Food shopping here in Ghana is not exactly like going to Super Stop & Shop at home. Rather, each item is sold from a separate person throughout town, and a shopping trip to get a week's worth of food more closely resembles a scavenger hunt.

This week's shopping list:

• Bread
  
• Eggs
• Pineapple
• Bananas
• Mango
• Pawpaw (papaya)
  
• Plaintain chips
  
• Groundnuts (peanuts)
• Onions
• Lettuce
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Green peppers
• Spring onions
• Tomatoes
  
• Hot chocolate mix
• Nescafe
  
• Evaporated milk
• Pasta
• Cheese
• Paper napkins
• Raid spray

There is a method to everything, and this is no exception. The vendors we buy from are the same each time; I've gathered this to be a mix of continued patronage and confidence in the food. We begin at the top of the hill buying the bananas and groundnuts from one food stall-- for whatever reason these two foods seem to be paired. It is acceptable to hand pick the ground nuts, but for the bananas you have to explain how ripe, how big, how many, and the vendor will select them herself. Next down the road is the pineapple; same procedure explaining how ripe and big, and then indicate whether or not you want it cut. Further down the road is the vegetable stand where the vendor will listen as you list off the things you need and she picks them for you. We wait to buy the onions, which can be bought more cheaply along the street if we see someone walking along selling it, and the tomatoes, which we like to buy from a young girl from our neighborhood. Usually the papaya and mango is found at the vegetable stall too. Even though the eggs are sold adjacent to this stall, they will have to wait until the very end-- they are sold from large crates and put into plain black plastic bags (called 'rubbers' here), and you can imagine its a little scary to carry a plastic bag filled with eggs all over town! Since its close to the junction where we will pick up a taxi to go home, its no problem. We continue up the road to one of the many general shops-- while they all seem to carry the exact same things, we only ever shop at one or two of them. And so we pass over about three of these identical shops while dodging taxis, people carrying huge basins on their heads, street gutters (sometimes covered, sometimes not, about three feet deep and filled with trash and dirty water), and stopping about every 20 feet to say hello to one person or another. We arrive at our shop of choice, a small room filled top to bottom with canned, boxed, non-perishable things. Here we get hot chocolate mix, Nescafe, canned evaporated milk, pasta, cheese (laughing cow-- the only kind widely available here), napkins, and Raid. Most likely by that time we'll have spotted a woman with plaintain chips walking down the street-- its a chance we have to take, because there are no specific stalls for it. We double back and buy the bread along the way, and finally the eggs across the street. Shopping done! We grab the next taxi headed home (taxis here follow specific routes and pick up other people along the way, like buses).

I'm sure if this is the way I'd done it my whole life I would think nothing of it-- but this is for me one of the biggest adjustments as far as living here rather than traveling through. Hopefully in time it will become second nature.