UCSD: Living On Campus: Off Campus Grocery Shopping!

Meal of the week: a ten second review of dining hall food

Stir fry. $5.95. A customized dish: pick your meat, your veggies, rice or noodles and you're good to go! Sometimes they offer water chestnuts and bamboo as veggie options too, which is a huge huge plus.

When/where: Lunch, 11/18 (today!), Canyon Vista (CV)
Delicious? Always! I don't get my stir fry anywhere else because no other place serves it like CV does. The portions are huge and the price very decent. I tend to get the rice over the noodles--sometimes the noodles (pictured above) tastes a little too much like cheap ramen packages.

Last Saturday I headed out to Vons and Trader Joe's to stock up on groceries. I have yet to go to the weekly Farmer's Market (shame on me!), but I know for a fact fruit at the dining halls is super expensive. The easiest way to get some healthy snacks for cheaper prices is to shop off campus by taking the Superloop!

The Superloop runs counterclockwise (the 201 bus) and clockwise (202) and arrives at each stop every 10-15 minutes, depending on the hours. Besides taking students to grocery stores and restaurants, the bus also stops by the UTC mall full of small stores and a food court. To optimize my route, I take the 201 (counterclockwise) to do grocery shopping and take the 202 back (clockwise) so I don't have to wait for the bus to make its full loop. :) Yay for saving time!
Here's a map of the Superloop route.

The first thing I learned as a student who's never gone shopping without a car is mind what you buy--carrying a large amount of heavy groceries back on the bus is no fun. I once had bought fruit for three other people at their request, and that trip back to the dorms was one of the worst. Some solutions to buying bulky or heavy products? Taking the Campus loop could shorten your trip back to the dorms. I've seen a girl carry a sustainable grocery bag with wheels, too, which is an awesome idea:

I'm good for the environment, grocery shopping, and I fold into a handbag!

Sustainable grocery bags!

I went to a lot of suite/building events this week too. There was movie night with my RA--free pizza and Sherlock Holmes! My suite also submitted a design for the Building T-Shirt Design competition, which in actuality is more of a "suite design that one very artistic suitemate drew". Needless to say, we're going to win!

As a suite, too, we share a love for home decor and the combination of our efforts resulted in the following: christmas lights, sparkly baubles, cutout painted snowflakes...it's a little too early for Christmas, so we also added silk autumn leaves right after I took these pictures. A few suitemates and I definitely went a little overboard with the snowflakes!