Obtaining Sustenance

Vinohrady Pavilion: My Albert is in the basement of this beautiful old converted pavilion building. There are a lot of basement supermarkets here.One of the most familiar and yet alien quotidian experiences in Prague is that of grocery shopping. It’s such a regular, comforting action. It feels like home, domestic, regular, thrifty. At home I do the same thing when I walk into the grocery store, pick up a little blue basket (I suppose sometimes it’s red at home but here, the grocery store I frequent, Albert, has all blue) and walk into the produce section. I’ve found that the grocery stores here have the same basic layout as at home, produce first, then dairy, etc. then the dry goods. Freezer sections are somewhat lacking here, which is always a bit startling because my default “too tired to really cook” dinners are usually frozen food of some kind.

But there are a lot of things that are strangely different despite the familiar layouts. When I go looking for snack food, every time I seem to hope that Nabisco products will suddenly be gracing the shelves. Groceries are generally cheaper here, like everything else, but not so much so that you don’t consider the generic brand before going for the name brand. Sometimes here, unlike at home, (that is assuming that you, like me, are not particular about the amount of processing, etc.) you really need to buy the more expensive brand in order to get a product that actually has some taste. I’ve learned not to buy large quantities of milk, as it’s not homogenized here and seems to go bad within a couple of days. I’ve learned that it is impossible to get good tomato sauce, that peanut butter is ridiculously expensive no matter where you go, that bread, a loaf of beautiful, fresh, country rye bread that you might pay upwards of four dollars for in New York, is about fifty cents. An RA tipped me off about the fish. In landlocked countries like here that have never used fish as a basic part of their cultural palette, DON’T BUY FISH. It’s always frozen and often gross. Taco ingredients? Forget about it. The egalitarianism of food in New York grocery stores is not at all reflected in Czech ones. You need to bring your own bags here to carry off your purchases unless you want to buy them, and though the checkout counters have gum, the usual slew of candy, gum, batteries, etc. is not present. Also, household goods can be a crapshoot. At my local Albert they don’t have Ziploc bags, but at the Tesco they do. Of course, the lines are the same. They’re always the same.

So every time I go to the grocery store I think, “This is normal, this is good, this is how people live.” I helped an old man get some juice off a shelf he couldn’t bend down to reach the other day, and every time I’m in there, people accost me with Czech, so I feel integrated, a touch expatriate even. But fifteen minutes later I’m inevitably faced with the thought, “If only they had fucking Pop Tarts.”