Usmom wrote:Went grocery shopping and spent a couple hundred, is that normal? Small stuff sure adds up quick but we have food for days. I don't know if I was expecting too much but hawker center food is just not that great. I guess we need to keep exploring until we find the place that suits our taste. Pepper crab at nosign board is so overrated. Anyways off to the redline mrt to explore.
Please keep the day-1 impressions coming, they're interesting for us (they remind us how one adjusts), and you can go and reminisce about them when you feel you have your feet on the ground later on
Oof, couple of hundred? What did you buy? Stuff like some decent wine, sliced meats or fish, vine-ripened tomatoes, salad stuff. It racks up, especially imported stuff. Especially when alcohol is involved.
I think you learn to be judicious. You source more basics from local groceries (NTUC etc), and use the expat shops for ... er, key feature ingredients. Fresh anchovies, pate, air-flown beef, and so on...
You can take it to three steps, expat shops for the niche imported stuff, NTUC for basics esp canned or dry goods, then wet-markets for fruit and veg and so on. It might take time to feel your way down the curve. I still don't do wet markets if I'm on my own, the cultural-hassle simply isn't worth it for me...
I remember the first I moved here, when I was on expenses for a month. The week-1 grocery costs were nuts, but I realised it was because I was trying to live, eat, and drink precisely what I would at home. My costs dropped off very rapidly thereafter.
Hawker centre food, there are great stalls, and then ones you vow never to return to. You just have to figure which are which. As stalls turn over over time, this is an ongoing process. I've just embargoed two places, a new Thai stall (in a food-court) who are ridiculously mean on the amount of chicken in their green chicken curry, and a Indian chicken murtabak place (hawker stall) that load their food with so much MSG it gave me my first experience of MSG-overdose... seriously not funny!
So you'll find places that you like, and places that FAIL and you immediately don't. If you do a little research via resources like
http://www.hungrygowhere.com/search-res ... xact_match you should avoid most fails. Observe the reviews for that place...
This leads on to the next challenge, sifting quality food, from the wannabe but disappointing. There are plenty of poor but expensive places here, so much so I started off a topic a while ago roughly on the theme of 'Expensive, yes, but well worth it!' as such places are like rare gems that will come to cherish, and come to depend upon for things like birthday or anniversary dinners.
Have fun, and good luck!