CHRONICLE Asian Girl Conquers Wales | Page 26

Personally, I just cook my own meals at the accommodation. For the first few weeks I’ve survived with spices and instant sauces that I brought from Malaysia. I bought a lot of seafood to cook my meals with. Not until after a month, I found fresh meat that I can eat. While inspecting the Ice Cream sec- tion at Tesco, Danial suddenly pointed out a section writes ‘World Food Section’. There at the very end of the freez- er, popping through the glass, we saw the packages written ‘Halal’ in Arabic. Stacked from above to be- low, there were arrays of chicken and beef options – chicken breast, chicken nuggets, chicken frank- furter, chicken burgers and even beef kebabs. We were overly filled with joy and thankful at the same time that we won’t be eating fish again that night. The choices of supermarkets are wide in Carmarth- en but two stores of my favourite would be of course Tesco and Poundland. The stores are all situated at Carmarthen Town where you can commute from cam- pus for about 15-20 minutes. Tesco is like any typical Tesco in Malaysia. Of course they have far more quality brands and options. However the prices are very cheap here and I usually spend only £10-20 per week for my groceries. Buying Tesco brands usually saves up a lot of mon- ey. I’m no miser but simply frugal. Tesco products varies from rice, spaghetti, fish, fruit juices, cheese, cereal, and even frozen pizza. Whereas in Pound- land, everything is £1. You may think this store only sells load of junks but no! It does sell from freez- er products to household product and anything in between. I never really had bad experience buying ingredients or products in Carmarthen so far. Al- though I should point out the difference between Malaysian products and Wales/UK products in gen- eral. Here, food products with no addictives/pre- servatives are leading the way. Because of that most have minimum shelf life and go bad very quickly. This is also one of the reason I get my groceries once a week to finish off everything in a week and then only buy more. 19