Grocery Shopping in Yerevan

To aid in the adaptation and settling in of US diplomats, employees are entitled to use a taxi service to and from work each day for the first 30 days.  "Eligible family members" (i.e. moi) are entitled to use the complimentary service for official meetings at the Embassy as well as two shopping trips.

Ok, the power just went out for about the tenth time this evening.

And...it's back thanks to this wonderful (not so) little contraption:  our generator. The transition from city to generator power is almost seamless, except for a little flick of the lights and humming noise.  I'm not complaining about this because until the late-90s, Yerevan was mostly dark.

But I digress.

The US Government recognizes that we need to eat and thus pays for two taxi rides to buy supplies.  I chose to use my first one today.

The first triumph was going where I wanted to go.  Thankfully, my driver knew where the "Kaiser" supermarket was.  We had passed it on one our trips to and from the house last week, and it looked shiny and new, so I thought I'd give it a try.  

First lesson:  supermarket attendants are very helpful, almost to a fault.  At first, it seemed like they were following me to see if I was shoplifting.  Silly American.  They were hovering because they wanted to help.  So imagine their dismay when they so cheerfully (I think) asked me what I was looking for, again and again, in Armenian and I just stared back blankly, barely able to spit out that I only spoke Russian and not Armenian (yet)...smile.  

Still, I managed to get about 80% of the things on my list - an electric teakettle which the helpful young saleswoman filled with water and plugged in to show me that it worked, groceries like beans, chickpeas, and organic frozen out-of-season produce like eggplant and spinach, plus a whole slew of cleaning supplies.  I must have been quite the sight examining and trying to decipher the differences between hand soap, toilet bowl cleaner and surface cleaner.  

While certain things, like taxis, are cheap in Armenia (with an hour's wait time, my cab only cost $8 roundtrip), food tends to be more on par with the US.  While not quite as expensive as Whole Foods, I still managed to spend about $60.  Granted, I'm sure betters deals are to be had, but after an hour in the Kaiser I got to the point of not caring anymore.  All in all a success but next time I'm going back with an Armenian dictionary.