Tears of Joy

Imagine life without Costco. Close your eyes and really think about it ... no fabulous cheap meats, no freezer foods, having to buy soap as individual pieces, no big boxes of those nice fruit snacks or granola bars that get our kids through church. It's a dark world; one without Costco. I can say this because I've just lived it for four years. I love Costco so much that no Santa could go wrong throwing in a membership card or gift certificate in my stocking. We have somehow (very frustratingly) lived without the Costco things I often took for granted: ranch salad dressing, lemon and lime juice, polish hotdogs, taste testers, italian sausage (seriously Costco's italian sausage is the best in the entire world), and those fabulously huge shopping carts. Well NO MORE!
***Back Story:***
Ryan and I try to get to the LDS temple once a month. For us that either means a quick flight to Cebu City or Manila. We enjoy these kidless trips. Not only do we get to attend the temple but both Manila and Cebu have 'treats' we can't find here in Bacolod. Things like Ranch dressing, cilantro or Cheerios. It's those little things that we call the immediate blessings from our temple attendance. December we went to the Cebu temple and ran into someone from church here in Bacolod. We quickly said hello and went our separate ways. The next week I saw her at a church meeting and we were talking about our recent trip and what we had done in Cebu while there for the day. She asked if we had gone to S&R because while she was there they were selling real live Christmas trees imported from Canada.
"S & R? Never heard of it" I told her.
She looked at me for a moment and then said "COSTCO, it's just like COSTCO! You need to go there."
This lady has been to Costco. She has some of her kids now living in the States so I knew she knew what she was talking and she gave me that look that said she knew that I knew that she knew what she was talking about (I couldn't resist). I didn't really want to get my hopes up too high but I do really trust her opinion so I googled it that night when I got home. It looked legit so yesterday when Ryan and I were in Manila for our monthly trip we decided to check it out! We walk in and this is what we find:

Looks pretty much like Costco doesn't it? Well that's because it used to be affiliated with Costco until just recently. It's stocks are 70% imported and 30% local which is dream come true for us. We quickly paid the $14 anual membership fee and headed to get some lunch before cruising the aisles of the warehouse. We were so excited to find polish hotdogs on the menu, something I miss from our local Costco in Canada. Real hotdogs, not red ones familiar to the Philippines, but real ones. REAL ONES! I understand that you could never understand how this felt to us unless you've lived in a world of rice and chicken for 4 years and the impossible task of never finding the simple pleasures of life. The filipino taste buds are different then ours. They do have a lot of namit (delicious) foods but they go for a sweet flavour and as North American's we tend to go for a salty flavour. Even the spaghetti sauce here is sweet, it's just how they do things.
So we savour our hotdogs in a couple huge bites and head out with our shopping cart. A couple posts ago I mentioned how expensive real cheese is here, well we found cheese ... loads of it! We found huge jars of real ranch dressing, by the crates. We found herbs and spices that have only been in dreams. We saw lemon juice and lime juice begging for me to take them home and we found the most amazing looking produce.

The meat and produce sections were so amazing. Just like they would be from a store back home. The meats were nicely cut and packaged. No need to pick up tongs and sort through the breast fillets and contaminate your hands, your bags and your carts with salmonella. Everything looked so nice and pretty. We saw fresh berries which we passed by because they were hugely expensive but I had to take a picture to catalogue the memory for my journal. It was just the best afternoon. It felt like Ryan and I were just newly dating, all excited and running around giddy holding onto each other trying to snag all the free samples we could. We made sure to go down every aisle so we wouldn't miss anything. We didn't really pick up too much because we're going back in a month and plan to check out the one in Cebu with our car so we can really bring back the heavy stuff like detergent's, swiffer sweepers and things like that! It just so fun to roam around. We picked up a few things we really wanted and realized we had so much time yet until our flight so we put back the freezer stuff and just got what were 'need' items. We decided that we would go to the Mall of Asia to burn time and then go to the other S&R that is right by the airport to pick up the stuff that needed to stay cold on they way to our flight. So good bye we said to the fancy fruits and vegs, the tall never ending aisle and our huge shopping car *sniff*

Our plan was perfect. We walked around the mall, had some DQ cool treats and headed to the other S&R for our refrigerated goods. It was so great too because we found more 'need' items at that location that weren't at the other! We crammed our 2 backpacks full of goodness to be checked and brought on a shopping bag as well.
Mission accomplished.