Grocery Shopping

Since a lot of Londoners, including me, don't have cars and rely on public transportation, the challenge of grocery shopping popped in my head before I left Atlanta. How do you carry groceries home? Of course, you can get groceries on the way home, and just carry them in your hand. But when you have to buy milk, mineral water, dog food, there's no way I can carry them home by myself. Forget Costco! One of the girls, Laura, that I met on Saturday, told me about Ocado, online grocery shopping. In fact, Ocado only has online grocery service. Other stores also offer the same thing, Waitrose is one of them. How convenient! Ocado's prices are pretty competitive and they offer coupons, and you can collect points. I'm in.... So this morning, my last day off, before I start working tomorrow, I went to the website and started grocery shopping online. Some items are easy like produce. An onion is an onion. Bananas are all the same. No brainer. But when it comes to bread, jam, yogurt and so on, I'm a little stuck, don't know what to choose, not familiar with the brands, can't read the label easily, at the end I was impatient and just picked based on size and price. 

I, then, chose my delivery time, which is tomorrow night between 7 and 8PM, Entered my address and credit card information. £55 pounds later, I'm done. The delivery charge is 99 pence. Actually the grocery price here is the same as in US, just change the dollar to pound sign. 

Since I had more free time this afternoon, I walked to Waitrose on Marylebone High Street, which turned out to be super close to my new flat. Marylebone High Street is full of expensive clothing stores, nice cafés, specialty food stores, and other things that look expensive. So posh! Ok I won't say that word agin, starting to get annoying. The Waitrose that I went to is small, Anne Sofie told me that yesterday but it's good enough to pick up something quick. It looks like Wholefoods, nice interior. They have butchers, good selection of wine, ready made food, fresh produce and toiletries. 

Marylebone High Street

My new flat, Building D, Flat 4. The bottom level is called ground. The second level is called first level. I'm on the first level on the right. You can see the two windows. I timed myself walking back from the store to Baker Street station, it's 10 minutes, not a bad walk.