This one was long in the making. I just never got around to write it down.
It hit me as early as first week back in Serbia: where do you go when you you want to buy something.
It's actually a skill which takes a long time to learn, no matter where you live. And the depth of your pocket doesn't really change the speed of learning - whether you're shopping for price or quality, it takes time to build your mental map.
Except that I'm at home (I'm not home, I'm AT home). I should know the places. The places have changed meanwhile, so my knowledge is hopelessly obsolete.
In the US, this learning curve wasn't so steep - the places where you'd go to buy groceries weren't too many, and they were big, and not too different from each other (and we had a car at all times, save for a few weeks in the beginning). It took us some time to learn (and to reduce our monthly grocery bill from $800 to $300), but the geography was rather simple: for food, we only needed to know where Kroger, K-mart, Giant and Food Lion were, and among those we'd find what we needed. Later we added a local food shop and that was it. Along the way we learned to buy milk, flour, oil and most of other ingredients in Kroger, vegetables, fruit and meat in K-mart, chocolate and salties in Trader Joe's and very few other things in Walmart.
In Serbia, things get a tad more complicated. The local mom'n'pop shops are mostly gone. Six years ago, there were four of them within a two blocks distance, plus a baker. Now there's only one left, and it's next to a local chain shop (which is about as large as three isles in a Walmart, and has only two cash registers). They have pretty much everything, but not a large choice of anything, and if they don't have what you need, tough - the next good one is almost a mile away. The living standard has dropped so much meanwhile, that there's not enough turnover to support more shops.
For instance, bread, the cult of which is still alive, has gone American - the industrial white bread, now made by small bakers as well, with all the good stuff taken out of the flour and replaced with chemicals, is your only choice in most of the places. There's a "rye bread" with only 8% of rye, and other dirty tricks. So buying bread, for us cultists, means going 2km to the good shop which has the good bread.
Appliances: not that hard to find, as those can't be in a small shop, but then the choices are a bit narrow. One shop will have two or three brands, next one will have one of these and two others, and you'll feel like you were in the US because almost everything is made in PRC.
For faucets and other hardware of the kind I actually had to ask my plumber to drive me there to buy, because I wouldn't know where to start looking. You can find complete heating or bathroom solutions, with full installation service, in some backstreet where you'd never expect them. People are opening such shops in affordable places - they don't need, nor can pay, locations with high visibility. Not as simple as going to Lowe's or Home Depot, and they don't all have everything, so be ready for some driving. But they generally know who has what, and will give you directions.
This patterned layout of shops has its upsides and downsides. The downside is that they are harder to find - local newspaper with ads may help, asking around too. And your house may all of a sudden have a noisy shop in the next yard, where trucks may come and go at any time, or sounds of metal cutting may interrupt your nap. The upside is that you don't really need a car - the zoning knows only industrial, residential and agricultural purposes of the land, which means there's no commercial designation, so all kinds of shops are interspersed with homes, and you may be just lucky to be woken by smell of fresh bread every morning.
It hit me as early as first week back in Serbia: where do you go when you you want to buy something.
It's actually a skill which takes a long time to learn, no matter where you live. And the depth of your pocket doesn't really change the speed of learning - whether you're shopping for price or quality, it takes time to build your mental map.
Except that I'm at home (I'm not home, I'm AT home). I should know the places. The places have changed meanwhile, so my knowledge is hopelessly obsolete.
In the US, this learning curve wasn't so steep - the places where you'd go to buy groceries weren't too many, and they were big, and not too different from each other (and we had a car at all times, save for a few weeks in the beginning). It took us some time to learn (and to reduce our monthly grocery bill from $800 to $300), but the geography was rather simple: for food, we only needed to know where Kroger, K-mart, Giant and Food Lion were, and among those we'd find what we needed. Later we added a local food shop and that was it. Along the way we learned to buy milk, flour, oil and most of other ingredients in Kroger, vegetables, fruit and meat in K-mart, chocolate and salties in Trader Joe's and very few other things in Walmart.
In Serbia, things get a tad more complicated. The local mom'n'pop shops are mostly gone. Six years ago, there were four of them within a two blocks distance, plus a baker. Now there's only one left, and it's next to a local chain shop (which is about as large as three isles in a Walmart, and has only two cash registers). They have pretty much everything, but not a large choice of anything, and if they don't have what you need, tough - the next good one is almost a mile away. The living standard has dropped so much meanwhile, that there's not enough turnover to support more shops.
For instance, bread, the cult of which is still alive, has gone American - the industrial white bread, now made by small bakers as well, with all the good stuff taken out of the flour and replaced with chemicals, is your only choice in most of the places. There's a "rye bread" with only 8% of rye, and other dirty tricks. So buying bread, for us cultists, means going 2km to the good shop which has the good bread.
Appliances: not that hard to find, as those can't be in a small shop, but then the choices are a bit narrow. One shop will have two or three brands, next one will have one of these and two others, and you'll feel like you were in the US because almost everything is made in PRC.
For faucets and other hardware of the kind I actually had to ask my plumber to drive me there to buy, because I wouldn't know where to start looking. You can find complete heating or bathroom solutions, with full installation service, in some backstreet where you'd never expect them. People are opening such shops in affordable places - they don't need, nor can pay, locations with high visibility. Not as simple as going to Lowe's or Home Depot, and they don't all have everything, so be ready for some driving. But they generally know who has what, and will give you directions.
This patterned layout of shops has its upsides and downsides. The downside is that they are harder to find - local newspaper with ads may help, asking around too. And your house may all of a sudden have a noisy shop in the next yard, where trucks may come and go at any time, or sounds of metal cutting may interrupt your nap. The upside is that you don't really need a car - the zoning knows only industrial, residential and agricultural purposes of the land, which means there's no commercial designation, so all kinds of shops are interspersed with homes, and you may be just lucky to be woken by smell of fresh bread every morning.
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