An Ode to the Exotic Mundane: The Joy of the Humble Supermarket
If there’s a thing I do without fail when I’m in a new city, it’s visiting the modest supermarket.
"From Black and White to Color" (2015) - William Eggleston
Supermarkets offer one of the best ways to learn about the city’s culture and are sometimes better at it than the usual top 10 tourist attractions. It offers a peek into the local language, what people eat, and the day-to-day life of locals. Like how in France they take pride in ‘Bio’ which basically means organic, to the point that sometimes they would mark how many kilometers away the farm that produces it, from the supermarket; in Italy, where they would have a dedicated counter for various prosciutto and cured meats; and in South Korea, where there’s an entire aisle or two for instant ramen in any flavors you could imagine (spaghetti and cheese instant ramen, anyone?).
When I lived in Rotterdam for a few months, there’s a supermarket I frequent around the Blaak city center called JUMBO (Being Dutch, it’s pronounced with a ‘Y’). It’s about a five-minute walk from the city landmarks of Kijk-Kubus (Cube House) and Markthal, along the typical brick buildings and for a period of time, right beside a ‘coffee shop’ that scents the air in the block with the smell of weed.
For a second, it looks like any typical supermarket - because it is. It has fluorescent lights, ready-made meals and a box of raspberries on promotion near the entrance, and aisles and aisles of all the typical things you’d pick up when you go grocery shopping. But as a foreigner, even the simple supermarket is completely different. I could spend hours just browsing through the aisles, picking up cartons of appelsap and reading the labels of packaged soup: Hollandse Edwerten, Romige Kip-Champignon, Romige Tomaten. It's absolutely insane to be fascinated by labels and food packaging in a foreign language, but it piques my interest so much because it's so familiar yet so different at the same time. Over time these words become familiar to me, and that’s one of the first ways foreigners build their local vocabulary. Ask anyone who has spent at least a month living in the Netherlands what kaas and korting means and I bet you they know.
I looked at my own basket: a tub of Picante hummus, a party-sized bag of Lay’s Patatje Joppie flavor that’s only available in the Netherlands (also, by party sized it means party of one because I’d finish that bag in one sitting), a broccoli floret, some pasta, and a pack of cherry tomatoes. An ordinary basketful of groceries represents something simple and sentimental about the idea of the ordinary day-to-day. Easily, I slide to the thought of residing here. Getting groceries every Tuesday, cycling home to a small apartment up four flights of stairs in a narrow brick apartment. In every new city I go, going to the supermarket gives me the temporary feeling of permanence: that for 30 minutes, I am no different than the locals doing their routine shopping.
Exotic (adj):
introduced from another country: not native to the place where found.
My Dutch friends would chuckle and are absolutely bewildered by my love of Albert Heijn and JUMBO. They thought it was a bit charming that I do, but maybe more strange than charming:
How something absolutely mundane to them could be exotic to me.
The word ‘exotic’ has traditionally been attached to something far more colorful than supermarket aisles. The word means “originating in or characteristic of a distant foreign country”, and therefore by definition, what counts as exotic is highly subjective. Yet somehow when we think of the word, we universally think of something tropical or of indigenous people. For a while, it’s been associated with ‘the Orient’, caravans in Middle Eastern deserts, Buddhist temples in Eastern Asia, tribespeople adorned with colorful beads in Central Africa. Perhaps it’s only because this definition has been, and maybe still is, dominated by Western societies and media.
But if you really think about it, what’s ‘exotic’ to you might not be exotic to me, and vice versa. This is because we use our own cultures as the reference point.
So why do we find the mundane exotic?
Because it’s refreshingly different from how it is like at home.
Or maybe it’s similar to how it is like at home… but with closer appreciation, it really isn’t. What we appreciate most or find most exotic often reveals what we think we lack in our respective home countries. The French author Gustave Flaubert loved the chaos and mess of Egypt so much that he used the word ‘happiness’ and ‘the Orient’ interchangeably. This reveals his annoyance with the high brow, snobbish bourgeois culture back in Paris (his hate was so deep that he wrote a satirical catalogue of French bourgeois’ prejudices called Dictionary of Received Ideas). Myself? I won't stop raving about Albert Heijn’s array of pre-cut fruits and vegetables and healthy snacks. This is because despite coming from a tropical country with an abundance of fresh produce, there’s a lack of a habit of healthy snacking. I hated that if I ate an apple or a salad, someone would jokingly say “Oh, are you on a diet?” or “Don’t pretend to be such a health snob!” (please let me eat my salad in peace, okay?).
Because we come in with a traveler mindset.
If you’re in a foreign place, all your senses are heightened and you see things in a different light than locals who have grown up and seen the same thing in their city all their lives. Something as mundane as a supermarket becomes exotic because you would notice how there is an abundance of cheese, or how the minimalist packing design goes back to their art movements in the sixties.
Because there’s a feeling that if you notice it, experience it, be a part of it; you could have a piece of the city and its culture with you.
It’s a way to extend your time in that city longer and to give a sense of permanence to what is obviously fleeting.
The Local Exotic
Two years ago two of my Danish friends came to visit Jakarta, the city where I grew up in. I am proud of my city but I didn’t find it anywhere near charming: there’s constant traffic jams, constructions that delay their completion by at least two years, the list goes on. My first reaction to my friends coming to Jakarta was, “Are you sure?” I had to think of what to do and what to see for them because I haven’t been exploring my own city that much.
We were walking towards a museum on a crumbling sidewalk right beside an open sewer. I must admit that I was embarrassed to show the mess of the city. Half-way I noticed that my friends were still far behind and that they were so amazed by it all and far more than when they saw the touristy Monas monument or the gigantic Jakarta shopping malls. They took their time. They were in awe. They took photos and videos.
I realized that they were amazed by all the street vendors that covered most of the sidewalk. There were woks filled with bubbling hot oil with the smell of fried fritters in the air, tarpaulin covering the ground for a middle-aged man selling cheap plastic toys, and groups of locals sitting on stools slurping noodles.
This was their equivalent of the Exotic Mundane.
I took all this for granted before, but being with them gave me secondhand traveler’s awe. It taught me to take the time to pay attention to the things that I’ve passed by every day and ignored. That maybe I don’t have to go all the way to JUMBO or Albert Heijn to celebrate the Exotic Mundane. I could just go to a local warung kopi (coffee shop - but not the kind like in Holland) and observe fellow Jakartans from all walks of life.
So I encourage you to look at your own city in a different way. Tell me, what’s your version of the Exotic Mundane?
Words by Nadia Pritta Wibisono