Metro

Went to Metro today, the Ho Chi Minh City equivalent of Wal-Mart. In the US we loathe the Wally-World, and have done our best to avoid Metro. It was only the second time we've been there since moving. Sometimes, though it is nice to be able to find everything we need in one store. It's funny that I said that because in order to cook dinner tonight we still had to make trips to the farmer's market and the supermarket in An Phu. I suppose we're just getting used to going to three to five places before getting everything we need for one dinner. Now that we've moved to District 2, at least the places are nearby and there is significantly less traffic than our old place in D3.

The Metro is really just like a Sam's Club. You can't simply walk in. You have to have a member card. In order to get a member card, you have to have a sponsor. We don't have a sponsor, so anytime we want to go we have to get a copy of our passport made at the customer service counter. Then make our way to the entrance, fill out a form, get a temporary card and get the card scanned. If it sounds like a lot of hassle to buy some laundry detergent, it is.

The portions of food they sell also trend towards Sam's Club-ish. I want to make spaghetti tonight so I went to the cheese aisle. I could only buy a 1kg block of Parmesian Cheese (or larger). That's 2.2 pounds of hard cheesy goodness for those of you new to the metric system. For a visual learners, the block of cheese was about the size of a medium sized adult thigh, or the size Ronald's hands in the photo below. We'll be having cheeseless spaghetti this evening...

Despite trying really hard to look and feel like a giant western box store, Metro still feels Asian. This is mainly due to the profusion of rice cookers and rows of tanks containing live fish. These are not fish to take home for pets, mind you (although I suppose you could keep a mackarel as a pet), but fish you can pick out of the tank, have scaled, gut and cut while you shop. Show me a Costco with that option. At least you know it's fresh. I wanted to see a guy with a big net and an impatient shopper trying to pick the perfect fish out of the 75 or so swimming in the tank. "No not that one, that one." But alas, no one was buying while we were in the fish area. It's hard to describe the feeling of seeing the "seafood aisle" containing almost nothing but live animals. It's kind of like going to the pet store, although you know they're all destined to be eaten. I only saw one tank with a dead fish in it. Pretty good for this part of the world.

We crammed our single shopping bag to near bursting and rode home in true Vietnamese style: motorbike fully loaded. Reyna held the box containing our new pans while I held the bag of groceries between my legs. We saved ourselves a $3 taxi ride that way.

Were you looking for white big chiles? chiles? big chiles? or green big chiles? I can't remember what you usually put in the salsa.

The MSG aisle. or, if you're Vietnamese, SUPER SPICE! I hate to think how many bags of this I have unknowingly ingested in the last seven months.

At least we manage to stay away from this place:

Tell me that's not the creepiest version you've ever seen. We have moved to a country that is blissfully devoid of Mickey D's (this one was in Bangkok). I think it's always a good idea to stay away from clowns with hands larger than their faces.

That is a large bag of my favorite chips. When I say "large" I don't mean the size you buy at Sam's that has a drowning child warning on the side. It's the large Euro size. For the uninitiated, the price is VND 197,000 or TEN DOLLARS. You can have this bag of chips, or 6.5 bowls of beef pho at Reyna's favorite spot. I'll be eating many bags of Lay's chips when we return to the US. This was at the An Phu Supermarket, not Metro. Metro wouldn't dream of having chips this sophisticated. They carry things like Pringels (not Pringles, "Pringels" the Chinese Version) in flavors like Kung Pao Chicken and Prawn and Dog (not really).

Speaking of dog, while riding to the Metro we passed a lady on the side of road who usually sells live ducks. Again this is not for purposes of pets, but to take home and eat for Sunday dinner. It always looks like she fed the ducks Valium before putting them out because they just sit in a listless line sucking down exhaust fumes from 10,000 passing motorbikes while they wait for someone to take them home for dinner. Today she had a fully cooked dog. I'd say it was about beagle sized. The weirdest part was that it was standing in a box. It looked like it had been posed as if about to start running into the street. If it's head had still been attached, it would have been peering out from the box. It's good to know that we can still be surprised as we close in on a year in Vietnam.

I promise I will start writing about restaurants soon. I'm still getting into the swing of this blog thing. I'm not sure who I'm making this promise to since I've told exactly one person I've started writing this and I know she hasn't looked at it because I only told her, "I started writing a blog." Not the name of it, not the URL, nothing.