Thursday, June 02, 2011

Shopping

I have never been the kind of shopper who is happy to wander around a mall for hours (in fact, I get downright twitchy if I have to do that). It's more my style to figure out what I need, where I can purchase it, and then make a tactically targeted trip to get it. That may sound boring to some of you but it has worked for me for years.

It's hard to employ my beautifully honed system here. For one thing, I don't really know what all those grotty little shops in Khobar sell (well, I do; they mostly sell cheap crap from India and China). And I can't find out unless I am willing to wander the streets. Not only is there no such thing as a telephone directory, but most stores don't even have addresses. Some streets have multiple names (3rd Street is also known as Prince Abdul Aziz ben Abdullah Street), others have no name at all. I've been given business cards that list a shop address as "two blocks from Jarir Bookstore."

Most female expats carry ragged bits of paper with handdrawn maps to one specialty store or another given to them by friend. For example, I carry one showing a route to the Asian grocery where I can get frozen edamame. The major landmarks on that map are the Tamimi grocery store on the Corniche and the note that the storefront of the Asian grocery is "red."

But wandering the streets is too much like wandering in a mall for me (just dirtier and smellier; Khobar doesn't have sewers or even curbs in some places; I keep a separate pair of shoes that I wear when I must walk around Khobar and never wear them in my car or house). Add to that the facts that it was 104F at 11am today and that I must do the wandering sheathed neck to ankle in black polyester, well, let's just say that very little wandering takes place.

I don't even bother shopping for clothing here. Nothing fits and it's all shoddy and ugly. In fact, in a bit of a protest against the utterly stupid culture we have to deal with here, since I am not accorded full human status (no driving, no voting, must cover with the abaya, etc), I spend as little of my money here as possible. I am willing to pay more to ship an item in just to avoid lining the pockets of the Saudis with my money.

But food is something that I must purchase locally. And that confronts one with a whole new set of challenges.

Saudi Arabia imports nearly all of its vegetables from places like India, Syria, Palestine, North Africa, and Pakistan. There are lots of imported dry goods and drinks from the UK. I can even find dry goods imported from the US if I really want them (they are very expensive, 4-10 times the regular price for the same items in the US). Because of the extremely large Asian expat population who are the maids, drivers, gardeners, etc., the fresh vegetables that I can find in the stores are amazingly varied and sometimes even challenging. June is "Mango Madness" month in Lulu--there are bins of more than 50 varieties of mangoes from all over the world, all priced the same so you can just walk along and fill a bag with different mangoes that catch your fancy--green ones, red ones, yellow ones, sweet ones, tangy ones, ones with texture like custard, and so forth. Good thing the dogs and I LOVE mangoes.

I have to go to Bahrain for pork. The Shias in Bahrain are getting restless again; I haven't been there since last fall and have no plans to go this summer. But as long as you can get by without pork (we expats learn to get by without a lot of stuff, actually), you have excellent choices in meat. Lamb from Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia. Beef from Brazil, US, Australia. For the most part, chicken and eggs are all local. But you can find organic Saudi eggs! And fish, fish, fish from the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. The fish counter at Lulu is always 3-4 Filipinos deep fighting over the displays of whole fish that are often more than three feet long. Silver fish, yellow fish, spotted fish, jaws gaping, some with huge teeth. All are extremely fresh (you can tell by their clear moist eyes). Since I can't really deal with whole fish (I find them a bit aggressive and disturbing), I buy my fish already filleted at other stores. Hammour, a firm, white-fleshed fish that comes locally from the Gulf, is one of my favorites. The Saudis love hammour too. You can do anything with it--but grilling is my favorite way of cooking it. Since I love to cook and I am a rather adventurous eater, I also try out all kinds of cool recipes for curries and vegetarian meals.

But if you happen to have a US recipe, you do need to be fairly creative in finding ingredients. For example, in a spring Clean Run magazine there was a very short recipe for dog treats. It called for baby food carrots, baby food chicken, chicken stock, whole wheat flour, and dried parsley. And once mixed the recipe suggested that you use a pastry tip and cone to dot the mixture on your cookie sheet. Sounded like a good recipe worth trying. I still make more than half of the food the dogs eat each day and making treats, as long as the process isn't too complicated, is a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

I trotted off to Lulu this morning on the Aramco shopping bus. Lulu is a hypermarket in Khobar that caters to the Asian expat community. Few Saudis shop there. You mostly wade through Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis, etc. First problem: no baby food meats, only fruits and vegetables. Don't Asians feed their babies meats? Apparently not, or at least not in that form. So I headed for the "potted meat" aisle. Lots of choices here--but potted meat is kind of a scary proposition. I watched an Asian woman select a couple of cans of potted chicken so I selected the same ones. Turns out it is kind of firm like Spam but in the food processor I was able to turn it into a smooth paste. Next challenge: dried parsley. I already knew I wouldn't find that but the goal was to find a suitable alternative. My choice: dried mint. It makes the dog treats smell very nice. The final challenge was the pastry tip and cone--no such thing exists here! In fact, I had already decided that a strong plastic freezer bag with the tiniest snip of the tip would work just fine. And in fact it did!

Since shopping in town involves driving my car to a parking lot in camp, taking a shopping bus into town, taking a taxi back to my car on camp, and driving my car back to my hovel, with the necessary multiple shuffles of grocery bags from one hot vehicle to another, a necessary accessory is one of those soft-sided coolers for the meat and yogurt. None of this is straightforward: there are multiple security checks leaving and returning to camp. Traffic can be unpredictable. You wait for the bus. You might have to wait a bit to get a taxi. Lulu is always packed on Thursday mornings so you wait in the check out line. You have to pay the driver (no meters, you have to know what the going rate is, currently SR 30). The entire affair from front door to front door can take more than 3 hours.

Sometimes the commissary selection, limited as it is, looks pretty good.

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