The grocery store

This is going to be a long and probably dull entry without many photos, sorry.

Grocery stores here are like the delis back home in Australia for the most part, or at largest the Supa-Value sized stores. There’s no dedicated parking, you just pull up out front. The grocery store I go to is known as the Dubai, though I’m not sure what its real name is. They’re nice there. I’m sure, when I go home, I’m going to be at Coles going, where’s my free chocolate for spending more than $20? And why aren’t you taking my basket when it gets too full or carrying my bags to my car for me? And where are the 20 different brands of tuna, or types of juice? Why does a big jar of Nutella cost a lot more than a few dollars?


This is a photo from the inside, not brilliant but I was a little self-conscious taking snapshots of a grocery store of all things. You can see it's not much different from a small Australian store except maybe a little more crowded. I’m standing at the back of the store where all the cleaning and laundrying products are, as well as soaps and shampoos. Off to my left is a section where a lot of women’s products (face wash, beauty products) are locked up and you have to ask and pay for them separately, don’t know what that’s about. Also off to the left is the entrance to an attached store selling a bit of kitchenware.

The aisle straight ahead in the photo has all the tuna down the left, and on the right all those things that turn groceries into meals: sauces, condiments, tins etc. The aisle left of that one is the juice aisle, with a little bit of long-life milk, and the cold section, mainly cheeses, strange things I’m not sure what you’d do with, and a bit of yoghurt, not much of which is palatable, since it’s long-life too.

The aisle to the right is the chocolate and sweet biscuit aisle, with a little cereal. It’s good chocolate too, Lindt/Lindor and Bachi and Ferrero Roche, costing a third of the price as Australia (I count myself lucky, when the first Blue Sunnys arrived a little more than a year ago, there was reportedly nothing but old whitened Cadbury).

Savoury snacks get less space, a display rack (Pringles, very few other chip brands). Then there’s an aisle of pasta and rice, and a little alcove for the spice guy, who sells spices (obviously), sugar, eggs, dried fruits, nuts and legumes. I’m not sure what his relationship is to the rest of the store; I go to him to get my dried apricots even though there’s pre-packaged ones in the cold section of the main store because I figure that’s better for him, but for all I know it’s all the same. There’s also an attached butcher.

So you can see it doesn’t really differ from an Australian store except there’s fewer brands to choose from (except tuna and juice, as I think I’ve made clear), conspicuously there’s no fresh produce section or pet food aisle (though a new addition recently is a pet food rack which even has dog food), much less savoury stuff, and hardly any pre-packaged or instant meals (with the exception of a few cake mixes; I think it should be apparent by now Libyans have a collective sweet tooth, but it’s not a baking culture so these are probably for the expats).

What you can get here is steadily increasing; I’m not sure if it’s expat influence or more money or lifted sanctions or what. But the cereals, for example – when I first got here, you could get a wide range of highly-sugared fun cereals, or cornflakes (7 or 8 different brands of cornflakes, mind you). The one multi-grain cereal was chocolate-flavoured. Now there’s quite a variety of healthy cereals, though still no muesli – I can get Quaker oats, so the potential is there to make my own if I really felt like it. One thing I spotted at the large supermarket was a range of gluten-free products.

I can get Worcestershire sauce, but not Caesar salad dressing. Anchovies, but not sun-dried tomato – and I miss sun-dried tomato (maybe the spice guy sells it?). You can get a decent range of cheeses – soft fetas, cheddar, edam, blue cheese, parmesan and mozzarella, ricotta sometimes, but no brie or camembert that I’ve seen. Pepsi is widely available, Coke more patchy. I had a lovely moment last week; you can get lemon and lime juice (you can get any kind of juice, including ones you wouldn't really think of, like banana nectar) and I had been wishing you could get bitter too – and I looked down and there it was, covered in dust at the bottom of the juice section.

I should say, though, maybe it is possible to get these things I can’t find, since there’s dozens of these stores in the area – one a few hundred metres up the road, known as the Damascus; a bunch along the main shopping strip of Gargaresh St; some up past the physiotherapy hospital – but there’s a limit to the amount of driving I’ll do to track down one ingredient.

You can’t get pork products, obviously, or anything with alcohol content. Fresh milk is rare, and last time I spotted some and brought some home, I think it might have been fresh milk not from a cow (if it was from a camel, we probably gave ourselves TB – just kidding). There is, however, a dairy nearby, which I keep intending to go to, which sells unpasteurised milk (boil it for a few minutes, it’s fine to drink), again it may or may not be from cows.

Plastic bags rule here; I did once try to take my re-usable bag into the one large supermarket, the one many expats go to, where there’s a parking lot, a large variety store, and you have to pack your own groceries and carry them to your car yourself – ideal, I thought, for using a non-plastic grocery bag – and also where there’s a security guard at the entrance.

Said security guard explained to me I couldn’t take my re-usable bag into the supermarket, because they have bags, you don’t need to bring your own (you silly Western girl, what kind of backwards nation to do you think this, of course we have plastic bags). I did intend next time to just sneak it in in my handbag, but as it turns out, I need every plastic bag I can get – because there’s no recycling and I don’t have a composter (unless you count Dog), so every single thing goes in the bin.


Lastly, this is a poster within the Dubai store (next to a stockpile of tuna and juice, mind you) – note the ‘No Danish’ scrawl on it, conveniently in English. I’m glad they didn’t stick with the boycott, because the Danish blue cheese is lovely.