Amendment to yesterday: it isn’t as expensive as I first thought.

Today I discovered our hotel (and directly around it for a street or so) is quite abnormally expensive.
Venturing a bit further we discovered a few Spar shops (there are loads – it’s like the equivalent of Tesco Express in the UK) where prices are much lower.
500ml of water at our hotel bar is €2.
Spar sells 1.5l bottles of the same brand of water for €0.65. Bargain.
Saw an advert on tv for a budget supermarket which packages things very plainly (ala Tesco Value), but haven’t tried there yet.
The water thing is handy, because although we’re half board (and so get breakfast and evening meal included), the evening meal doesn’t come with a drink.
There’s all-you-can-drink tea, coffee and orange squash at breakfast, but not even water free in the evening. Odd.

We thought we’d save some money this lunchtime and have a picnic. Quite tricky really.
Cheese isn’t available in small amounts, and we don’t have a fridge to keep it in. That also rules out yoghurts (only really in packs of four or above), fruit juice, or anything else that needs to be chilled.
I joked that the Cheddar cheese probably wasn’t from Cheddar (if you’ve seen that Channel4 moaning food programme recently, you’ll appreciate that), only to find out it practically was. A farm in Somerset, listed right there on the back. Curiously orange colour though.

Chocolate seems very expensive still. Cheapest I found any today was still about €0.80. Comparatively, you can buy a huge bag of crisps for €0.65, so it isn’t an “unhealthy tax” or anything.
Also saw at least two bars of Cadbury’s chocolate which I’ve never seen in the UK. I had no idea they had non-UK products that they sold around the world.

The meeting with our rep went well. He’s not at all pushy, seems quite friendly. Very camp.
He mentioned that you can hire a car for about €40. Sadly, being overly worried about getting them stolen, neither me nor my girlfriend bought our driving licences with us, so that’s a bit of a #fail.
There is a land train – of the sort you get up/down Weston Pier – which does 3 hour excursions. It drives down main roads and everything. I’m almost tempted purely for the bizarre-factor.

If I take away one thing from this trip, so far, it’ll be how much one culture merges with another.
My tv was advertising Hannah Montana a few hours ago.
There’s a KFC and Pizza Hut within walking distance.
In a corner shop earlier, the cashier counted the change back to us in a very British manner.
Spar sell Dorset Cereal bars. And Heinz ketchup.
This afternoon I walked past a sign essentially offering “Cash for Gold”.
Quite amazing how international everything is. I’m surprised you can’t get Colon washing powder in the UK though – for that really really deep clean.