Gateway to American Food

We can get nearly everything that we need from our local grocery store. But, there's something oddly exciting about going to other Western grocery stores - it's kind of like a treasure hunt. Last weekend we went to a store called "Gateway." It had been described to us as a mini-Costco. How could we resist?


Gateway is located in the basement below one of the train stations. It had the ambience of a store below a train station, but we knew it had to have good stuff with a sign and display like these:

The store is a very, very small (like half the size of our apartment!) Costco - it even had Kirkland branded products. There wasn't a single product in the store that we couldn't identify; I don't think the same was true for the people who worked there! The only other shoppers were American.

And, after six weeks of living in a place where portion control is taken to an extreme

(The ketchup container is regular sized; the drink is a small. In case you are wondering, a large drink is 20 ounces)

we were excited to see things in BULK. The prices weren't discounted like at Costco, but we loaded our cart with such essentials as a 64 oz container of peanut butter, a 36 pack of Diet Dr. Pepper (yahoo!), Cascade (dishwashers aren't common here - detergent is rather expensive, about $10 US for a tiny container), and a huge container of candy for Lydia's birthday pinata.

We won't make going to Gateway a habit, but it was good to know it's there - you never know when you might have a need for a 96 pack of Quaker instant oatmeal breakfast!