Costco Run

Laura and I decided to test the bus system here and head out to the Costco on the edge of town. It's about 6km from the flat and a bit out of range of the bike share system, so it's the bus. We haven't used the bus system here yet, but today was the day to figure it out.

Mario left us a rechargeable bus card. Laura put some funds on it a couple of days ago using the public transit web site. To use it, just tap the card on a sensor when you get on the bus and your account is automatically debited. Furthermore, you can tap multiple times if traveling with multiple people. For us, two people, two taps.

To avoid a transfer, we walked/rode bikes a bit to get to the bus stop. Once there, we hopped on and in about 15-20 mins we were near the Costco. A bit of a walk at that end and we were at our destination:

Costco here is very similar to those in the US. Also, our US membership works here. We walked around just to see what kinds of things we could find here that are hard to find in the stores near our flat. We knew we couldn't go for a lot of stuff or really bulky stuff since we had to carry it all back home. After a thorough walk through we came away with some spaghetti sauce, salsa, almonds, peanut butter, dishwasher detergent and a small flat of raspberries.

By the time we got through, it was getting late and I was hungry. I didn't want to wait until we got back home to get something. Plus, there was a McDonald's adjacent to the Costco (and not much else). After a bit of waffling, we went to the McD's figuring we could find a salad if nothing else. Indeed, salads were available. I grabbed a chicken Caesar salad. Interestingly, the dressing was a small packet of olive oil and a small packet of vinegar:

They even have little McDonald's M's on them. The salad with dressing was good. We headed back to the bus stop:

Sadly, we waited on this little corner because we thought we saw the bus stop here as we approached. We missed that bus though and waited for the next one. The next one did pull through after about 15 mins, but the driver wouldn't let us on because this wasn't actually a bus stop. It was just a place the bus stopped briefly as it negotiated a sharp left turn on its route. The driver motioned us to walk down the street behind him, so we did. We found a clearly marked bus stop about 100M down the street, ugh. After another 15 mins, yet another bus appeared, stopped, and picked us up. Yay!

The return route has a stop that's closer to our flat so we were able to walk home pretty quickly with our load of groceries. Laura's class time was immanent, so we unpacked the groceries and she hurried off to class.

I worked on some math. I also did a little housework. The flat here and lovely marble/granite tile floors. I noticed a few of the high traffic areas were getting a bit dirty, so I vacuumed and mopped the whole place. We've been here about a month. I'm thinking I should do that at least once a month based on how dirty the mop bucket water was, haha.

Didn't get enough sleep last night because of the concert, so I'm hitting the sack early tonight. Plus, gotta run tomorrow morning, so... good night!