Expat Drama: How (Not) to Buy Eggs in a Foreign Country

How to make a fool of yourself abroad

by Miss Footloose

The problem with food is that, no matter in what obscure corner of the planet you find yourself, you’ve got to have it. And in order to have it, you have to find it, and then somehow procure it. In some places this means you go hunt and fish, in others you pull victuals out of the ground and pick them off the trees.

Potatoes are a staple of the Armenian diet

 

In prosperous countries foraging for food is done in your local supermarket, which is the size of a small banana republic. You hunt around with your shopping cart and harvest items off shelves and from bins. Easy to do for most of us trawling the shopping emporiums of the modern world.

But here’s a story of one of my shopping adventures not in the culinary paradise of the Gourmet Giant in Virginia, USA, nor in the HyperU in France where I now live, but in a small neighborhood grocery store in Yerevan,  Armenia, a small country in the Caucasus Mountains where I domiciled for six years. I hadn’t been there long when this drama took place, and at the time there were no modern supermarkets.

Just a Few Eggs, Please

I’m in a small shop not far from my house where the neighborhood housewives go on foot to buy their daily needs. In a place like this, checking off the items on your grocery list is a tricky and humbling task for people who don’t speak Armenian or Russian. I’d be one of these people. Shopping can be an exercise in frustration, or entertainment on a good day. There are reasons for this:

In these little neighborhood shops you don’t pick things off the shelves. Most of the items are kept safe behind counters of which there are several, each tended by a fierce-looking matron with dyed hair — red, black, orange. (Hair dying is the GAP, the Great Armenian Pastime. Everyone participates – teenagers, menopausal mamas, grannies, and even the men. I felt obliged to join in to show respect. But I digress.)

The art of shopping

Dairy is sold at one counter, bread at another, processed meats, eggs and canned foods at a third. A few shops have fresh beef, pork and lamb for sale as well, usually in rather large hunks that have not had the benefit of a designer butcher’s knife. This would be sold at counter number four. Sometimes shops carry a small selection of fresh fruit and vegetables in season. A small selection because there is no big selection.

For vegetables and fruit you’d best go to the large covered markets, such as Mashtots market on this photo by Rita Willaert. In the summer these are wonderful places to shop as you can see.

Me, the illiterate

So here I am, in my corner grocery store. I can’t read the labels, and I can’t speak the language and I’m hungry. I’ve managed to get the bread, the rice, the tea because they’re recognizable and I pointed at them. Now I want eggs. I see no eggs. Where are they? How can I point at them and then raise ten fingers when they are not in sight?

I learned the word for eggs weeks ago, but it now escapes me. It has skipped away, hiding somewhere in my memory refusing to come out like a naughty child behind a sofa. Armenian words have a tendency to do that because they’re not like any other words in any other language in any other place on the planet. I explore every nook and cranny of my brain and cannot find the Armenian word for eggs. I can find it in several other languages, but none of these will do me any good. What to do.

Helpless as a baby

This is what I do: I make the shape of an egg with my fingers. I look at the sales matron with big pleading eyes. She asks me something. I don’t know what she is saying, but she’s not understanding me. We are not getting anywhere, and something else is called for. Something more drastic than mere sign language.

I flap my arms and cluck like a chicken

I then follow my performance by once again making the shape of an egg with my fingers.

Four stout mamas are looking at me in stunned silence. The dairy lady, the bread lady, the salami-and-beans lady. All with neatly coiffed hairstyles circa 1973.

I know why they are staring

In Armenia people take themselves very seriously. You dress very neatly, no wrinkles allowed anywhere. You always have your hair done right and your shoes polished. You do not go around clucking and flapping your arms like a chicken. What would the neighbors think!

Here I am, crazy foreigner, making a fool of myself. It is unthinkable.

Then laughter erupts!

Rich and full-bodied laughter– the kind that happens when you’ve not laughed for a long time because life is tough. But now, here’s this weird foreign woman clucking and flapping her arms, how can you contain yourself?

Laughter subsides. My counter lady turns around, steps aside and points at the eggs that have been hiding behind her body.

“Ayo!” I nod eagerly. “Ttass hat,” I say and hold up ten fingers in case she doesn’t understand my sorry Armenian.

She carefully puts the eggs in a plastic bag and shows me the amount I owe her by tapping it out on a little calculator.

Success

I pay. I smile nicely. I say shnorrekaloodjoon (Շնորհակալություն), which means thank you, I kid you not. I turn and walk to the door, trying to look dignified, which is, of course, a lost cause.

I’ll be the talk of the neighborhood, but hey, I’ve got my eggs.
_____

NOTE: Modern supermarkets have come to Armenia, but the small shops still reign in the neighborhoods.

* * *
So tell me, have you ever made a fool of yourself on purpose, out of necessity? Or not on purpose, for that matter?

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Gabijan

Yes I had a funny encounter at the market in Yerevan once too. As is usual in the Caucasus, you need to buy everything by the kilo and negotiate the price. Whatever the price. I studied Russian and thought I was pretty brilliant at it, until I started the negotiations…… The vegetable vendor was holding the carrots in one hand near his face and off we went…  The numbers were flying, and the salesmen just kept smiling and smiling more and more at me…. An Armenian friend, who was with me and spoke English, looked at me and laughed and said; STOP!…. Gaby,… Read more »

Oh goodness I loved this story. You have the writer’s gift!

Elizabeth

Wish you could see the knowing smile on my face. Remind me to tell you how to say, « I have a bladder infection from hell and you, my angel, are going to give me antibiotics right now! » in Russian. Which I don’t speak. At all.

Hahaha, I can just see those women staring then bursting out with laughter 😀

You should see the things I do to make non-English students (people I tutor) understand me. I mooooooo, I cluck, I draw.

As for making a fool of myself in every day life! It’s all I seem to do, and often.

Karien

Haha, great story! Singapore is the land of plenty, everything is for sale here (just bring your credit card) and they mostly speak english. I have had similar experiences in other countries though. And I won’t be shopping for eggs anytime soon anyway cause I have 6 new lady friends who will lay them for me! (that is when they have not stopped laying again…scared by either pythons, huge monitor lizards or our crazy monkeys…)

I had an English friend who did the same in Portugal, when shopping in a village grocery store (they do still exist too).
I remember when we lived in Germany, for the first few weeks when we went to the supermarket we would take our dictionary – for example to buy shampoo or conditioner we didn’t know what were the words for “dry”, “oily”, etc, and for other things that weren’t so obvious.
Gosh, Armenian sounds like a hell of a language to learn!!

Hilarious!! For all you know, they all knew what you wanted, just wanted to see your performance! 🙂

Thanks for giving us a glimpse of your life there. Love it.

OMG that word for thank you almost had me rolling on the floor. You couldn’t invent it better .Great story! I haven’t yet lived in a country with a new language, though it was hard enough to understand Singlish when in Singapore, not all that close to English either. And I’m pretty sure people were laughing at me behind my back and pretending they didn’t understand English when they did perfectly well.

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