Sticker shock

When we were in Holland, we felt the pinch of the falling dollar, especially as everything seemed more expensive than it should be to begin with. My brother calculated that gasoline, at 1.52 Euro/liter, worked out to about $9/gallon. Now, of course the Dutch can just bicycle everywhere, and many of them do. The towns are very small, and the way the streets are laid out, on the same cobblestone grid from the Middle Ages, it's faster to get anywhere by foot or by pedal than by car. Moreover people routinely bike to work, up to 20-mile commutes. So perhaps they don't feel the high price of gasoline as keenly as we do.

The groceries, however, there is no getting around. Did I mention that things are smaller in Holland? The portions are smaller, the refrigerators are smaller, and the egg cartons are smaller. (Standard size is six eggs; large is ten eggs; you can't buy a carton of a dozen eggs anywhere.) Everything is on the metric system, which is handy for calculating the price per liter or gram, but you're still stuck not knowing how many lbs. of potatoes you're buying.

Fortunately we had brought most of our groceries with us - dried beans, packs of tuna fish my family smuggled past customs (apparently you're not supposed to take meat into the country, but having lugged provisions across the Atlantic, they were not about to jettison their precious cargo, so it came in undeclared), canned fruits and vegetables, TVP, rice, noodles, and assorted oddments. We frequented the grocery store for our daily bread, the potatoes (which are government-subsidised and hence fairly cheap), and the occasional half-kilogram of butter and liter of milk for coffee.

It was with relief that I anticipated the return to American prices, only to discover that these had shot up alarmingly in our absence. Gasoline has topped $3/gallon, and by a very wide margin indeed. Therefore I am making a concerted effort to stay at home these days.