What's in That Bag? The Countdown Edition

You may have noticed me or Tom carrying around one of these bags in the photos I have been posting recently. It's almost impossible to carry easily when we've got all of our other bags on us as well, but it's always there, making me want to throw it into the nearest river. 

You probably haven't been wondering what it is, or what's inside it, but I'm going to go ahead and write this post as if you have. This is probably another post only me or my Mum will ever read but HEY HO. That's who this blog is for anyway! (I realise I'm getting weirdly defensive about a post about a bag). 

So anyway, the bag. 

You may (or may not, if you're not my Mum) have read about our favourite supermarket in one of my posts last year*. It's considered a mid-price supermarket here. We've figured out that the three main supermarkets fall into these three categories:

• Cheap = Pak'nSave. You pay for your carrier bags, they put your shopping into a trolley for you and you pack it up in bags or boxes after you've paid and moved away. (UK equivalent is probably Lidl, Aldi, or maybe Sainsbury's and Morrisons).
• Mid-range = Countdown. There's much more variety here than in Pak'nSave but on average you're probably spending 30c to $1 more per item. The staff pack your bags for you and you don't pay for them. (UK equivalent is Tesco or Asda)
• Expensive = New World. New World has the best layout and most orderly shelves (I didn't know I cared about that until I saw how beautifully it was all arranged). I wouldn't actually know if they pack your bags for you because we've never done a big enough shop in there. You can get certain items (like my milk) a lot cheaper in New World but you're definitely paying $1 - $3 more per item. (UK equivalent is Waitrose and M&S). 

Even though it's not quite the cheapest, our loyalties lie with Countdown. It was the first supermarket we found in New Zealand - a tiny little Countdown Express kind of shop tucked away on a side street in Auckland. That first experience cemented our preference for it and as long as the area we are in has a Countdown, we will be shopping there.

*I question why this blog has the tiny readership it does when this is the kind of quality content I am publishing.

WE HAVE WAY TOO MANY CARRIER BAGS AND NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH THEM ALL.

Okay cool, but what about the bag? you'd be thinking, if I hadn't already bored you enough to leave.

WELL for the first 6 weeks of our trip, we were keeping our food in the plastic bags we used to carry them back to the hostel in. We would stick our food labels on the bags and tuck them away in the fridge or the cubby holes. 

This generally worked fine but became a problem when we moved from place to place and needed a way to carry anything we were taking with us. Particularly things like butter, that don't do so well in a carrier bag on a hot bus. 

That's when Countdown decided to put their cool bags on offer. Tom and I thought it was such a good idea, we bought one each. They have been life savers. We use one for our fridge food, and one for our cupboard food. When we're travelling from one place to the next, we put one bag inside the other, fill it with food, and away we go! 

So that's the first thing in our bag, other than way too many plastic carrier bags: the other Countdown bag! 

When we shop, we buy the cheapest version of the product we can find. While we don't take milk with us from place to place, we keep our spread until the pot is empty. It's annoyingly slightly more expensive to buy the spread than the cheapest butter but it's a lot easier to have something I can eat! 

I'm also SO glad they sell a milk I can drink here. It's a lot more expensive than Tom's (I pay $3.12-$3.39 (£1.40) for one litre) but I don't really have a choice! 

The two of us eat so much bread it's actually slightly ridiculous. For our journey from Greymouth to Christchurch, we used an entire loaf for our sandwiches for the day. We're lucky it's $1 (45p) per loaf otherwise we'd be screwed! 

These are the staple foods we always carry around with us. We have:

• A 750g of Quick Oats that costs us $2 (90p) per bag and lasts Tom a couple of weeks of breakfasts. We also buy this to make batches of flapjacks.
• A bag of sultanas. I got into this habit sometime around our 3rd week here. I usually carry the sultanas in my bag with me for long walks. They're handy snacks to stop Tom feeling faint if he gets hungry! We've also started putting them in our porridge because we were starting to feel a little bit like Oliver Twist. 
• Potatoes. We probably eat potatoes as much as we eat bread. It's such an easy staple food, we can make mash, boiled, roasted, jacket. Easy! (I refuse to travel with these though, as they're so heavy, so we only buy enough for the days we are in a certain place for).
• Baked beans. These go with jacket potatoes usually, but we do occasionally treat ourselves to beans on toast if we need to use anything up!
• Although most hostels have free salt kicking about, it has been so handy having our own. This particular one has lasted us for our entire trip and only cost a couple of dollars. 
• Honey. This is the honey I bought Tom from the Gisborne farmer's market that we have been carrying around ever since. I'm starting to think he actually hates it because it's the slowest I've ever seen him get through a pot of honey! 

The most important thing you will always find in our Countdown bag is our hot drinks selection. This is Tom's. There's the box of mi-chai (he pronounces it mee-chee) tea that I gave him. Then there is the MOUNTAIN of instant mochas he has. He bought a box of 30, and is very slowly making his way through them. It doesn't help that he keeps forgetting he has them! 

Aaaaand here's my collection, plus our pot of sugar. That sugar has been going since Rotorua; quite an achievement considering how often we drink hot drinks! Neither of those coffee pots have the eponymous coffee in them. I've refilled both of them with much cheaper equivalents. Only two of the hostels we have stayed in so far have had free tea or coffee, so this little supply we have is often a godsend. The decaf coffee is also extremely needed. I drink coffee like a fiend and that is my pathetic attempt to try and curb my caffeine intake, ha!

~

There you have it. The answer to a question you didn't even know you wanted to ask. 

This obviously isn't the only food we eat (sometimes we buy sausages, and we've been eating wraps like it's the only thing we can afford*) but it's the food we most often buy, and the food we always have with us in that damn bag. 

The everyday kind of thing I don't want to forget about our time here. 

Although I do want to forget carrying it. That sucks.

*It is.