One thing we were warned about before coming to Oman was that food is really expensive here. A lot of times people living overseas insist on buying American branded products that they are used to from home so they are a lot more expensive, but we figured that buying local brands and produce would help us keep our food costs down. Not so much. Food really is that expensive here.
These apples are from the US, so that’s why they’re expensive: about $3.30/lb. And see the price for avocados? $5.30/lb. No guacamole for me in the near future.
this is a normal size bag of spinach — not one of those Costco size ones. The price? $9.50
This is one place where we come out ahead — the bakery cranks out fresh bread all day long. You pick out your loaf (often it’s still warm from the oven) and they will slice it for you. A large loaf of whole wheat bread is about $2. I bought fresh pretzels for .50/each, a loaf of sesame bread for about $1.50, and I think the most expensive loaf I saw was around $3. The Omanis must not believe in low-carb diets.
But I hope you like peanut butter and jelly on your bread, because lunch meat is crazy expensive. This sliced chicken is $20/lb. Yes. TWENTY DOLLARS. Cheese is expensive too, unless you’re willing to eat the Arabic version of Kraft singles (I’m not — no fake cheese for me). A normal block of cheddar cheese cost over $10/lb. I bought a 1/2 lb and it was gone by lunchtime.
Even this very scary chicken bologna is about $5/lb. It could be free and I still wouldn’t eat it. In the win column, we can get small rotisserie chickens for $3 each. Ironically, buying the rotisserie chicken is cheaper than buying the raw chickens of the same size. I’ll take my chicken cheaper and cooked please.
We’ve found some bargains when buying local tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplant so we’ve eaten a lot of those lately. I prefer to eat locally grown things when we can and we try and select produce grown as close to our country as possible — usually it is less expensive too. Like the Fuji apples from China end up being $1/lb and milk from UAE is cheaper than the milk from Saudi Arabia (and they taste the same — we tried them both). The cheap milk is $5/gallon, the more expensive milk was $5/half gallon.
Now my brain hurts from doing all the metric conversions combined with the dollars/rials conversions so I’ll leave you with one thing to be jealous of . . . gas only costs $1.17/gallon. Too bad we can’t eat it.
