I miss the supermarkets the most: closed borders have me dreaming of ramen aisles
People tell you that they travel for the culture – that they saw this great Picasso exhibition and the cathedral at Chartres was am-azing – and that being inside the Vatican was exciting, even after queuing for four hours and craning your neck above the crowds to see the mosaics. They’ll show you bad photos of a flakey fresco and tell you that they can now cross it off their bucket list.
But what if it’s not the flaky fresco but the flakey pastry they had before lining up for the museum which provided the true hits of pleasure?
Standing up in an Italian cafe, a little espresso, a little pastry, surrounded by people going to work saying “Pronto!” – observing the stuff of the daily in a foreign country is often more illuminating than visiting the bucket-list places in the front of the guidebook. Likewise having one of those fried snacks from a cart in Yogyakarta, or a small cup of chai on the side of some highway in Delhi, or shisha and an intense black coffee in a tiny cup in a cafe in Istanbul.
Going an extra layer into a country is not just to observe the culture but to enter it. And that is what I miss most about travel right now.
Travel pangs are particularly acute this week after Australia’s chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, said reopening Australia’s “international borders will be one of the last things to change” as the country tries to get back on its feet with the vaccine.
Sealed into our country for almost 12 months now, it’s strange the things that I miss about travel. Many of the most well-travelled people I know say the most fascinating thing about visiting a new country is the supermarkets. You walk into the chilled, brightly lit store and are immediately dazzled by brands you do not recognise, for products that you’ve never heard of, at prices you do not understand.
Each purchase is a lucky dip or a leap of faith. What colour will this food be? What will it taste like? Will I become enamoured with it, thereby starting off a lifelong painful process of having to procure the said foreign product from my home country?
As well as dazzling the curious traveller, a supermarket has an anthropological function, giving you a wealth of information about what type of nation you are in.
Are they a country that loves their chips – and devote whole aisles to local flavours such as shrimp and fish sauce? Or are they a country that runs on carbs? And if so, is their bread sugary like in Japan or heavy like in Germany? Can you get beer in the supermarket? Or socks? How do they sell their meat? Do they even sell meat?
On my first visit to Berlin, one of the things that stuck out was the supermarket. I think it was a Lidl – and alarmingly, it looked like it was in the process of being looted. People were piercing the hard plastic across pallets of cans with the sharp edge of their house keys and helping themselves to tins of tomatoes.
Where were the shelves? And why didn’t any of the workers unpack anything? Was all of German retail like this? (Answer, no: the shelves in German department stores – and pharmacies for that matter – are a work of art).
In Indonesia, there seemed to be a thousand different brands of dried noodles with headache-inducing foil packaging – and every sized pot in which to cook them.
The story of class in New York can be told through the supermarkets – the organic food utopia that is the Wholefoods in Union Square, or the right-on co-op of bougie Park Slope, the extraordinary variety of hummus at Zabar’s to
the supermarkets in the outer areas of Brooklyn and Queens, where there was often very little fruit or vegetables but loads of different brands of cola.
British supermarkets once had a proliferation of something I hadn’t seen much of in Australia at the time – something called “ready meals”. You could get two for the price of one in Sainsbury’s and take them home and heat them up in the microwave. And also a revelation: you could buy wine in the supermarket, not like in Australia where they made you go into a separate shop.
“Show me a supermarket and I’ll show you the country,” said some Jesuit somewhere.
Britain then was a place where you were discouraged from cooking but encouraged to drink.
Then there were the English corner stores. I would stand inside the usually tiny amount of cluttered, dark space available for customers and marvel at the sheer amount of newsprint … 12 daily newspapers. Plus cigarettes in packs of 10! And the thickest crisps I’ve ever eaten, and in steak flavour (a brand called Walkers)!
No one moves to Britain for the food but it may have been in a corner store that I decided to move to the UK. All I wanted was in there.
The late, great British travel writer, AA Gill wrote about why he travels: “It’s the things that really move you and really change your life and the things that give you perspective of who you are and where you are. Mostly for me, they’re being in cities. Cities are where most people live.”
When you partake in a ritual of a city, there is briefly bestowed on you a sort of citizenship or keys to that place. You’re doing what all the other people of that place are doing and a kind of communion occurs.
As great as it is to see Borobudur at sunrise or walk through the Louvre or gaze on the northern lights, walking through the neon-lit, colour-saturated dried ramen aisle of a Seoul supermarket has its own magic attraction.