Grocery Shopping

I know that it is hard to imagine what grocery shopping means to me, butonce a wee I hit the town to gather what we need. I usually try to go the day that the produce train rolls in from Ethiopia. The Djiboutian government recently bull-dozed the traditional open-air market and we now all travel a bit outside of the town limits to a new, fancy covered market. This new market is meant to be an improvement in many ways from the old market area. It is self-contained, there is no traffic, and pedestrian traffic is kept within the confines of the market area. The market is also covered with a corrugated tin roof. The first time I went to this market was about three weeks after it opened, because we had been in the States. Each week since, the filth and number of flies have seemed to multiply. There doesn’t appear to be a drainage system of any kind and I can only imagine what it will smell like when it is 110 degrees vs. 90 degrees.

After the produce market, I go on to the various grocery stores in no particular order... I go to Nougaprix for meat and produce that I can’t find at the open air market. From Nougaprix, I go on to Tom Thumb Bakery for croissants. From Tom Thumb on to the Casino grocery, which is a French grocery and has neater packages then Nougaprix, but not much different options, but at Casino you can buy ham and pork products. From Casino, I move on to the Heron Market, where I buy my eggs. If we are having a party I go to BB Modi’s to buy soft drinks and alcohol.

What I forgot about grocery shopping being so time consuming and a traveling adventure, is that this process turns you in to a hoarder. When you see anything that is hard to come by on the shelves, you tend to buy all that you see. For example, tahini is a hot commodity, only one grocery store carries it and when it comes in stock, it sells out in a day or two – so you buy three or four bottles. Cream cheese, same thing. So, I often buy the things in copious quantities.

To continue the scene setting of what it means to grocery shop, every price at the open air market is negotiable. There is a certain amount of price setting, for example, apples are typically 500 franc a kilo (which is $2.82), because I buy 2 kilos every week from the same vendor, I can often get my 2 kilos for 800 franc, ($4.51 US). If I had the desire I could negotiate every price that I pay at the vegetable and fruit market, but I usually end up getting fairly good prices because I go to the same vendors every week, without having to haggle. On top of the prices being negotiable, the vegetables and fruit are organic in a different sense than the organic produce we get in the States – I mean they come directly from a field in Ethiopia where the field really wasn’t treated with anything, where the soil is naturally fertilized in ways we don’t want to even consider, and the produce is grown from seeds that are truly in their natural state. So, tomatoes are not red, oranges are not orange, lemons are not yellow, mangoes are not red when ripe, bananas are brown, the papayas are pitted. The vegetables and fruit, when in season, are beyond delicious – but I often have to buy 2 kilos of tomatoes to get ½ kilo of nice tomatoes.

On meat, I go to the Yemeni grocery, Nougaprix, where they have meat (beef and sometimes chicken) from Ethiopia which is much, much less expensive than meat from France, the other option. Because the Yemeni grocery is a Muslim grocery, they butcher right there in the humane and appropriate way for Islam (which is something like with a sharp knife by hand). If I want hamburger (steak hache) – I pick the chunk of meat from the display window that I like, the butcher then trims all of the fat off of the meat, and then grinds the amount that I want. If I tell him that I want hamburgers, he then goes in the back and gets a little metal press and forms them into hamburger shape for me. If I want steak or tenderloin it is the same process. I point to the side of beef that looks good and they trim the meat to my specifications.

If we buy things that are largely desired only by ex-pats, we pay out the waa-zoo for those items. Cream cheese is $11 a block, Cheddar cheese $16.00 a block, pepperoni $25.00 a package, celery $20 a bunch! You are only able to pay those ridiculous prices if you can find the items!! Sometimes I will go into the grocery stores and all of the shelves will be wiped out, because a container ship has been stuck in customs or the flights haven’t come in.