M

arkets of Moscow

 

July 8 - September 10, 2005






Russian flag



Shopping in Moscow is such a varied experience. There are the simplest street stands run by a fruit vendor and there is a giant hypermarket with everything in between. There are the fanciest of enclosed malls and there are underground passage ways that sell convenience foods like simple sausages and pastries.

Dorogomilovskaya Market
Dorogomilovskaya Market

Our first shopping experiences were limited to the two supermarkets that were closest to our apartment. One was owned by a French chain the other by an American company. Both seemed expensive to us. In particular, the things that were a staple part of our diet such as cereal, cheese, wine, and all kinds of fruit and vegetable seemed high in price compared to Paris and Berlin where we had come from. The reason for that, of course, must be import duties. And the fact that supermarkets seemed to prefer to import fresh foods rather than buy from local suppliers. We couldn't figure out why, but that is how it seemed to us.

The range of products in both stores differed sufficiently that we never really fixed on one store. We liked the product range better at the American store, but the prices were higher there. On the other hand the French store was in the midst of a big refurbishment project and so stocks were low and you often couldn't find the same product from one visit to the next. By the end of the stay, we favored the American store more and more, partly because it always had a stand offering the free English-language newspaper, the Moscow Times, which we read as often as we could find it.

Dorogomilovskaya Market
Dorogomilovskaya Market

Not long before the end of our stay, we found a very big market called Nash that we would have frequented more if it had been a little closer and a little easier to get to. There we found boxes of red wine at an affordable price and a much better assortment of fresh fruit and vegetables than any other supermarket we had seen. If we had had a car, we would have shopped here all the time.

Sometimes, we would find fresh produce being sold on a street corner, or on the sidewalk opposite large stores. One day, we found an old woman selling large black currants from a bucket on the edge of a sidewalk in a busy shopping district. We could hardly believe that it was worth her while to make the journey from her village which she said was two hours from Moscow, to sell her bucket of currants at about a dollar a kilo. We watched someone else buy to figure out the price and then bought our own kilo. We need not have worried, this lady was scrupulously honest and friendly and open into the bargain. We enjoyed those currants on our morning cereal for more than a week.

Dorogomilovskaya Market
Dorogomilovskaya Market

About ten days after arrival, and with the help of our landlord Frederik, we also discovered that a fifteen minute walk from our apartment was one of Moscow's biggest covered markets, named after the district it was in, Dorogomilovskaya (dah-rah-gah-mil-OV-ska-ya). We had fun shopping there and found much better quality, variety, and affordability especially of vegetables and fruit. There was also a vast meat and fish market too, but we found it too difficult to negotiate prices and didn't feel we got any better quality or price than in the supermarket's packages. But we did experiment some and tried smoked fish and other delicacies once in a while.

The main market hall was surrounded by a plethora of small kiosks that all together made up a giant supermarket. Just about every product imaginable was on sale, each in a handful of specialist kiosks. There was a tea kiosk, a soap and cleaning products kiosk, a dried fruit kiosk, and even an egg kiosk. We made the mistake of buying eggs here and found them to be of very poor quality, probably because they weren't kept under refrigeration, and this in the summer! We found this whole place a fun place to shop but except for a couple of fruit and vegetable stalls that were outside of the market complex itself, never made shopping here a regular occurrence.




December 31, 2005