World Shopping

It’s been more than a month since Scott and I have returned from Tanzania to the States and I’m still experiencing sticker shock. For someone who loves to cook, you’d think I’d be excited to be back in the land of ingredients, but I can’t bear to buy anything that we don’t ‘need’ because everything seems so overpriced. The gloss and size of grocery stores here are still too intimidating for me. Instead of piquing my interest, the amount of options and aisles is dizzying and, more than anything, I just want to get out of there.

I miss Tumaini shop in Monduli, the only store we went to on a regular basis. I miss the pile of bananas and tomatoes and onions and ginger and mangos that were kept outside and the smile of the young man who was in charge of them. I miss Faraha behind the counter inside the shop, his unwavering kindness and peaceful disposition. If he thought you needed any help whatsoever, he’d immediately offer assistance. I miss the refrigerators in the back of the shop which kept glass bottles of Stony Tangawizi, Coke, Sprite, and various colors of Fanta. I miss glancing inside the meat freezer to see if Faraha had any ground beef in stock, usually our lone affordable option for incorporating meat into our meals. I miss that you could check out everything the shop had to offer in a few minutes. For vegetables that Tumaini didn’t have, we’d swing by the daily vegetable market.

In Bhutan, I miss the few shops in Kanglung I would frequent on my walk from school to home. They all had their own unique name, but I never knew them. To Scott, I’d refer to them by events or what they offered – “the shop we went into with Tenzin,” “the shop where we get toilet paper.” I liked to stop in a few shops because you never know what each shop just got in that day. If I was lucky, I might find bunches of asparagus laying on the shop’s window pane, or cilantro, or something else that was green that I didn’t know the name for. One shop’s tomatoes might look riper than another shop’s. If I couldn’t find cheese at one shop, the next one might have it. As quaint as it was, there were surprises to be had in the Upper Market shopping scene in Kanglung – the occasional squash or large bulb garlic. A whole other shopping experience existed in Lower Market where sometimes I would find such treasures as broccoli or green onion.

I even miss Bobs’. In Wrangell there were two grocery stores in town that kept the exact same hours. Within our group of friends, there was a constant debate over which store was better – Bobs’ or City Market. While the majority of our friends picked City as their go-to grocery store, Scott and I were loyal Bobs’ shoppers and it had everything to do with location. Bobs’ was located behind both the Fish and Game office and the Wrangell Sentinel office. After work, it was a matter of walking a few meters to pick up whatever was for dinner that night. We also liked their deli for a quick and affordable lunch. Everyone at Bobs’ knew us, we knew everyone. But the same would’ve applied at City as well. In each grocery store, there was also a movie rental section and an attached liquor store – all of that in one location, simple.

It will just be a matter of time until I get used to the shopping scene in Juneau. What’s funny is that, even though I work downtown, I have yet to check out the shops, which is something I would’ve done immediately if I lived in Wrangell and came to Juneau to visit. In fact, I remember when Mike Tozzo and I took our first trip to Juneau in 2006 for the annual folk music festival. We marveled at the escalator in the airport, the variety of restaurants and stores. We ate sushi and Mexican. We were giddy.

I know, 2006 wasn’t that long ago.