The best way to tour a city is through its grocery store
nymag.com
nymag.com
Hopefully this will not disappear entirely as brands and chains become more and more homogenized across the world. One of the saddest examples of this is how nearly every brand of ice cream in Europe became part of Unilever’s ugly “Heartbrand” in the late ‘90s. Now anywhere you go, you will just be offered the same Magnum, Solero, Cornetto. Who wants to take a vacation photo eating an ice cream you could find in your local store at home?
Always a joy - or at least a surprise :) - to try the local snack in a new place!
This is true, but a bit of an exaggeration.
In the UK and Scandinavia, many small dairies are producing nice ice creams which you can buy in regular supermarkets.
In fact, a favorite thing of mine is trying to find said ice creams without any gelling agents (carrageenan, gum, etc.) which are really harsh to gut biota. There are quite a few.
Obviously, Unilever's is not one of them.
Took me a few years during my backpacking days to figure it out. While odd, I never thought of it as "ugly."
Whole bags of microscopically thin slices of deep fried potato, loaded with salt or sugar in some form or another.
Of course, you get the fake antique alternatives to attract the millennial crowd too. e.g. Old Mout Cider claims to be 70 years old but is just a hipster offshoot of Bulmer's, with a carefully crafted narrative and bizarrely appealing design for a hitherto unknown drink, customer support hotlines and all.
There's a lot of amazing local stuff you can find when you're not in mass-market brand outlets.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Humor
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unilever_brands#Ice_...
They also had a banner outside the store saying "Stock up before the cold comes."
There was a photography coffee table book I loved, where the artist took pictures of an entire family around their table, which had all of the food they ate for a week on it.
I've since forgotten the name of the book (if anyone knows it please tell me -- search isn't turning up much), but grocery stores feel like as close as a regular tourist can get to those personal scenes.
https://fstoppers.com/food/what-week-groceries-looks-around-...
[1]https://menzelphoto.photoshelter.com/gallery/Hungry-Planet-F...
Underdeveloped nations haven’t yet gotten in the bad habit of wrapping everything in plastic. Grains are in reused sacks, meat is straight from the butcher. I mean, sure I get egg cases and wrapped meats. But some places put vegetables and fruits in styropacks.... why?
https://time.com/what-kids-eat-around-the-world-in-one-week/
I seem to mainly recall the negative experiences.
In Rome, on vacation, I remember a grocery store where there were only two cashier lanes open, and long lines, and the two cashiers were facing each other, just havin' a five-minute chat about something unrelated to their work. This might have been an unusual event, since I've never lived in Italy.
In Portugal, where I lived several years, you're just out of luck. The cashiers are as slow as molasses. Also, one particular major chain seemed to have this weird occurrence of always looking ransacked and constantly being restocked during every one of their opening hours. And the "we're opening a new lane" thing wasn't "next person in current line is first in the new line". It would be a free-for-all, especially for newcomers.
In Netherlands, a major chain in Amsterdam would only take cash or a Dutch credit card. Visa/Mastercard from elsewhere were not accepted forms of payment.
Same experience just recently -- Albert Heijn. You'll find this grocery story every 50 meters in a major city like Amsterdam. No credit cards. It was pretty odd to me as a Canadian.
The stuff with the amateurish labels is inevitably the best. It’s not packed with preservatives and stretchers and all the other crap you have to adulterate your food with to be able to ship it across the country and have it be shelf-stable.
There’s other surprises around the grocery store, but the feeling’s most intense in the Local Seasonings Aisle at the local Rouse’s.
I was in Kyoto a few months ago, and wandering through the Kyoto Co-op grocery was super fun. So many kinds of green tea I had never heard of, and again, there's a sense of the Japanese minimalist cooking culture. Almost no one in Japan owns an oven, and most places I've seen just have 1-2 standalone electric burners, so baking either isn't done or it'll be something small in a toaster oven.
I love grocery shopping in general, but if you're abroad I'd highly recommend checking out local grocery stores.
Start with the main branch, then on to the various neighborhood branches. It’s important to pick a section you are interested in beforehand. Fiction might be too overwhelming, so I’d go for the math or computer technology sections.
Once you’ve done this in multiple cities you can compare the sizes of those sections between different cities and how current the books are, i.e, for tech books, do they have books on the latest trend in programming languages.
Go to coffee shops and bakeries in between. I can usually squeeze in the main branch and one or two neighborhood branches in a day. Research the city to figure out which neighborhood libraries to go.
I'd add for Brazil, a great alternative to the libraries are SESCs. SESCs are cultural centers, funded by a payroll tax proposed by big business in the 50s when they were afraid of Communist sympathies in population. The result are extremely well funded community centers with big arts budgets for free exhibitions, exercise facilities, primary care clinics, libraries, cafeterias with affordable food and lots of space for people to lounge around. In many neighborhoods, they're the epicenter of social life. They've been a terrific way to break out of the downtown Sao Paulo bubble.
From my perspective, food and all the rituals and customs around it are some of the richest parts of culture, so I also like to go to grocery stores like this article covers. Another half-day is dedicated to a food tour, which is a fantastic way to learn about a new culture. In my experience, often the tour guides have lived in that culture for many years but they're not originally from there, so they can do cross-cultural translation for you, pointing out things you might not expect. And the best tours also include walking around the city and seeing cultural highlights.
I wandered around a thrift store in Bern once and found some weird secondhand stuff -- mannequins apparently for sale, fur stoles, mattresses, chandeliers, clocks galore, oil paintings, dress shoes, model trains, china, flasks, buttons, yarn -- all piled high, priced about 50% of what you might pay in a retail store (which is still very expensive), and sold in what looked like a very large single-family house in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood that had been somehow emptied out and turned into three rambling stories of loosely scattered miscellany.
Reviewing the map now, apparently just down the street at 24 Pappelweg there was an even bigger, more commercialized thrift-store operation, a Barner Brocki Plus, which might have had what I was actually looking for (a men's coat). Oops.
At least I got to read the local news and find out that, yes, their version of the American thrift store is a bit different and a bit pricier (e.g. https://www.derbund.ch/bern/stadt/brockenhaeuser-sind-zwar-s... ), which was an interesting way to learn a new culture.
Ironically I also love going to foreign McDonalds. Always fun to see what local items they have.
That's a good point. It's funny for Americans to see beer there, in, say, Europe.
I make a point of getting a McDonalds cheeseburger in every country I visit. Austria has the best meat (Germany the worst). Poland tasted like Australia (my home) and the UK burger was the most plastic like. Italy, UAE, and Hong Kong all deviate quite a bit from the "regular" menu but I visited the latter two at the airport so maybe they are outliers.
The McCroquettas and patatas bravas in Spain are my latest favorite.
And since McDonald's adapted their breakfast menu to the Middle East a few years ago I'm still astonished by how closely they managed to make their chicken-based ham taste like real pork ham.
In France, a bakery can thrive next to a supermarket because enough people mistrust the supermarket's quality.
In N. America, a supermarket opening is a death sentence for nearby food vendors.
Not so different anymore, aside from the prevalence of corn based sweeteners.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...
I don't care if you can get the same item from the company in it's fancy downtown store, or a few blocks away at the grocery store. It don't really matter and becomes a tourist trap.
The towns of ~10,000 that I know that have Walmarts have multiple competitors to the Walmart, and smaller towns don't have the Walmart but may have a local grocer.
You'll probably find this strange, but as a foreigner, I was really excited to see Walmart for the first time, and I found it just as interesting as visiting grocery stores in other countries.
There are things there that just seem comically American - like there's a McDonald's inside a supermarket! And there's a section where you can pick up guns and ammo while you're buying milk and eggs!
The chocolates section contains the same products as every other store across North America, but I'd never seen any of these while growing up in Australia, so we picked up a lot of these. Even basic things like bread taste different from back home.
Other stores are interesting in different ways. The size and scale of Costco is insane. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's carry different brands of everything, so it feels very different shopping there.
I'm really looking forward to my next visit to the States, and picking up the bacon flavored popcorn from Trader Joe's. I've never seen this anywhere else in the world, and it's as awesome as it sounds :)
Please please, this is impossible in America. The guns aren't in the fridge!
But that didn't help me when a cashier got impatient with me for not having weighed my produce in advance. Who knew?
I've never seen eggs being sold from refrigerators though.
> “Why did you buy this cheese?”
It was obviously a pricing error, there’s no way a hunk of real cheese only costs 2 EUR
Every single new country I visit, the first thing I check is the local supermarket.