Supermarket sweep

I feel like I am starting to get to know this fascinating city though I still have a long way to go. I seem to have spent a great deal of time analysing the various shopping opportunities in order to create a life for us both which is familiar, but at the same time different.
We now have a fully functioning kitchen with the arrival of the washing machine (much rejoicing on my part as it's doing laundry is a favourite hobby and pastime which runs in the family!) and a microwave which, despite its size and the fact that I had already bought two standard lamps, came home in the back of a taxi!
Mr Hameed from Ideal Curtains (050 621 0735 if anyone is reading this in Abu Dhabi and might need curtains) came up trumps, arriving yesterday afternoon with curtains for all the rooms which look fabulous and start to make the place feel more like home.
So having got the kitchen more or less fixed up, I decided to take a long hard look at all the supermarket options and spend a bit of time working out what I can get out here and what changes I may have to make. The answer seems to be, not many, as I am struggling to find any gaps in what we can buy over here. Marks & Spencer simply food only has a very small range but it's enough to provide some familiarity to the food cupboards including individual crumbles (John's favourite) and jars of cheese sauce! Spinneys and Abela are probably the most authentic reproductions of a UK supermarket and both have signficant pork sections though carefully screened off. Spinneys even do a range of Waitrose products which I'm not familiar with since we don't have Waitrose in Manchester. LuLu and the Abu Dhabi Co-operative Society seem to be the places to go for genuine Arabic food though I do find the layouts a bit of a challenge. In the end Carrefour has the advantage of being the biggest, having quite a lot of things I can normally only buy in France, a recognisable taxi rank (so you're not left waving manically at oncoming traffic whilst trying to stop the trolley from running away) and if someone has stuck an Arabic translation over the English instructions there's always a chance to read the French ones! I walked very slowly round Carrefour and tested it with a range of items I didn't think I could get. With help from another bemused English shopper we found proper Bisto and the sight of jars of Marmite nearly had me in tears at the thought of the gigantic jar still sitting in my desk in Hale. Washing powder only seems to come in powder or liquid form - none of those nice neat little sachets but then, do I really need sachets?! In Carrefours they don't seem to have minced beef but maybe I just missed it since they have everything else you could possibly think of.
So there's just one thing missing for which you need to go to a special shop or proffer a licence which I don't have (but John says that wine or the lack of it is becoming an overriding theme of this blog so I promise not to mention it again!)