I thought I’d try and come up with the most boring and most mundane thing I could to post on my blog. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you:

This week’s grocery shopping list 😀

Maybe a few people are interested in finding out how much everyday things cost here, I think you might be quite surprised!

At the end of my road is what is rather optimistically referred to as a supermarket. In India, it’s still very much a case of one shop, one product type. You buy fruit and veg from one small shop, rice from another shop, toiletries from another shop, etc.

The shops are truly old skool; if you can imagine the store front about 2.5 metres in width with a counter across the front which the owner sits behind and you queue up to tell him what you want. Each one of these family shops is probably about 2-3 metres square at the most.

Getting back to the ‘supermarket’ at the end of my road, if it was in England, it would be called a corner shop. I would say it’s smaller than a Spar and maybe a tiny bit bigger than a shop at a petrol station.

The supermarket concept is just about taking a hold, but as you can probably imagine, there is quite a fierce opposition to it – India is a nation of shopkeepers.

Anyway, my grocery receipt. Here goes…

8x Red Delicious Apples – 160 rupees (£2)
5x Bananas – 15 rupees (£0.19)
5x Oranges – 68 rupees (£0.86)
1kg Basmati rice – 140 rupees (£1.76)
2x 330ml Diet Coke – 50 rupees (£0.63)
Kellogg’s 450g Honey Cornflakes – 125 rupees (£1.58)
Nivea Anti-Perspirant – 160 rupees (£2)
2x Navaratan Kurma (curry) – 98 rupees (£1.24)
Aloo Mutter (curry) – 48 rupees (£0.61)
Chicken Biriyani – 95 rupees (£1.22)
1ltr Tropicana 100% Orange Juice – 85 rupees (£1.07)
1ltr Nestle Milk – 38 rupees (£0.48)

So in total it comes to around £15, to buy enough food to last the week. Sometimes there are additional things I need to buy like toilet paper, shampoo, shower gel, tea bags, coffee – and in that case it can add another few pounds to the bill.

In recent weeks my total expenditure on food has been going up since I now buy fresh fruit to take to the office for lunch and I have stopped going to restaurants in the evening for dinner, so need to prepare (heh! ok, heat up) food at home.