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| Milk of the Mare (fermented, of course) |
In the last few years of my time in Australia, I started to call the place a "land of plenty." Last year, I could walk down my street in Seddon and grab lemons, kumquats, pomegranates, pears, feijoas and apples from the neighbourhood's trees. I could go across the road to Footscray and load up on as much cheap produce as possible at the local Viet market, and quality meat at the halal butchers. If too lazy to make it to the markets, I could go to the ghetto supermarket in Footscray Plaza and find a mostly stocked fruit and vegetable section (albeit at high prices).
A trip to the supermarket in Mongolia, on the other hand, is a sick joke that never fails to make one pine for the markets of, well, anywhere I've ever been aside from here. A typical experience begins, as in most markets, the fresh fruit and vegetable section. You are confronted with a paltry and pathetic (in the original sense of the word) selection of a few apples, some sad looking (and tasting) bananas, a cabbage or two, strangely triangular carrots, and perhaps a random turnip or kiwi. Hidden behind this plenitude are an equally lacking assortment of dried fruit and, in what will be a recurring motif of Mongolian supermarket experience, candies that are shaped or flavoured like fruits wrapped up in the same manner that those aforementioned real apples are: plastic wrap, styrofoam tray.
After the produce come the, in all seriousness, a dizzying array of preserved vegetables in jars, mostly from Russia and its former Soviet republics. For those expecting quality, artisanal pickled shit, look elsewhere as it seems the stuff is bottom of the barrel, eat only when the nuclear apocalypse hits Minsk type rations. Next row over you can find a quality selection of instant ramen mostly from Korea to appeal to your inner first year uni student. You may or may not be able to find a really random selection of condiments, mostly sourced from Germany (what the hell is knoblach sauce anyways) or Eastern Europe with cameos from the USA.
The next section is perhaps the largest: the candy aisle(s). Mongolians evidently have an untameable sweet tooth. The sheer number and variety of obscure sweets from the former Warsaw Accord members is impressive. There's the ones with the Russian baby logo, the lobster and prawn logo lollies, the strawberry labelled candies, the camel ones, the ones with horses on them, and so on and so forth. From limited experience, despite the packaging, they all seem to taste the same in that they are all overly sweet, vaguely chocolatey, translucent hard candies. Next to all these candies are the prepackaged stale cakes and cookies from China, Korea and Russia.
You may now come across the extensive dairy section. Yogurt (watery and very sour) takes up a whole fridge or two, you will probably find an impressive selection of dried cheese curds or dried meat. If really lucky, you can find airag as well, which is fermented mare's milk. It's mildly alcoholic (perhaps 3 or 4%) and, by all reports, completely unpalatable to non Mongolian (or central Asian) tastes. It's supposedly better tasting when freshly made by nomads.
The last few rows of the store consist of the booze of which vodka is the most conspicuous. Every store has many many shelves of different forms of the clear liquor, from the very cheap (perhaps the equivalent of $3 for a 24) to the very very expensive (and good). Beer drinkers will find a selection of local and imported (once again from Eastern Europe) brews, in containers ranging from the normal 300 mL can to 5L plastic bottles.
And so the supermarket remains, despite how many times you visit hoping for a better selection of actual food. Despite leaving with a full bag, you inevitably feel that you have purchased nothing that you should actually be eating.
Of course, you could have had some initiative and gone to the Mercury Market, an actual vegetable and meat and dry good market with a surprising amount of OK produce shipped up from China, but that would require organisation, will and patience.
So: instant ramen, candy and vodka it is for another week.
