Grocery Shopping in Mongolia

I don’t normally travel with tour groups. If I can, I generally car-camp. I’ll stop off at restaurants that look interesting, but generally I hit grocery stores along the way and fix my own food. Since this tour provided food for most of the trip, I really didn’t expect to stop in at any grocery stores at all. To my surprise, we hit several.

This one (The outside is in the top picture) is in Ulaanbaatar. It was our first stop. Because it’s good research material for the book I intend to set in Mongolia, I went shutter-happy.

I noticed several things. First, all the stores we went in to had a significant section turned over to sweets. Candy, cookies, etc could easily take up a quarter of the floor space. The alcohol section generally only took up an isle or two. Sugar got more real estate – but every one we went into had both.

Second, between the pictures and the prevalence of English, I could generally figure out what I was looking at even when the packaging covered everything up.

Third, each store had something a little different in it that the others didn’t.

Each time we left Ulaanbaatar we would stop off at a store to pick up water. Well, the tour guide got bottled water. Most of the rest of us went in for bottles of wine and beer. On one occation we happened to be in the store on a Wednesday. (I think it was a Wednesday, though I didn’t double check. One non-weekend day a week anyway.) The isle with the booze had a canvas tied across it. Apparently that is how they enforce the law forbidding grocery stores from selling alcohol.

We had just left one store and were on our way to the ger camp when we stopped off at another. This one was a long, narrow room in a log cabin along the road where we were on a long drive. Apparently the stop was made for the use of their out house. I went in to see if they had prayer scarves or anything like that. Nope, but they had the usual assortment of candy, so I got a lollypop for The Girl.

A bit earlier in the trip we stopped off at an outdoor market. They had everything from bags of grain to fancy underwear. One even had the equivalent of Avon products. We stopped to get meat from a butcher’s shop which we brought with us to the Kazzakh family for soup. The butcher’s shop in question was a large shed with tables and slabs of meat sitting on the tables. A far cry from the shops around here.