Rite Aid!

About 15 minutes walk away from where we live is a little shopping mall bit. It has a few shops in a little strip on two sides of the road, things like takeaways. It includes the largest shop called 'Rite Aid'. There are similar shopping mall areas all over the place - perhaps one every few streets (about 2-3 miles between each, I would say.)

Rite Aid is like an over-sized dairy or starmart. It's supposed to be a "drugstore", which means something different here. It's very very large, and sells random stuff - but nothing fresh at all. It screams preservatives and unhealthiness! Rite Aid sells, for example:

- ice-cream and Berkley milk - Mealz, you will be happy to know that all the milk we can find is labelled "without RTD(?) growth hormones" - but I can't seem to find proper unwhipped cream anywhere
- very very cheap alcohol! More on that later - but suffice to say you can buy huge 1.75L bottles for a very small price - usually about $15 for that amount of Smirnoff vodka or something similar.
- hammers and electrical outlet extension cords (lots)
- cosmetics
- basic pharmaceuticals (with a more specialised pharmacy at the back) like asprin
- vast numbers of weight-loss pills - seriously people! They DON'T WORK! It's called EXERCISE and HEALTHY EATING! Sigh.
- lots of instant noodle meals and cans of soup - basically any sort of food that can be stored indefinitely. If you were under threat of nuclear winter you would go there to stock up.
- Socks and undies
- "seasoning" - consisting mostly of lemon pepper, garlic salt, salt and pepper together, chicken salt, "seasoning salt", parsley salt, and basil. Wow, basil! Except they pronounce it, Bay-sil.
- very sugary cereal.
- lots of lollies!

Basically, there's nothing that you could eat there really if you were trying to eat healthy,which we are. And amazingly, it is possible to find takeaways which are more healthy than Macca's.