In Which When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Go Shopping....Again
on Zoe Page (Sierra Leone), 09/Nov/2010 16:51, 34 days ago
It’s important to look on the bright side of life. Things could be far worse. I could be stranded in Burkina Faso without access to vital meds:http://acadienenafrique.blogspot.com/ Or, like a few people I met at pre-departure training, I could still be in the UK following visa and CRB issues. There are people who were supposed to go 4 or more weeks ago who are still waiting for a revised departure date, and trying to deal with having already quit their jobs, rented out their houses etc... I could be like the doctors who came out with me who finally got their medical registration yesterday. They, at least, get to start‘sharing skills and changing lives’ now, though.I get a bike to take me into town, and since it’s doing all the work, I go further than normal, up to the bank to get some cash. It is empty and I’m in and out within 6 minutes. Clearly Tuesday morning is the time to go. There is a beggar outside who approaches me but stops when I adjust my helmet over my arm with an over-exaggerated gesture. It is my weapon of choice today. The bank guard has a bad ass gun, but sits there looking bored most of the time, and a little old beggar is not reason enough to get up off the chair.At the market there are aubergine, 3 for 5000, so even though it’s going off-script (or, rather, off shopping list) I get some. Vasile will have a plan for them, I’m sure. In Choitram’s I buy beans and corn (and candy and cookies). It never ceases to amaze me that a food shop can have so little, well, food in it. The first aisle has freezers and fridges down one side, stocking an eclectic mix of Häagen-Dazs ice cream bars, Cornettos and London Dairy cups (last seen in Dubai) next to unidentifiable packs of meat and, most bizarrely, Quorn mince and Quorn nuggets. On the other side there is an insane amount of plates and trays, at prices no one here can surely afford, and up above Tupperware, both normal looking lock ‘n lock style, and local tie dyed stuff. The next aisle is entirely none food – cutlery, candles and some cleaning stuff, with hideous greetings cards on the end. Next to that we have the toiletries with a crazy array of imported shampoo at even crazier prices. Hurray for hotel miniatures is what I say. Finally, the last aisle actually has some food in it. One side has a small number of crackers and crisps at the end, but the rest is cookies and cakes, with a selection to rival a British supermarket. The other side is lesslikely to send you into a diabetic coma, but might give you a coronary from the prices: £5 for a small bottle of olive oil, £3 for a jar of peanut butter, £2.50 for a jar of olives, £1.50 for a tin of sweetcorn or beans (except baked beans which bizarrely cost only a 3rd of that), just over £1for tinned tomatoes. They have excess drink stock here too, just not refrigerated. It’s £1.50 for a carton of juice, £1 for a can of Diet Coke (but 50p if you’ll take your soft drinks sugared instead). Right at the end near the one till, they have chocolate. 80p for Dairy Milk, 70p for a MarsBar or Bounty, 30p for a knock off version of either, or a fake Kinder Egg. 14p for a single Celebration – or you can buy a small box of Roses for £6 or a tiny tin of Quality Street for £9. I don’t know who buys this stuff, and it’s not what I would choose if stocking a shop from scratch. Why do you need 4 brands of identical mixed veg (sweetcorn, peas, carrots) when you could have something far more useful like, oh, bread / wraps or Pesto...?I get to the checkout and am amazed. To understand, you have to be brought up to speed with the weird rules here. I occasionally supplement my chocolate and tinned veg shop with non-food items– anything from a bar of soap (I know, kinda retro but 1/30 the price of the cheapest shower gel) to candles to washing powder. Bags are packed for you here, either by the cashier or, if there’s one hanging around, a young boy. Occasionally I will just do it myself, as I always have bags with meanyway. Once they looked on in horror as I began to pack up my things, then firmly took the packet of laundry powder off me, wrapped it in another bag, and gave it back to me. A bit like when you buy a salad box from Morrisons, except unlike those, this is not likely to leak. They firmly believe, however, that food and non-food items cannot be in the same bag. It's like a religious rule about cooking gone weirdly wrong.Today, randomly, they are out of their candy-striped thin plastic bags, so instead I get a Spritex branded one. Spritex is the extremely toxic bug killing spray we use in the house here. I recently read (and reviewed) a great book calledHow Pleasure Worksand it went beyond all things nice to discuss how the mind works in general. There have been studies that show that if you take a clean, empty bottle that is labelled‘Poison’ and let a child watch you fill it with water from a tap, they won’t take even a tiny sip when you then offer it to them, and most adults will hesitate before doing so too. So anyway, put the two together, and it is incredible that they are willing to put food in a bag branded with Spritex. Don't they think one will rub off on the other?On the way home, there is a uniformed Policeman on Hotel Road. He looks as bored as the security guard from earlier, but it can’t be coincidental. I suppose it gives him something to do, though.