Grocery Store Stream of Consciousness

This update comes to you after my having looked over the previous emails I’ve sent, and realized that I’ve come a long way! I also realized that a lot of what I mentioned before is no longer true. Living here isn’t really a daily adventure anymore – it’s just life. I’m not surprised anymore when my host babushka speaks Russian to me, and I don’t just follow what she’s saying, but actually understand each word that she says.

I don’t think twice about taking public transportation – I’ve taken buses, trams, trolleys, cabs, the metro and marshrutkas, all without worrying about it. (NB: A marshrutka is kind of like a cross between a bus and a cab – they’re minibuses or vans that are numbered like buses and follow the bus routes, but you hail them like cabs and have to tell the driver when you want him to stop.) Also, usually the main streets the bus hits are printed on a sign on the outside of the bus, and I know the city well enough at this point that I can pretty much figure out whether the particular bus is going to take me where I want to go.

Also, if I need to buy something, I know for the most part a) whether it’s reasonable for me to expect to find it in Russia and b) if so, where to get it and c) how to know when I’m being totally ripped off. In example: I’ve spent several weeks questing to find the cheapest Diet Pepsi in the city. Once I found it for 16 rubles a bottle, but that was nowhere near anywhere I go regularly. I can usually find it for about 24 rubles at most grocery stores, but since it isn’t 16 I never stock up, so when I want a Diet Pepsi, which is always, I usually just buy one at school for 30. You don’t have to tell me that doesn’t make any sense, economic or otherwise. Anyway, I’ve gone into every grocery store I’ve passed for about three weeks now, and finally found 18 ruble Diet Pepsi at a grocery store about three blocks from my school, so my quest is over, much to the relief of all of my friends, who are sick of talking to me about my Diet Pepsi Quest.

Of course there are still things to get used to, but for the most part I know what those things are and am either in the process of getting used to them or have given up trying so as to spend my emotional energy on pursuits that promise to yield more fruit than, for example, trying to get used to the fact that I can’t expect to eat spicy food again until June. It’s just to terrible to think about! (Parents prepare yourselves: we’re stopping at Baja Fresh on the way home from the airport.)

But independent of the Great Diet Pepsi Quest, I’ve developed quite a little penchant for trolling about in grocery stores generally. I’ll go into a grocery store and just walk up and down every aisle checking stuff out, be there for upwards of an hour, then leave without buying anything. Sometimes I’ll buy a candy bar or a box of cereal (or a Diet Pepsi) or some other little Russian goodie that I want to try out, but mostly I just like being in the grocery store and looking at all of the stuff they have or don’t have, and looking at the things people buy, how the stores are organized, etc. I know this sounds really weird. Even for me. Especially for me, actually, because in the States I hate grocery shopping and avoid it like the plague and get really overwhelmed and anxious in grocery stores. Which is also weird, I guess. And I know I’m in a city where I could probably go to a different museum every day for a year and see all of them, and I know that there are a million theatres and ballet companies and musical performances every day, and even if I don’t feel like being ‘cultured’ it’s spring and there are beautiful parks and walks along the river etc., and I’m spending all of my free time in grocery stores. I know.

I was planning on explaining my grocery store thing, but I ran into a bit of a technical difficulty – some sort of stream-of-consciousness chain reaction went off in my brain when I started to explain about the grocery stores, so I’m just going to get a lot of random rubbish out of the way, and then I’ll go back to the grocery store thing:

• In addition to every kind of beer on the planet, you can also choose from a fairly extensive selection of hard liquor at even the smallest grocery stores.
• It’s illegal to buy liquor in a grocery store after 11 pm, but beer isn’t really considered alcohol, so you can buy beer whenever you want.
• You can also drink it on the street or on the metro or in class, despite the law against drinking liquor in public.
• Same goes for mixed drinks, which you can buy canned at grocery stores. Canned Gin and Tonic is especially popular, but there are also alcoholic energy drinks and all manner of your typical mixed drink.
• You can buy beer in little roadside stands that are everywhere. I can’t think of an analogy in the US except maybe hot dog vendors in New York.
• There are also hot-dog-vendor-style huts that sell exclusively dairy products, bread products, tobacco products, and produce.
• The produce huts should not be confused with the random little fruit and vegetable tables: people sell fresh fruits and vegetables in these little improv markets where they sell bootleg videos and nylons and flowers and grated cabbage in large plastic bags. I’m pretty sure everything else sold in these markets is bootlegged, it’s literally just people with a bunch of stuff laid out on folding tables, and everything about the way this particular produce is proffered absolutely screams bootleg. Though I don’t pretend to be able to rightly comprehend the Wallace-and-Grommit style absurdity and intrigue that would accompany the bootlegging of vegetables.
• Although there is bootlegged liquor – any bottle of vodka that costs less than four dollars a bottle, and there are many, is probably bootlegged, which means diluted methanol followed by blindness and/or death, though I think the government has been cracking down on this. “Cracking down” in the actual sense of the word, not in the usual Russian government sense of the word.
• And lastly, stemming from the cabbage in plastic bags: this country, or at least the city, has a weird fixation with plastic bags. Everything comes in plastic bags. I mean EVERYTHING. You can buy milk in plastic bags. And mayonnaise in plastic bags. And salad dressing in plastic bags. And grated cabbage in plastic bags. Bananas come in plastic bags. Clothing stores give exclusively plastic bags. But at grocery stores, you have to pay for a plastic bag to put your groceries in, so people usually bring canvas ones. (Yay!) But the Cult of the Plastic Bag doesn’t stop at the plastic bag as a mere conveyance of recent purchases – oh, no! You can also buy rather more durable and, erm, fashionable? plastic bags at the improv markets described above, right between the socks and the birch bark baskets. So people carry these plastic bags instead of backpacks or briefcases. For example, women always carry cute little purses and NEVER backpacks or briefcases or shoulder bags or anything like that. Instead, anything that won’t fit in their purse they put in a plastic bag.

Whew! That was absurd. Sorry. I initially put all of that in the paragraph about the grocery stores, and they were nested parenthetical statements, but then I ended the paragraph with a dozen )’s in a row and realized that what I had done was ridiculous. So now, back to the kernel of all of that nonsense:

Foreigners don’t go to grocery stores, and I feel like when I go to grocery stores I’m getting to see a closer approximation of St. Petersburg as Russians see it rather than as Americans do. And let me just say, Russian grocery stores are absolutely nothing like American ones. And no two are alike, either. There are “western-style” grocery stores, but that just means they’re bigger than a 7-Eleven and they’re on the less-kassa-like end of the kassa system spectrum. Admittedly, these are the ones I usually go into, but they aren’t organized like American grocery stores at all. For example, there aren’t really snack aisles because there isn’t really snack food here per se. Rather, by the beer aisles, yes that ‘s’ was put there intentionally, (here’s where the first bullet above sprang from) you have beer snacks. Beer snacks include chips, which are either Lays, or these odd but tasty puffed potato things. Also instead of Sour Cream and Onion, they have Sour Cream and Dill flavor chips. But more than chips, beer snacks consist of dried, salted fish. In any number of varieties. A mind-boggling number of varieties, actually. There is also non-dried fish, but that’s a vodka chaser, not a beer snack. I don’t know.

Then, by the tea, there are the snacks that go “к чаю,” (k chayu) which I guess means “with tea.” But this same construction is used to say that this is the jacket that goes with that skirt, or this is the sauce you use for the fish, so it has this idea of matching involved. Or, more accurately, that whatever goes к the other thing has that relationship as its sole purpose and even its destiny – the jacket was made just to match the skirt, or the sauce wouldn’t exist if it weren’t to go on the fish. The snacks in this area are what you’d expect – little cakes and cookies and things like that, but all the same the к чаю phenomenon is something I don’t really understand. Whenever I’m having dinner, my babushka always offers me tea. Then she asks if I want something к чаю. But I thought I was having my tea with dinner, so what do I need to go with the tea? She usually then gives me a little chocolate jam roll or something. I usually think of this as dessert, but she always offers me dessert after dinner, so I think the cake thing was really just for the tea. But then one of my options for what I would like к чаю is always jam, and I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to do with the jam… I know I don’t put it in the tea, because putting something in the tea is a different construction. Do I eat the jam with a spoon? Is there an implied, tacit piece of bread involved? I don’t know.

Anyway, back to the grocery store. They all pretty much have the feeling of scaled-down Costco or, for my east coast readers, Sam’s Club without the negative Wal-Mart association. Yogurt isn’t refrigerated, but rather just set up in a pile in the middle of an aisle. The stores aren’t usually big rooms with aisles, but rather three- or four-room mazes lined with shelves. Also, you can usually buy jewelry and cell phones at grocery stores.

So I like going to the grocery store, just because it’s different and I feel like I’m absorbing the “real Russia” without actually having to interact with people, which, although it invariably ends well, is really scary. But lately my grocery store addiction has grown more serious, and it’s been harder and harder to get a fix. The “western-style” stores just aren’t satisfying anymore! I need a new kind of store – a more exciting grocery store – a non-Western grocery store! So yesterday, in a froth of grocery store craving, I boldly entered two of the grocery stores by my apartment, which stores I had been eyeing ravenously in secret for some time.

The first was just overwhelming. I went in but was only in there for about 10 minutes, because there was just too much going on and I couldn’t figure it out. It was a giant warehouse of a grocery store, but everything was kassa system. So there were probably over 100 counters, each selling a really narrowly defined subset of groceries, and they were all jammed together, and it was just incredible. I think that particular store was a few levels above my current grocery shopping abilities, but I’ll go back when my Russian is better and after I’ve experimented with a few less-intimidating kassa-style grocery stores.

The second store is my new favorite. It was also a little overwhelming, and I’ll probably wait a few weeks to go back because I was kind of intimidated, but all the same it was my favorite grocery store experience so far. The basement of this particular store was a building store. (I saw a man coming out of it as I came in carrying some two-by-fours in a plastic bag. No, I’m not making it up for literary cohesion.) It was organized about like the other stores, but it was in a sort of run-down shopping complex, and so the clientele was different. By different, I mean drunk middle-aged men. Not exclusively, but there was definitely a good-sized contingent of drunk middle-aged men in need of groceries. They were all very good-natured shoppers. Also in this grocery store, there were two things I hadn’t seen before: first, bulk frozen vegetables. As in, a bin of frozen vegetables in the freezer instead of bags of frozen vegetables, and you take your scoop and take out as many scoopfuls of green beans or chopped potatoes or sliced mushrooms or berries as you want. That was really cool.

The second new experience was samples. In American grocery stores samples are pretty common, but I hadn’t seen anything even remotely resembling sample-giving in Russia. This particular sample was a mayonnaise sample. I was looking at the frozen bulk veggies, and a middle-aged woman was talking to the mayonnaise women, and the mayonnaise women called me over to try the mayonnaise with the middle-aged woman, and the four of us stood and chatted about the mayonnaise for awhile. By “the four of us chatted” I mean, of course, they chatted, and I smiled and threw the occasional nod or chuckle into the mix. The mayonnaise, which came in a plastic bag with a picture of olives on it, was quite tasty as far as mayonnaise goes.

After the mayonnaise, I made a cursory cruise around the rest of the store, grabbed an ice cream and a pack of gum, and got in line to pay. I was waylaid in making my purchases, because a crazy old man was standing at the exit chatting up the check-out girl. He started by singling me out to tell me about how he had been in school with the guy ahead of me in line, which made said guy laugh, and said check-out girl divert the conversation back to her, as she could tell I was a bit taken aback. The guy ahead of me finished paying, and the check-out girl asked if I could wait for a sec, because the old crazy man wanted to buy something without waiting in line, and none of us in line were about to impede his progress towards that end. This was a very good natured old crazy man, but crazy all the same. At this point a dog ran by. We’re still in the grocery store, mind you. The dog ran up to the line, from the area of the frozen bulk veggies, and came up to sniff my feet a bit, then ran over to the crazy guy. The check-out girl asked if it was his dog, he answered it was, and asked if he could have two Snickers bars. I was standing by them, so I gave the check-out girl two Snickers bars, she ran them up for him, and he paid for them, offered to buy one for the check-out girl, she politely declined, and he left. I paid for my gum and ice cream, and walked home in an extremely good mood!

I wasn’t actually intending that whole post to be about grocery stores. In fact, I was a little embarrassed by my grocery shopping habit, and so wasn’t going to say anything. But I’m glad I did, because look at all the fun stuff we got to talk about as a result! It was a fruitful topic, as it were. Haha.

Anyway, I hope everyone is well and enjoying spring weather. The weather here has been fantastic, and the city is all the more beautiful. I’ll try to write again soon, hopefully about something mildly interesting!