Grocery stores as a tourist attraction?
Think about it. Have you ever walked around your local supermarket and stopped at the ”international food” section, looking at all the different uses for rice or the cool/odd/disgusting/unpronounceable sauces on offer? It’s fun, right? Or at the very least, interesting. Possibly even enlightening. Multiply that by fifty and you get why I always try to swing by a grocery store in every country I’m in.
Doing a bit of your own cooking (and by “cooking” I mean mainly buying bread and meat and making sandwiches or pouring your own bowl of cereal, unless you have a kitchenette) is always a great way to save money. Even if it’s just snacks, bringing your own granola bar and water bottle can easily save you $5-$10 a day, depending on your destination and appetite. That’s valuable souvenir money! So while you’re at the grocery, you might as well take a few minutes to walk the aisles and see what culinary treasures you can unearth. You never know if that brand of beer you had once ten years ago and could never find again is hiding around the corner, or if the chili lime chicken bouillon you find in aisle four is going to become the centerpiece for your new signature dish back home. And when someone asks you where you got it, you can be all mysterious and say “it’s imported.”
When in London, I’m all about finding the cool flavours of crisps. We have your standard salt and vinegar, ketchup and nacho cheese in Canada, they have roasted lamb and mint, chargrilled steak, pickled onion, seafood mayonnaise, crispy duck in hoisin sauce, turkey with paxo sage and onion… if you can braise, boil or bake it, they probably have chips to match. Southeast Asia is also good for this, though they have substantially more seafood options and their packaging usually involves more google-eyed animated characters. One of my coworkers in Spain said the prawn cocktail is great, though I’ll have to take their word for it. On one trip I actually kept a list, and found no less than 25 different flavours in one country in the space of a week. Think I tried two of them. And these flavours are, for the most part, incredibly accurate. The chargrilled steak I tried smelled like nothing, but once on the tongue, you were just looking for the side of mashed potatoes and steamed veggies.
I’m always drawn to snack-type foods, like chips, gum (oooh, there’s this applemint Dentyne in Thailand I loved so much I brought like 10 packs home with me) and candy, mainly because they’re cheap and small, so you can try something really experimental and, if it’s totally revolting, you can throw it out and you’re only out a buck. Meat always intimidates me (especially since you can’t always read the label), but one day I’ll have a place with a stove in some far-flung destination and I’ll go for it. It’s all about embracing the local culture. In Singapore this past march we discovered pea cheezies (for lack of a better comparison). They were made entirely of peas, green and shaped like a pod, but puffed up, deep fried and lightly salted to the cheezie consistency. Sounds strange on paper (hell, it looked strange in the bag, too, that’s why I bought it), but these were surprisingly good. In Costa Rica, tamarind drink, once you get past it’s industrial-waste brown colour, is incredibly sweet and yummy. I got all excited here when, on a day trip across the boarder to Seattle, I found some Tamarind Kool-Aid, but when I tried it back home it tasted kind of like cardboard. Total let down. Oh well, it’s a reason to go back to Costa Rica!
Also in Costa Rica I discovered my beloved coco pops (there is not a breakfast buffet worldwide that doesn’t have coco pops) are endorsed there by a space elephant named Melvin. That was just funny.
International grocery shopping can be a fun thing to do if you’re traveling with kids, too. While you’re picking up the necessities, you can challenge young Jimmy to find the craziest looking fish in the seafood department or weirdest-sounding product name (this one can be particularly fun if you can’t speak the language). Kids usually seem to gravitate to the gross, or what they think is gross, anyway, and this is where the cheaper options like candy come in handy. Treat them to one small thing, but make it the grossest they can find, and hear the giggles start. This can also be done locally, just check out the various ethnic food stores around your area and keep the kids entertained on a rainy afternoon.
For me, I think this all stems back to my Grandparent’s travels when I was a little kid. When they’d come back from driving across the US or touring Europe they’d bring me something we couldn’t get in Canada, like Barbie breakfast cereal, or Swiss cow-shaped chocolate, so now I always want to see what other surprises the world has to offer. This can also be a good way to buy a gift for that impossible-to-shop-for person on your list. Nobody ever turns down food, especially if it was brought into the country especially for them and you know it’s something they’ll like. The one exception to this was when my BF got a bag of dried bean and anchovy trail mix from Hong Kong. It’s been months and that’s still sitting unopened on his desk, but I can’t really blame him, the fish are dried whole in there, complete with the little dried heads and eyes. But still, because we got it at a grocery store as opposed to a souvenir place, the cost was low enough that I don’t give him a hard time about *sniff* rejecting one of my gifts.
Ever found anything spectacular/weird/memorable in the food aisle when on vacation? Let me know. But if not, try spending an hour of your next vacation at the supermercado and see how much culinary trouble you can get into!
