Day 1 [Germany] Making it work with a quick pre-packed meal and quick fresh grocery shopping

Day 1

It’s day one. We just landed. My husband slept maybe one hour and I slept about 2 hours on the 10.5 hour flight. Our daughter has slept about 5 - she usually sleeps for 12. 

Trouble is-a-brewing.

The flight was great, the landing was a bit choppy but we are alive and safe and have all of our luggage. Getting our passport stamped was a breeze. Honestly, the quickest international arrival I’ve had. The rental car pickup was epic! Quick, no line, brand new car and an attendant in the special garage to make sure you are oriented and comfortable with the car (perhaps now is not the time to re-hash that we should ask him for help with the nav and my husband saying no - but yet it took us 30 minutes to try to get the nav from German to English!!). It was about a one hour drive from Frankfurt to Walldorf and my daughter is crying because she went to sleep right when we landed (specifically saying “we are in Germany now. I take a nap.”) and woke up when she realized I was putting her in a car. She’s tired. She’s hungry. She’s in another country!

It takes us about 2 hours to get into our hotel and shower (man we stink!!!) and figure out that the grocery we looked up, Dunns (a “BioMarkt” as they are called here), is about 6 minutes away. We jet over and find that it’s less than we expected (the advertisements online make it seem like our Whole Foods) but we can deal with what they have. 

We buy:

Chicken breast

Mineral Water

Olive oil

Onions

Lettuce

Carrots

Zucchini

Apples

Nectarines

Capers

Olives

Cucumber

Wine - much, much needed wine!

What was surprising about Dunns is there is no meat counter. Cheese and pastries/bread, but no meat counter. We are going to ask our local co-workers, but I think the deal is that folks use a butcher and not a grocery for their meats here. 

Dinner:

1 pack Andean Dream pasta we packed

chicken sauteed with onion, seasoned with salt and olives and capers

[toss with pasta]

onion sauteed with diced carrot and zucchini

The focus here was: 

1. Something quick (this took under 30 minutes)
2. Something balanced (protein, carb, fat and veggies)
3. Something wholesome (nothing refined or packaged)

I will note that next time I will either go alone or send my husband. If you are traveling with a toddler who is jet lagged and/or just pure tired from a plane trip  - don’t take them grocery shopping. Some of you might already know this - I didn’t. So, we were those Americans in the middle of the grocery store begging our daughter to stop screaming when we asked her to not run the mini kid cart into people or the walls and her insisting we don’t tell her what to do - and then my husband was the American carrying the screaming, snotting toddler out the door to cry outside.

I was also the American who didn’t know that groceries in Germany require you to put 1 Euro in this little slot in the grocery cart to ‘borrow’ a cart to do your shopping. Day 1 I just took one that was on the side. Day 2 Ben took a cart from  man who kept hovering and it was about 10 minutes later I noticed “AHHHH ha! there is a Euro in this tiny slot and that is how they get the carts - oh snap Ben! you took that man’s Euro -that is why he was hovering!!!!” #embarrassed  

Everyone was much happier after dinner!