The difficulty of buying stuff (Where in the world am I? [23])

My efforts at restoring my apartment to livability after the weekend's party madness have been hampered by a lack of bin bags ('garbage sacks' may be the preferred term for some of my North American friends).

I discovered rather belatedly (just as the party was getting underway - aaaarrgghh!) that I only had ONE left.

And this was not a proper one. No, it was one of the ones made for local use - which are completely bloody useless: the plastic is not the durable, thick-gauge, shiny black stuff we are used to in more 'developed' parts of the world. No, it is so THIN as to be translucent; and it comes pre-torn with dozens of micro-holes. Even if you get a freak-of-nature one that doesn't have the holes in it already when you take it off the roll, it will sprout holes as soon as you put anything heavier or more jagged than a dozen ping-pong balls in it. (Picture me doing the destruction testing on this, lugging flimsy garbage sacks filled with varying quantities of ping-pong balls up and down my stairwell until they burst at the seams and spew their contents..... All in the name of science!)

There are a few of the big international grocery chains here now - Carrefour, Walmart, etc. - but they mostly target the local customer, and don't carry a lot of expat-friendly produce. For that you have to rely on a small number of local supermarket chains that specialise in servicing overseas customers. These places are a treasure-trove of international cuisine (German pickled vegetables and Russian chocolate bars are amongst my favourite quirky indulgences - did you know that in Russia you can get a Twix bar in plain chocolate? Outstanding!), and probably deserve a post or two to themselves at some point. Hmmm, this is in danger of becoming that point. Anyhow, you can get things like kitchen paper and semi-decent bin bags (which are only infrequently or never available in the local stores) in these places from time to time. Just not at the moment, it seems.

The leading chain in this little niche market has 4 or 5 stores around the city - but you would struggle to divine that they were under common management: each one has a markedly different inventory. They don't even carry the same stock in one store with any kind of consistency or predictability. If you see something you really fancy, you have to buy it immediately - otherwise it will disappear from the shelves again for months, perhaps forever. I have been known to send SMS alerts to needy friends when a rare breakfast cereal or chocolate bar, or some other coveted foodstuff such as Maple Syrup, Vegemite, or Molasses made a fleeting appearance in one of these stores. I have been canvassing such intelligence myself over the past week or so, as I struggled to find the necessary ingredients for my planned Jamaican foodfest (coconut milk in one store, lime juice and tinned mandarins in another, ground allspice in yet a third, okra in none....).

If this randomness of stocking is an occasionally galling problem with the "foreigner-friendly" grocery stores, you can imagine how much worse it is with the local supermarkets. You can pretty much guarantee that any product you develop a liking for will be mysteriously withdrawn from sale within a few months. The churn rate of new products here is astronomical; and it is not only local manufacturers who exhibit this phenomenon. Shortly after I came to live here, I discovered a local product engagingly called in English 'Ice Fruit Cream', which was basically a milkshake in a Tetrapak carton - absolutely delicious, especially the mango one. Now this was a good product, and I saw lots of other people buying it too, foreigners and locals. After 3 or 4 months, it completely disappeared. The American snack manufacturer Lay's for some months put out a potato chip flavoured with hot chilli (not very hot, but just enough to be interesting). Again, a fantastic product, and - you would think - very much geared to local tastes; hot food is big here. For a while, the stores seemed to be carrying way more of this than any other flavour of chip (forgive the lapse into American English here - yes, I should call them crisps.... but this is an American product, for heaven's sake), and I saw a lot of packets being bought. Then..... abruptly discontinued. Quite baffling.

It teaches us the Buddhist virtue of non-attachment, I suppose.

Anyway, I started this little stream-of-consciousness rant by reflecting that I still haven't finished clearing the trash out of my apartment from the weekend because I don't have anything to put it in. The three nearest local supermarkets all appear to have discontinued carrying even the uselessly thin bin bags they used to sell; and the expat supermarkets are also mysteriously out of stock of this valuable item (the proper kind, that is).

Is it a conspiracy? Perhaps so..... but beyond the inevitable sense of being put-upon, my accustomed paranoia is letting me down rather today: even my fertile brain struggles to produce any convincing theory to explain this latest inconvenience in my life.