E.Leclerc

I am so thankful for the stores that we have in Spain. And for my patient husband who drove me around a lot the first few weeks we were here so I could check out every.single.store to decide where I would be shopping. I've basically narrowed it down to a few choices and I will try to blog about the stores I frequent most, so you can continue to get a snapshot of our daily lives here.

As you can imagine, food here is different. As I posted earlier, we think a lot of the food is fresher and even higher quality. Honestly the food here is one of the things I've been enjoying the most! I can cook most of my usual recipes but some of the more unusual ingredients require me going to this store. E.Leclerc. I can find most anything in this store but don't go too often because it's farther away and a little more expensive. So I save my trips for buying things like applesauce, corn tortillas, cornmeal, etc. They have a much bigger selection of things like cereal, bread, cookies, and stuff like that. They carry many American brands, which are twice the cost of the Spanish brands but sometimes it's nice to know I could buy Kellogg's corn flakes or Oreo cookies if I really wanted to.

One of the times we went to E.Leclerc, I grabbed my camera. Unfortunately I only have a Nikon SLR camera, which is kind of large, and it kind of attracted some attention. People could not understand why I would be taking pictures inside their store! Understandably so. My husband wisely suggested, after a few shots, that I put the camera away before we were asked to leave so I didn't get as many photos as I would have liked. Next time I'll use Gus' phone to take pictures. But here are enough photos of you to get a feel for what the store is like...

Our start to any trip is a walk onto the sidewalk outside our apt. We live on a busy street so I try and have the boys hold hands. Though Coen still protests and while this pic may look cute, Coen is squawking at being restrained! They're so cute though!!

Here's Cael, with his best grin, outside our building. We live at number 42!

And here is daddy, in his grey steed, come to take us away!

Driving through the streets...

And we've arrived! Here is what the store looks like on the outside. It's quite large as you can see. Kind of reminds me of Walmart.

And here are all the shopping carts neatly lined up

Time to get a cart. Here I am pushing a Euro into the slot...

Here's the slot. Once it's pushed in, the cart is released and away we go!

Here's inside the entrance. Lecler is on the right and random other stores on the left. Kind of like a mall I guess.

And here is the entrance to the store...

Now we're inside...this is the book section...You can see the super high ceilings and get a gist of how large the store is...

Electronics section

The dishes row. It is blurry because I took it fast. People were starting to stare at me :)

One of my favorite rows in the whole store! The kitchen aisle. They have everything here!!

The pasteleria or dessert/bakery section

And the fish section. Which is kind of shocking for me whenever I walk by. They eat a lot of fish here in Spain. And they display whole fish on ice for you to look at-not behind glass. Their displays of fish are quite extensive. Whole fishes of several varieties. Whole eels, all curled around. Squids. Octopus. Shrimp. All whole with all parts included. Quite an anatomy lesson! I've been told they will de-scale or de-head your purchase for you. But I've not yet been brave enough :) And apparently octopus is very popular at Christmas time! Yum!

And that is all of my pictures inside of the store. But I hope you were able to see what it looks like inside. I am so thankful for this store!