Super excited today. Just tee'd up a bulk purchase of milk with my local convenience store/restaurant/espetada/talho/bar guy. I am cursing myself that I asked his name and forgot it before I was 5 metres out the door. I need to learn my portuguese better, but I'll get to that soon.

Full fat milk is a huge pain to get at most retailers, they always have predominantly half fat, skim, lactose free, and then whole/fat milk, in approximately that order of volume on the shelf.

Milk without at least 3.6% fat is not milk. I might be interested in the lactose free, maybe, but it's not full fat milk.

So, I'm gonna have my whole month's supply stacked up in a few days time.

It's Mimosa brand, at this point, but I have found it to be tolerable. Probably the majority of them are all the same and actually most of the Azores milk is grass fed - the place rains a lot so it makes sense, why bring in grain on a ship when you can just let the ladies wander in the paddocks. I'm not sure now, I forget whether Mimosa's is Azores but most of it here is. I think in fact only the supermarket brands Continente and Pingo Doce are from the mainland.

Makes sense, really, why would people in this place want to pay for more transport than they need to? Property prices are so inflated here, due to the tourist industry and the subject of autonomy from Portugal is so frequent on newspapers I could take a photo of a pile of them thrown on the side of a concrete wall just 50m from my place with the word "autonomia" loudly screaming at me. The terrain demands everyone have their own cars and motorcycles, and the fuel costs are pretty high these days. As if madeirans are gonna be ok with expensive food as well. There's plenty of poor people here. This is latin europe after all. Egalitarian and all that.

I say what I see. Fight me.