Grocery Shopping

Grocery shopping has never been my favorite thing to do. I always get overwhelmed by possibilities and take way longer than I should. And grocery shopping here is part of that “everything is more complicated and takes longer than it should” feature of living in Jakarta. But here are some interesting features of my grocery shopping.

I shop mostly at two big supermarkets, Carrefour and Hypermart. They sell other stuff beside food, so they’re kind of like a Walmart or a Target but only kind of. When I arrived at Carrefour the other day, there was a promotional tent outside where this was happening. Yes, those are children in oversized plastic balls rolling around like hamsters in an inflatable pool filled with water. I couldn’t stop laughing, and I really needed to share it with someone.

Carrefour has a garage on the first floor so you have to take this moving ramp up to the second floor. They magnetize the cart wheels so that they don’t slide down. At first glance, Carrefour looks pretty much like a grocery store in the U.S.

There are some differences, though. For one thing, there are a lot more store employees. Labor is very cheap in Indonesia, so at times there are more employees than customers in an aisle. Sometimes they thrust products at me or try to get me to sample something. There’s always someone mopping the floor. Actually, that’s true almost everywhere I go—school, mall, grocery shopping. Floors and windows really do need to be cleaned often (pollution brings in a lot of grime), but sometimes I think employees just need something to do. Other grocery store differences: eggs aren’t refrigerated, there’s a whole aisle of powdered milk, bread pretty much only comes in white, and when there’s a problem at the register (at least at Carrefour), they wave a flag until someone come to help.

My favorite product that I've seen recently was in a Indian grocery store which I visited with my Indian neighbor from across the hall (he and his wife are also IPEKA teachers). Sorry for the blur, but it says "World's No. 1 Fairness Cream for Men." For a white person who cannot tan to save her life, this looks very funny.

The story of this week is me starting to fall in love with fruit here. I started with familiar fruits, bananas and apples and oranges and grapes, but I’ve been branching out. I discovered pink guava juice a few weeks ago, and I’m pretty much addicted to it now. My exciting discovery this week was that guava naturally prevents or cures dengue fever (a nasty virus transmitted by mosquitoes). I love it when I’m smarter than I think I am. I also tried fresh guava, pink and white, for the first time. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a green fruit about the size of a small apple or orange, and you wash it and cut off the top and bottom and bite it and it’s juicy and fleshy and it can have some small seeds, but overall delicious. I also found some excellent mangoes this week, some at a fruit stall near my apartment (thankfully, I had an Indonesian friend to translate), and some at Hypermart. Mangga is Indonesian for mango, and they’re fabulous here. I'm also learning to cut up a mango successfully, but give me a little more time to practice.

I have one more piece of grocery news, though it’s not really my grocery news. On the way to church last week, we saw this motorbike. Those chickens are alive (or were). I hope they enjoyed the ride.