Part 2: Grocery shopping hacks and where to eat during your stay

Alright, so you arrived to your receiving country and checked in safely to your accommodation. Now the next biggest concern on your mind is where to buy things and where to eat. I am a coffee addict and my first concern when I arrived to Lithuania was where to buy my coffee from. I started stressing about when I was still on the airplane. I just can’t exist without coffee. If you’re a coffee lover yourself, you know what I’m talking about.

So here is a list of things I could think of which helped me save money during my stay. I hope it is useful and you enjoy reading it.

1. Avoid buying your groceries from a small supermarket. It might be easier to get to the small supermarket on the corner of your street, but trust me it is not indicated to do large grocery purchases from there. Usually, small supermarkets have a limited selection of brands you can choose from. And they usually have the expensive ones. Either it’s a loaf of bread or a box of eggs, you might want to go do your grocery in a big supermarket and besides that, you have the chance to drag the basket all over the supermarket with your grocery list and feel like a real adult. In bigger supermarkets, the xxl kind of ones, there are various brands and offers for pretty much everything. You need a box of cereals? Sure, you have at least 10 brands to pick up from, all in various flavours and with various prices.
2. Go for the client card. One of the coolest things about Lithuania is that you can get a discount card absolutely everywhere, even in your favourite coffee shop. So of course, there are client cards for supermarkets as well. When you will be doing grocery shopping you will see that there are some products whose prices are written twice: first, the big red price is the regular price and then lower in smaller font with green is the price with the discount card. This can save you some money throughout your stay. You might see for instance that a regular box of milk’s price is 1. 20 euros, but you can get it as cheap as 80 cents with a discount card. However this is not applicable to all products so you will have to pay attention. For a 10 euros purchase at the supermarket you can get around 2 euros off if you buy things like this.
3. If you want to go full coupon-lady kind of saver with your groceries you might want to get a magazine from the displayed ones in the supermarket. You don’t know the language, but that won’t be an issue. You will see the pictures and make the connections. There, they have advertised products that they have a discount for. Even if you might not need a bottle of oil today or the next two days, you could buy it in advance and save it for later and also save some cents. However, I confess I was always too lazy to do that.
4. Also from the category of coupon-lady behaviour, you might want to compare the prices of different supermarkets. One of the benefits of living in Lithuania is that they have more or less, 3 big chains of supermarkets and some smaller ones. Well actually now they have 4 big chains (with the new one which opened June 1st this year). Of course, the prices don’t vary a great deal from supermarket to supermarket. But you might get some things cheaper. My personal opinion was that the supermarket in Ozas mall was the most suited for everything I wanted to buy, from specific brands I was targeting to variety and prices. This one is a tricky one to find, especially if you’re a foreigner, because you wouldn’t find it if you didn’t already know it was there. First thing that is weird about it is that it is on the second floor of the mall. (Who does that to a supermarket? Who? ) Second of all, when you’re a newcomer you don’t know all the local supermarkets, and this one is not one of the big 4 ones. You can easily find out about it by asking a Lithuanian such as your mentor or the people at the information desk in the mall.
5. Try to buy only things you need and in fair quantities. If you are buying things that can go bad in couple days, such as fresh vegetables and fruits, you might reconsider getting all those 10 oranges. Sure, you are in the supermarket and there are so many things and boy, do you want those kiwi and mango yoghurts and like 10 of them because they are so nicely wrapped. This is why you might consider getting a grocery list. You can download apps on your smartphone for it or get a cool agenda and write things down with glittery pens, however it suits you. Grocery shopping can be fun and it can motivate you to actually make a plan about what you want to eat and eat more responsible as well. You can pick a day of the week when you have some free time on your hands and go grocery shopping, doing your laundry etc. For me it’s always Saturday.

Now let’s talk about where to eat. It’s your first day in Lithuania. You’re walking down Pilies gatve and look around, take pictures and try to take everything in. Suddenly it’s already noon and you feel kind of hungry. You will see that pretty much everywhere on Pilies Gatve (which is the equivalent I would say of Lipscani Street in Bucharest, more or less), there are adds with: daily menu starting from. And usually the daily menu starts from 10 euros. Oh, good! You are saying to yourself. This place can put food in my belly and 10 euros is not that big of a deal (especially if you’re a Westerner). And besides, they have the advertisement in English which means I don’t have to speak Lithuanian for sure because they will understand me! While this might seem as a natural conclusion, stay away from all these places! Just don’t go in there. The location of these restaurants and the fact that they have the menus in English means that they are usually targeting a special kind of customers: the tourists. And sure, you’re new in Lithuania, but you’ll be there for more than 3 days so you must learn how to live like a proper Lithuanian student. Of course, if you want to go full swaggish on this, do as you please. But consider that paying 10 euros for a meal a day is 300 euros per month only for one meal per day.

What I would suggest is you going to the student cafeteria instead. Vilnius University has 2 cafeterias, one in the main campus in the city centre and the other one in the other campus in Sauletekis (and a smaller one in the library in Sauletekis). You can get a full meal for 5 euros, with a soup, main course, salad, desert and a drink. You can get whatever you want and their food is absolutely delicious. And you will have fun trying to order in Lithuanian, especially at the beginning. But as I said yesterday, everybody understands English and if you feel like it’s too much for you, you can just use English instead (but it’s more fun like this! ). My favourite thing ever and the one I miss the most about the cafeterias is their blyneliai su vistiena, hashtag never forget.

There are also quite common the pizza places. Lithuanians know their pizza and just to add a pinch of my personal belief, they are fangirling about Italian lifestyle and culture kind of the same way Romanians are fangirling about French culture and lifestyle (if you’re a Romanian and you don’t believe me, allow me to present some brief examples with respect to the above-mentioned: the SAT exam you are all taking at the end of high school –the Bacalaureat is inspired from Napoleon’s France and was latter introduced by Alexandru Ioan Cuza, our form of government, telly semi-presidentialism is also a copycat from the French one, with the Constitution as well, Francophonie events and such; I hope now you have a better view). Coming back to Lithuania, just Google Bona Sforza or the founding myth of Vilnius and you will see what I’m talking about. Nowadays Vilnius is still a very Italian-alike kind of city, with Italian bakeries and pizzeria, good pasta and such. There was a small restaurant in the neighbourhood where I lived –Uzupio picerija- where I went on several occasions with my friends. The first time I ever went there, as I was sitting back drinking my lemonade and waiting for my Margherita pizza, the sun was slowly setting down and I had the feeling I was taking part in the shooting of the “Roman holiday” movie with Audrey Hepburn. That being said, the pizza quality is acceptable by Italian standards and the prices are also good. You can get a 30 cm Pizza Margherita for 3 euros. Well done, Lithuania! And you will see that, just like the place I talked about above, these pizza places have restaurants all over the city and in the city centre as well and their staff is super friendly and helpful.

You can also check the touristic websites for travelling such as TripAdvisor if you want to get to see more cool places. I personally didn’t go to many of them because I found them to be a bit over my budget and I settled down for the well-known pizza places everybody goes to and kept my options opened about trying new places, such as Snakutis which we discovered and liked a lot.

I will make a new entry about coffee shops, traditional food you must get and some other cool places you should consider going, such as cat cafes.

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