Grocery Shopping in Town

Our first week here we decided to adventure into Khobar and go to the grocery store. The camp has a bus that goes to downtown Khobar with a stop at Tamimi (Safeway) at the end. I got a ride from a friend to the dining hall where I met Mike. We ate dinner then went to catch the shoppers bus into town.

We liked the store better than the commisary on camp. It was a bit cheaper and had better meat choices. We finished our shopping and went to catch the bus back to camp.

Since we didn't have a car we had to carry all our purchases in our hands. I had taken a large canvas beach bag to help carry things. We put about half of the groceries into this bag and I carried it while Mike carried about 3 or 4 other bags. They use a much thicker plastic here so all the bags are very sturdy.

When we got back to camp we realized that neither one of us had brought the numbers for the taxi service on camp. So Mike decided that we would just walk home. Nothing on camp is really very far so under good conditions this could be a very pleasant walk.

Of course this night was not pleasant conditions. First it was still hot, I wasn't wearing shoes for a long walk, we were not completely sure of the way home, and to make matters even more interesting I had to go to the bathroom really really really bad the whole way.

We started out fine but the farther we walked the heavier my bag seemed to get. I didn't understand why since we had divided the bags up evenly at the store.

Just before we got home, I looked closer at the bags Mike was carrying. His bags had, crackers, cereal, bread, a couple of cans of good, some pasta, and chocolate chips, etc.

My bag had all the meat, all the canned goods. So it ended up with me carrying most of the heavy good and Mike with most of the lighter ones. What an experience.

Needless to say we learned a lot that evening. After we got home, Mike got out the map and realized that we had missed a turn and taken the extra long route to get home. At least we had groceries for a while.