I have a dreamsicle

Early on in any long trip, I always have a very vivid dream about going home. So when one hit last night, it was right on schedule.

It covered everything: Mom driving me home from the airport, getting ready to take a bath in an actual bathtub, even the amazing first episode of The Daily Show I got to see at home. In fact, the episode was so awesome that I wondered if I were dreaming, so I went to check it online. Sure enough, the clip was still there, all details intact.

Then I started thinking. Sure, I knew the semester in Canterbury was going to be a short one. But I only remembered classes meeting once.

And then I woke up.

But I promised you a post about food, didn’t I?

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There are a couple of supermarkets and quite a few dairies (convenience stores) right off campus, but a brisk half-hour walk away is the mall (currently one floor, though the next level is under construction) with the Pak’n Save.

Pak’n Save’s motto, and entire selling point is “New Zealand’s Lowest Food Prices”, which they achieve in part by not spending any money on frills. Like expensive advertising. Or shelves. Most of the products are stacked in yellow metal industrial frames, or just piled in the cardboard boxes they came in.

But the food itself doesn’t seem to suffer, just cost less. A whole loaf of bread for under NZ$2! A 1.5-liter bottle of fruit drink for $NZ0.95! I haven’t managed to spend more than NZ$30 on any trip yet.

Along with the staples (lots and lots of bread and fresh fruit), I’m trying to sample New Zealand-y things. When we got lunch at the Christchurch airport and everyone else was reaching for the water, I sprang for a bottle of ginger beer, in part because the label touted it as “a great New Zealand tradition”. (“Is that real beer?” asked one of my companions nervously. No, it’s the same idea as ginger ale. Only more ginger-y.)

So when something weird/new catches my eye at the store, I spring for it. Sometimes it backfires. Like with the Korean pear:

Same texture as a standard pear, but the taste turned out to be more bitter, or maybe more sour. And, as you can see, it’s huge. I only got halfway through.

It did come in a pretty cool wrapper, though:

The Russian fudge, on the other hand, went great:

Tasted like a hybrid of fudge and caramel. You know how some combinations of things that should taste perfectly decent turn out to be horrible mistakes? (Ham and bananas, anyone?) This was not one of those combinations. This was a chocolate-and-peanut-butter level of right.

There have, admittedly, been a lot of frozen dinners and canned soup (from Campbell’s, even) in the picture. (I have yet to put in the time and effort to actually cook something.) But on the easy-to-prepare front there’s also cereal and fruit bars, Made In New Zealand With Local Ingredients for good measure.

It should go without saying that I’ve bought fresh kiwis.

And on that note, I need to take the walk now. I’m down to two oranges, a kiwi, half a cereal box, and a little tin of mints, none of which sounds like dinner.