Food Time 3: The Art of Grocery Shopping

Hello again everyone! I'm back from my Second Travel Week, which means it's high time for another blog post. And I can think of no better topic to get right back into the swing of things than, you guessed it, food!

This post is all about my experiences grocery shopping in Copenhagen throughout my semester. It is by no means a comprehensive guide as to what you can or should expect as soon as you get to DIS, but I hope that my first international encounters with supermarkets can help some fellow students out in some way or another.

{Decisions, decisions, decisions!}

From how I see it, my relationship with the grocery stores in Copenhagen can be broken down into three stages - amazement, constraint, and conscious enjoyment - in pretty much that exact order.

For the first stage, I entered into each grocery store with wonder and awe at all the possibilities. Holy cow, look at all those apples! I've never seen that kind of fruit before! Why are the onions here so small? How long will this giant bag of pasta last? I wonder what that "ham and chives" spread tastes like? Where are the chocolate chips to make cookies? And why, oh why, is there so many different kinds of rye bread???

{Ok, I may not know the names of any of these frozen items, but the packaging is certainly helpful!}

If you can't tell, dear readers, I had never really gone grocery shopping for myself before. Sure, as I kid I always helped my dad when he went to the store, picking out produce and snacks for our weekly meals, but since coming to Copenhagen this is by far the longest stretch where I've had to consistently plan out what I was going to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not to mention I had to cook for myself too!

Luckily, DIS supplies each and every student with a grocery stipend, which comes in the form of a card that you can scan at three prominent grocery chains around Copenhagen - Netto, Føtex, and Bilka. This has been an incredible boon for newfound shoppers like myself, and for the first few weeks I had the liberty to buy whatever I wanted in the name of trying out various fruit, vegetable, and meat options to see what I liked and what I could do without.

{The dreaded Salling update email}

Then I started to see the bills pile up. Every Friday, the company that organizes our grocery stipend sends you an email telling you exactly how much kroner you have left on your card. And by March, my goodness I was running out of funds. I immediately went into stage two of my journey, restraining myself to only buying the bare essentials. I would hunt through the bargain bins of both Netto and Føtex, figuring out which days that each supermarket offered discounts on meat and pre-packaged veggies to make my stipend stretch as long as possible.

{That glorious yellow tag means it's Netto's discount day for the meat section!}

But then I went on tour! In the span of 6 weeks, 3 of those were spent traveling with my Core Course, for the Student Media Team, or with newfound friends I had met since arriving here. And I'm going to let you folks in on a little secret--if you're traveling at all during your time at DIS, chances are you won't be using your grocery card! Sounds crazy I know, but after returning home from the Second scheduled Travel Week I found my funds to be low, but definitely not zero. This is how I entered the last and current stage of my grocery store saga - conscious enjoyment. I'm still being aware of what I buy and when I buy it, making sure that no groceries are going to waste on my watch, but that doesn't mean I have to be beholden to whatever is on super-sale for dinner in the nearest Netto on my way home from school.

I think that I've struck a good balance this way, and even if my grocery card runs out before the school year ends, I think I've picked up enough good habits in my semester of shopping to know how to feed myself properly without breaking the bank.

{What one day of conscious shopping can get you - and you know I had some leftovers after this!}

And there you have it! My semi-autobiographical experience grocery shopping in Copenhagen this semester. If you have any questions realted to the grocery stipend card(or want some insider advice on where to find the best deals), please feel free to reach out! Until next time, I hope you all are finding the cheapest, yummiest, and best bits of food at your local store. See you around!