Off the Map

Going to the grocery store is not just a small errand, anymore.  It's an epic battle and an unsolvable puzzle, and each of the seven trips I've made so far in this country have been Pyrrhic victories at best. 

Or, I'm just a wee bit melodramatic.  But it has been tough.  Grocery shopping in a new country is the best metaphor I've thought of so far for making a trans-continental move.  It theoretically shouldn't be that hard, but for some reason you're totally thwarted at every step.  My children, bewilderingly, need to eat several times a day, so I can't put off buying food for them.  After three weeks, I'm making progress, but it's felt each time like a video game where you have to build a world but begin with a completely dark map.  Worse, it feels sometimes like I'm trying to navigate a new place but I have a map from another place to help me navigate. I don't know where I need to go and I can't even begin to figure out how to get there.  I'm trying to use the map and thinking it should be working but every trip I end up bewildered and lost.  Fortunately, the whole situation is generally funnier than it is disheartening, but that doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to trips to the store becoming uneventful.

Problem the first:  I'm walking to the grocery store.  I'm just randomly Googling grocery stores and seeing what I can figure out.  So my first two trips resulted in me walking more than a mile to get to a store when there's one I can see from my window.  I thought it was a good idea.  I blame jet lag.  Probably part of the problem is that I love to do things the hard way.

Next, I'm walking home.  I'm accustomed to Houston, where I cart a week's worth of groceries out to my car, load them in, drive them home, and walk them about 20 feet from my garage to my refrigerator.  Yes, one of the close grocery stores is only 500 meters away, but that's a lot more than 20 feet.  I thought I could get a whole weekend's worth of shopping in one day, and I thought I was being sooo savvy because I only got what I could carry in a single hand basket.  It was a heavy basket, unfortunately.  When I tried to haul those two bags of up the hill (Yes, uphill.  Every. Time.), I started inventing new curse words with every step.  I'm not vain enough, sadly, to find real joy in thinking about the effect all this uphill hauling is going to have on my leg muscles, I just want to lay down on the sidewalk in front of the Thai Embassy (which is maybe 50 steps from the store) and weep loudly until someone carries me home, like an overwrought toddler.  I'm not sure that I'm ready to talk about the day I walked home more than a mile with four bags of groceries; perhaps in time the memory will fade.  Singapore is thankfully much less hot than I thought it would be.  Honestly, Singapore in July vs. Houston in July?  I'd choose Singapore every time.  It's super humid here, and there's no way to avoid getting sweaty, but in the shade, it's actually pleasant, which would never, ever happen in Houston.  Not in the shade, not on a rainy day, not at 6am, never.

I do have lots of stores to choose from, which is a good thing and a bad thing.  I can't quite catch my rhythm because I haven't been to the same store twice, but at least I don't have to keep going back to the same terrible places.  I don't yet have quite enough information to make a good choice, so I just have to kind of blindly grab and hope for the best.  Kind of like I did with the wall o' soy sauce I saw today--over fifty different kinds, very few with labels I could read.  

So here are the stores I've visited so far:

Cold Storage - Food for expats--lots of Waitrose pickles and American cereal, with prices that reflect the import taxes and the desperation of homesickness. Smells powerfully of Durian, I think because of the bakery across the way.  You will spend way too much here, because you came in for a chicken and some potatoes, which are both expensive, but not prohibitively so, but then you grab some tomatoes, thinking they'll make a nice sandwich, without checking the price, and then the checkout guy looks up at you when he scans the tomatoes, winks, and rubs his fingers together in the universal "if you're going to waste money like that, why not just set it on fire" gesture.  The bread for your sandwich, incidentally, costs three times as much as it would at home.  So you better like that sandwich (it was fantastic).  This is in a mall, like everything else and all these stores, though this mall is extra tony and it's an interesting experience to walk past Hermes and Jimmy Choo with your groceries.

Jason's  - Part of the Cold Storage family, but smaller, fancier, and even more expensive.  Wasn't sure that was possible.  So you need to select among seven different kinds of foie gras?  Desperate for a fresh oyster flown in from New England?  This is your spot.  It's also your closest store, and on Friday afternoons you might run in and close your eyes and grab chips (crisps), Nutella, bread and apples so your children don't have to starve or go to the mall for a meal, and you'll see that you've spent $60 and want to apologize to your Scottish ancestors for having offended them so profoundly.

Isetan - Japanese department store with groceries in the basement.  Best pop soundtrack, and best place for singing along rather too loudly in the checkout line.  Not enough space for dancing, though.  You will stand in line long enough to sing through three songs because several people in front of you are buying at least an entire paycheck's worth of seafood that you can't identify.  There are bags of rice that cost more than a nice bottle of wine.  Great place for fun candy, fish so fresh and lovely it doesn't matter that you don't know what it's called, and take-away sushi.

Fair Price - My favorite so far.  They have a good selection, and decent prices.  Their prices are even more decent if you're careful to buy local products, so you get mangoes instead of apples and bok choy instead of peas.  You take pictures of vegetables you would like to try and a lady gives you a dirty look, evidently for being a gross tourist.  You long to explain and smile winningly, forgetting that now she definitely thinks you're a weirdo because who the heck smiles at strangers?  You'll learn about unfamiliar vegetables another day, I guess.  This store would be even better if you didn't have to go through one mall to cross a giant street to enter another where the store is, but at least here you only have to pass a Longchamp and a Bose store to leave.

Giant - Kind of like a Singaporean Wal-mart.  I haven't actually bought anything here, because I was tired and the children were with me and I didn't have a list.  Kind of overwhelming.  Kind of awesome.  

The heart of the problem, however, is what happens at the grocery store.  Everyone has bought food, right?  You decide what you want to eat, you get a recipe to make it, if you need one, you make a list of the ingredients, and you bring the ingredients home to cook them.  It's a simple process, and one I didn't think I'd have trouble with once I found a good store.  But here's the deal: you can't make a list if you don't know what you're going to find at the store, and my kitchen supplies are seriously limiting my repertoire.  

I thought I might make some chocolate chip cookies, because my priorities are in order, but I can't get chocolate chips.  So I could probably chop up a chocolate bar, but I haven't found vanilla extract.  And if I buy sugar and flour, I have to store what I don't use, and my containers for storing dry goods are on a boat in the middle of the Pacific.  And I don't have a cookie sheet. Scratch cookies.  So I think I can make some lentils and meat and salad to eat in pita bread, because I saw pita at the store.  I hesitate to buy the sad spices that are too expensive at the store, because I've heard there's a big, fun spice market I SHOULD go to, but again I'm missing my jars and I'm not sure I have the energy for the spice market quite yet, so I just spite the bullet and buy the spices.  But then I wander the store looking for lentils--everyone eats lentils, right?  If a store has foie gras and pop tarts and octopus it should have a staple like lentils, I would think.  But it doesn't.  I see quail eggs and disposable underwear and six kinds of fruit I can't identify, but there are no lentils.  So I buy mung beans and hope I can cook them, even though I never have before (I did it!  They were good.). And then there aren't actually any pita, because that was evidently a one-time thing.  And half the recipes I think of happen like that.  I'm missing a pantry staple that I don't want to buy until we're settled, or a kitchen tool I forgot was essential, and if everything goes well we have a good dinner but I forgot that the meal would take a million dishes to make and now I have to wash them all by hand because there's no dishwasher.

Like my favorite video game that begins with a dark map that I'm probably going to have to play after this because now I'm thinking about it, figuring all of this out is halfway fun.  I look forward to becoming a pro Singaporean grocery shopper.  I look forward to exploring spice markets and wet markets and fruit shops and butcher shops, and I'm really excited about having a real address and phone number so I can order groceries to be delivered, which is a genius idea.  But I think those video games would be less fun if I HAD to play them, and if I needed to achieve a certain level of success a few times a week because people were counting on me.  I just hate being so wildly incompetent.  It's a comfort to know I'll get better, but like many other things this summer, as my man Tom Petty says, the waiting is the hardest part.