The Flores Journey

Boy, I am very glad that Claire and I decided to take the first two weeks to take time and set everything up. I don’t know how to communicate to all of you how difficult it is for us to figure out everything here. I’ll take a couple of examples. First if you want to go and get groceries where would you go? Back in the U.S., Claire would take Peyton to Walmart or Cub and buy all of our groceries at once. You the reader, have your own routine that you have in place. For groceries there’s Walmart & Cub, You want to buy a vehicle, hop on Craigslist, read the paper, or go to your local dealership. You want to set up internet, no problem call up Comcast or Cox for a monthly plan. Heating, trash and water comes in a bill every month to your door and if had it like us call make a couple of clicks online and you pay your bill that way.
All those things I had figured out in the States. We knew what to do for everything. Here it’s like learning everything all over again. Where do I go for groceries? Wow veggies are expensive at this store! Oh, for veggies and fruits don’t buy it at this market you have to go across town to the Fruit and Veg City where you will find them much cheaper. Don’t buy your meat at the local grocery store. You are paying too much. Drive down the street, take a left and at the end of the road you’ll see a meat shop. Buy it there, it’s much cheaper.
In the States everything is a monthly expense. Phone bills, Electric bills, Internet, Water, everything is paid on a monthly basis. Here everything is prepaid. Andy and I purchased the cheapest cell phones we could buy. The phone cost us 190 rand which turns out to be 30.00 US dollars. In order to get time on the phone we go to your local grocery store called Pick n Pay and purchased “air time”. This will then last us whatever time we purchased. We only pay if we make a call, calls coming in are free. The same goes for our electric, we purchase electricity at the store and come back home and enter in the code which is on our receipt. We then have that much more electricity that we can use at the house. We have found that this is very, very helpful to us in that we can see how much energy we are using. I buy 500 units of energy and in a week we have used 100 units. This helps Claire and I make a very conscious effort to save our energy. We know that every unit used, we pay for.
The biggest cutback for us is internet. We prepay this as well per gig of usage and that’s why we haven’t been online as much as we would like to. We type up our blogs and emails prior to getting online, that way we can just get online and copy and paste our journal entries and emails.
(Bryan)