The Carrefour Experience

Anytime we visit a different country, the first thing on the agenda is to look up restaurants. Anyone else plan their trips around food? When we moved to a different country, one of the first things on the agenda was to check out the grocery store. Which begs the question, what do they not have that I need? In the UK, it was hard to find some basic food items, so we were interested to see the difference in Dubai.

As I mentioned in my last blog, most of the grocery stores are located in the Malls. The grocery store in the Mall of Emirates is Carrefour, which is known for their cheap prices. I would say it's like Walmart, a one stop shop for groceries, electronics, and clothing. Our first time we made the mistake of going on a Saturday (work week here is Sunday-Thursday).  It was packed and people are not accommodating. They are never in your way, you are in their way so you need to move. And since this was our first time at the grocery store, we had to go down every aisle.

We started by perusing the meat section. Immediately we noticed they don't sell mince turkey (or any form of turkey aside from deli meat).  Okay, no worries. Upon further inspection, we noticed that none of the meats contained caloric information and they all expired within 3 days. Furthermore, the label cautions against freezing. Say what?! This is why I have to go to the grocery store EVERY. OTHER. DAY.  For a city that prides itself on vision and modern technology, they can't find a way to make the food last longer? Really efficient guys.

We soon discovered the lack of caloric information goes for EVERYTHING and the 3 days expiry limitation is for all meats, dairy, fresh fruit & produce.  I think this is the Universe's way of telling me to stop counting calories. Hmmm. Next we hit up the produce section. No surprises in terms of variety here. They had pretty much everything I needed and I began to bag my items, one by one. As we started going down each produce aisle, we began to notice huge crowds on 2 different ends of the produce section. We saw a sign that said "Weighing Point." Ram and I looked at each other utterly confused. Surely they weigh and price your produce at the checkout, no? NO. I was so close to ditching all my produce in that moment, but I decided that would be stupid. Stupider than waiting in that stupid line. So we stood and waited 15 min to get all of our produce weighed and priced. Ain't nobody got time for that.

As we hit up the rest of the store, we could not find Pam or any form of fat-free cooking spray, no carbonated lemonade (got addicted to this in the UK), no cooking utensils (no spatula in our hotel), nor could we find a few other must have American food items. Seems like, just in the UK, I may have to go to several grocery stores in order to complete my weekly list. There was one cool thing to note. They have a section where you can select your seasonings and only purchase the amount you need. So if you're like me and try new recipes often, you can now buy the spoonful of a seasoning you may never consume again, instead of being stuck with the whole bottle. And they allow you to do this for grains and beans too! Touche.