Burton’s Missionary Tales

Posted By burtons on November 11, 2009

Instead of a letter I am sending a travel log. Love Mom, Grandma, Arva

We have learned since we came to Moscow, why people only buy enough food for a day or two instead of for a week or two.  The reason is very simple really.  You have to carry everything you buy home.  No car to get into and drive home.  You walk to the store and you walk home.  DeVere and I are lucky though.  We have a little cart.  Kind of like those personal carts you see in the airport that you put one suitcase on.  Not the big ones, the little ones, maybe more like a short hand truck; small wheels and bungee cords.

DeVere and I live about a ¼ of a mile away from a grocery store, and we walk to the store.  If we think we need a lot we take our little cart, an insulated bag for cold stuff and a babushka bag, a rectangular bag with handles and a zipper closer.  It is about 24 inches square and 9 to 12 inches wide.  If we just need a few items that are not heavy, we carry our groceries home in regular sacks from the store.

When we enter our store, we come into a little lobby.  In front of us and to the left are lockers.  You put your cart and the bags in one of the locker and take the key with you.  Women can take their purses in the store, but DeVere cannot take in his bag.  (Yes, DeVere carries a bag with him, over the shoulder type like a missionary bag.  It has his umbrella, his water bottle, gloves and scarf and anything else we might need away from the apartment.) Also, in front of us in the lobby is a man.  Now we think he is a guard making sure no one shop lifts, but he also makes sure that you don’t carry anything in you shouldn’t.  He is not the only guard either. In our store there are at least three, but probably more.

After the bag is locked in a locker we get a grocery cart and go to the left to start our shopping.  We come to produce first on our left.  We buy potatoes and carrots here, but most of our fruits and vegetables we buy from the kiosks along the sidewalk on the way to and from our apartment.  On the right is pasta.  Continuing down this aisle we come to dairy on the left and cereals on the right.  Most of the milk to buy is irradiated, so it does not have to be refrigerated.    Recently, however, our little store has been carrying milk from Finland.  It is closer to our milk at home and must be refrigerated.  I can even drink it.  Not quite the same taste as at home, but close enough.  They also have a product called kefir.  It is clabbered milk, I hear.  I don’t think I will try it.  They sell a lot of it.  I see people buying it instead of the good stuff.  On the right next to the cereals is the sugar and salt.  It is amazing how much stuff they can get into a little space.

At the end of this aisle, against the wall is the meat counter.  It runs the width of the store.  The deli is also in this section, as are cold cuts.  We don’t buy a lot at the meat counter as the prices are quite high.  We shop elsewhere for most of our meat.

The second aisle has water and juice on the left and on the right we start with jams and jellies and ice cream topping, then pickle (an enormous variety), then canned vegetables and beans, then sauces, then dressings and ketchup.  You might think the juice was boring but the fruit juice here is wonderful.  We love it.  We have juice with almost every meal.  (It tastes better than milk and you can’t believe the variety.  I will miss the juice when we come home.

We skip the next aisle.  It is the widest aisle in the store and also has pallets in the center full of product.  This is where the wine, beer and hard alcohol are.  There is a little soda pop at one end and we pick up some sprite or Fanta here, but mostly we just skip this aisle.  The next aisle has coffee on the left and a refrigerator case on the right with ice cream, frozen pizza and other quick to heat and eat stuff.  Just next to the coffee is the baby formula and baby food.  We are coming to the last aisle.  On the right are more freezer cases.  In the first part are frozen seafood.  I am not fond of the shrimp looking up at me.  They still have their eyes and antenna.  On the left is the fish cooler.  I don’t’ like this area either.  It smells like fish, rotten fish.  And they have dried and salted fish to buy; the whole fish, head, tail, eyes,scales.  Now I don’t know it they have been cleaned or not and I don’t think I will buy one to find out.  Our translator says people eat these for lunch.

At the end of this aisle is another refrigerator case.  It has cheese, butter and mayonnaise in it.  At the end of the case are the eggs.  The eggs are not in the case being cooled, they are on their own little shelf.  They do not refrigerate their eggs here and I am still among the living.  They don’t wash eggs well either.  We always wash our eggs here even if they look clean, because sometimes they polish their eggs with the whites of broken eggs.  Oh, back in a little corner is pet food.  They even have Whiskas.  End of room one.

Room two is a small room, three sides and a central gondola.  The fourth side is the aisle to the third room.  Here we buy our cookies, candy and crackers.  The candy is wonderful.  They have wrapped chocolates in cellophane bags, and boxes and tins.  I’m afraid we spend a little more money here than we should.

The third room has the bread, a small variety of chips, and the checkout lanes.  Like at home, you can buy candy bars ( Snickers, Milky Ways, M&M’s, and others) and gum and cigarettes by the check outs.  This room also has a DVD section, a gift section and a small pharmacy is one corner.  You shop through a window at the pharmacy.  You tell the pharmacist what you want and she gets it for you.  I take empty packages of what I need or have a Russian write it down for me.  One of our sister missionaries is a pharmacist.  We have now come full circle and are back at the lobby.  We stop at one of the tables in the small lobby and bag the rest of our groceries or put them in the bags on our cart.

Did you notice that there were no paper towel, plastic bags, and laundry or dish soap? No toilet paper, household cleaning supplies, shampoo or hairspray.  To buy those items we have to go down stairs.  Our groceries go into one of the lockers and down we go to buy the non food items we need.  In the same shop is a wonderful house wares department.  Utensils, pots, pans dishes, figurines.  There is also a dry cleaner downstairs.

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that this is a large store.  I would be surprised if the aisles were 30 feet long.  They are only wide enough for two carts to pass each other and the carts are not as big as the ones at home.

When we are done with our shopping, we walk home.  It is only a quarter of a mile, but too far the carry a lot of groceries.  I enjoy shopping there.  I generally enjoy the walk to and from the store.  We often walk to the store on the way home from work.  We have recently found canned green beans.  We were tickled to death, because I had decided we would do without green beans as neither one of us like frozen beans.  Peanut butter is hard to find.  It is not something Russians have acquired a taste for yet.

Things are much better here than we thought they would be.  When DeVere was here in 1996, food was in short supply and people grew as much as they could.  They call that period of time the black times and compare it to the early 1600’s when another government system had failed.

I hope you have enjoyed this trip to our supermarket.

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