What $35 Will Get You

By Rachel

Today was grocery-shopping day. I have noticed that shopping seems to be a recurring theme in these posts. I hope it is a window on how life here is different, or the same, as life wherever you happen to be.

I left the house with 43,000 tugrugs and a backpack with another bag inside. It was pretty cold this morning; the electronic sign said it was -25 C at 8 a.m. I walked about 30 minutes to GoodPrice, the first stop. This is the store that sells the extra stuff from an Army PX in Korea, so everything has a long self life, much of it is packed full of hydrogenated fat and it is all pretty random. At the moment they have red stewed tomatoes, so I stocked up. The canned tomato market here is currently flooded with diced yellow tomatoes, which were nice at first but are now tiresome, The 5 of us here in UB who buy canned tomatoes are probably working through a whole container shipment. I also picked up toothpaste, vegetable oil and brown rice, a rare find.

Then I moved on to Mercury, about a five-minute walk from GoodPrice. This is a store much like Eastern Market in Washington D.C., where different people have different stands. There is a room of dry goods, a hallway of dairy, and a room shared by the vegetables and the meat. We posted some pictures from here at the very beginning of the trip and the blog.

First I bought: cheddar and mozzarella cheeses, ½ kilogram of dried apricots and 1 kg of “goy” apples, which means they are very good. Can the nutritionists among you tell me the dire consequences of eating my 5 a day of vegetables and fruit only as dried apricots? They are one of my new most enjoyed things here. After the fruit and cheese ladies, I moved into the vegetable and meat room. I went to a corner in the back where I situated my money and stuff before entering the fray. Vendor one: 2 blocks of tofu, 2 bags of lettuce and 2 bags of spinach. Vendor two: sprouts, 2 bags of bok choi, 4 peppers (2 red, 2 yellow,) 4 onions, and 4 carrots. Then I tried to buy some pork, but it was frozen and the meat lady was not interested in cutting it up. So I moved back to the vegetables. Vendor three: a little cilantro and about half a pound of little tomatoes. Vendor four: more cilantro, leeks and celery. Then out into the dairy hallway: 12 eggs and a liter of Polish 1.5% fat milk.

I was tempted to skip the pork this time, but it was the one thing Charlie had specifically asked for, so I made my way out and around the corner to the “Passage,” where there is a German butcher. Here I got ½ kg of pork, with 1,900 tugrugs to spare,