Grocery Shopping in New Zealand

This is one of the few "culture shocks" I've gotten while here in New Zealand. Groceries are SO EXPENSIVE!! This is mostly because our local grocery store (New World) is a really expensive one, but even when we take the bus to the cheaper on, the dairy products are crazy expensive. You'd think because New Zealand is a huge dairy producer that the dairy products would be cheap, NOPE. I pay like $5NZD (~$3.75USD) for a 1/4 gallon jug of milk (it's in liters, but it's about the size of a 1/4 gallon jug). So here's what my grocery shopping thus far has consisted of:

• Lowfat milk (they don't have completely fat free) 
• Cornflakes, aka the cheapest cereal
• Eggs (they're brown, not white)
• Yoghurt, which is combined with custard? I don't know but it's pretty creamy
• Cheese, crazy expensive. And all white, they don't have yellow cheese like anywhere 
• Apples, all from NZ (gala)
• Big carrots, I don't I've even seen little ones
• Bacon (we're talking like $7 for 10 strips)
• Hard cider (I recently got pear cider and raspberry vanilla cider)
• Rice
• Frozen veggies
• Juice! They have crazy weird flavours here, stuff like kiwi and aloe vera. 
• I tried hot chocolate, but it's not very good so that won't happen again...
• Bread - I get the kind with seeds, but it's all pretty white bread here, I haven't seen any whole wheat?
• Peanut butter - mine sticks to my mouth really bad. Probably because they don't add salt and oil ;)
• Jam
• Margarine
• Miscellaneous stuff depending on the trip!

Thus far (on the whole 3 trips) I've spend about $45NZD, or $35USD per trip. Sometimes more or less, but it's pretty pricey here. For some odd reason I can't stop eating apples? I've been having like 3 a day. So that't strange hahaha. Food in the dining hall is pretty horrible, but the grocery food is decent. Personally I prefer shopping in the States because we have a bigger variety, and it's much more affordable, but they have very quality food here! I haven't really done any cooking so far, ingredients are just so pricey. I did try making oven baked drumsticks, but our oven is in celsius, which I forgot, and they didn't quite turn out ;)