Buying Items in a Foreign Land

Wow, I had no idea that purchasing items could be so difficult or time consuming. I guess that we take for granted that we slowly pick up things as we move throughout our lives. I will at the very least never, ever take IKEA for granted.

Eric and I have been purchasing items this week for our new home. For those of you that don't know, our house is completely empty except for the desk in Eric's office. Now while I would have been a little overwhelmed doing so much purchasing in the states in stores that I know, purchasing items in Uganda is a whole other thing entirely.

As we are going to be living in a smaller town about 8 hours from Kampala, it was suggested that we do some of our major purchases here as to avoid the high prices in Arua. For us this meant purchasing a fridge, gas oven, washing machine (not like the ones in the states :), table with 6 chairs, two beds, and some appliances and dishes. For someone like me, that doesn't like to make decisions, this was an issue. I struggled! I am happy to say though that as of now, we should be able to eat and sleep in Arua. What else could we need :) We will probably have to hire a truck to take the things to Arua, but I think that one of our coworkers will be able to do this.

Once we are in Arua, we will start talking with carpenters and looking for used things so that we have a couch, dresser, bedside tables, etc. There really are a lot of things in a house. I don't know that I ever fully appreciated this.

One funny thing that happened while we were doing our shopping... there are two supermarket type stores in Kampala. While we were doing some shopping at one of the stores, we noticed that they were cleaning the floors, etc. A floor waxer kept continually trying to run us over. We kept having to move to get out of the worker's way. This went on for quite some time. We then headed up to the checkout. Upon arriving up front, we discovered that all of the registers were closed. Then we looked around and noticed that we were the only customers in the store. Yep, they had closed up shop long before but we had NO IDEA and no one had told us. So here are the silly white people with their shopping cart hoping that someone will check them out. Eventually a very annoyed cashier rang us up. So the moral of the story is: "When someone continually tries to run you over with a floor waxer, it is time to checkout."

I hope that you can all find a way to use this valuable information. :)