couldn't read it and tell. Have you ever noticed how poorly labeled produce is. There was a row of apples, kiwis, and potatoes or some combination like that, all with dramatically different prices, but listed horizontally, while the row was vertical. Essentially, without knowing the czech words for the various produce you can't tell how much they were. Then I narrowly escaped buying shortening while trying to buy butter. To compound the fact I can't figure out what certain foods are, I have the added nuisance of having a limited kitchen. All we have is a fridge and hotplate. So, our ability to cook things are limited and when cooking instructions are in Czech, it makes figuring out what you can cook much harder. I bought some dumplings, they are the big Czech delicacy (aside from the beer which I also bought 500 mL for 50 cents) but have absolutely no idea how to cook them, much less if I even can without an oven. On top of all that, everything I buy I must be able to carry in my backpack on the tram back from the store. All in all this was an unforeseen complication to life, but weirdly enough I love it.