LostInTheWoods

Living abroad for any extended period of time, will inevitably mean you will miss some foods that you were previously used to for most of your life. Yes, I am starting to justify a craving, right here and now.

Yesterday we headed to Gothenburg for a periodic shopping trip and to get a good pint of British beer (yup, you guessed, another one of my cravings). In Gothenburg there is a shop called “The English Shop” which sells all the stuff you can find on the supermarket shelves of “The Island”, but with a cavernous difference in price. Now I don't blame the shop for the difference in pricing, for there are many reasons why they are a lot more expensive, I just want to explore the phenomenon of cravings.

To illustrate my point, you can buy a half kilo box of “Shreddies” in “The English Shop”, which I am sure you can buy in many places, but not anywhere else here in Sweden that I have found. For some some reason, I just really fancied a bowlful. Dang, they taste good with a cup of coffee, really malty. Chucking a box in the basket was easy, handing of the now familiar currency was easy too, and why not? I was surrounded by familiar things and it felt like home....

When I fell back to reality, I thought I would look up how much they cost in a supermarket in UK, and compare prices. OK... here are the numbers:

Nestlé Shreddies 500g:-

Gothenburg Sweden: £3.92
UK Supermarket: £1.62

Now I feel a little embarrassed, a bit stupid and slightly conned. But, and this is the inexplicable thing... I don't care, I can look forward to having Shreddies in my life for the next few weeks, and then my craving will hopefully have been cured, until the next time.

So next time you are in the supermarket and you see something you fancy, ask yourself, would you pay two and a half times the price for it? If not, you probably don't want it enough... not yet anyway.

That is all.
LostInTheWoods