The Supermarket Tourist

I have an unexpected day off in Muscat. After a leisurely breakfast I debate with myself what to do next: "Catch up on all the paperwork and sort out your inbox", I tell myself. "You must be joking!" I reply, "Here I am in Oman having just been working for the week and you want me to work some more?" "You've been here before", I counter, "been there done that. You've been procrastinating with the filing so now's your chance to get back on track". And so it continues for a while as we negotiate with each other. In the end we reach a compromise and I do some work before heading out of the hotel for a random walk. Since it's winter here it's very pleasant although the sun is strong and I've forgotten to bring a hat, which might restrict my walking to some extent.

Welcome to Lulu Muscat

The Lulu hypermarket is not far from my hotel, so I head in that direction, thinking that I might find a hat there. In any case I have an ulterior motive; I like supermarket tourism. You can learn a lot about a country by wandering the aisles of the supermarkets and there's always some interesting stuff for sale which you'd never see back home. Even in these days of international supermarket chains and with many items seemingly ubiquitous, there are still always some local touches to discover.

Rice, anyone?

The Lulu is enormous, by any standards. Vast aisles seem to disappear into the distance, many of them with a bewildering assortment of variations on the same type of product. The rice aisle - yes, an entire aisle devoted just to rice - is a case in point. Not only are they selling rice in 20 kg bags (like you'd see in most of Asia as well, but are unlikely to find at your local supermarket in Houston or Melbourne for example) but there's a seemingly endless array of different types and brands of rice.

Colourful choices

The more I walk around this supermarket the more I am impressed with what's on offer, and which items are clearly bigger sellers than others. Apart from the rice aisle, I notice that the sweets aisle is similarly impressive. Then there's the cakes and bread section, which is not only huge, but also clearly is biased towards sweet things. Sugar is everywhere and it's no surprise that diabetes is becoming endemic in this part of the world. I pass by yet another display cabinet full of sweets, this time they are all varieties of Backlava - gorgeous but oh so sweet!

Sweet distractions

Other things which seem to be popular in large quantities include paper tissue products and I see one man stacking an entire trolley with what looks to be 24-packs of toilet paper. Tissues take up another aisle and I recall that in fact you do see boxes of tissues pretty much everywhere, including in most cars, often on the dashboard. The ample use of water in most bathrooms leads to an equally ample use of tissue paper - not particularly environmentally friendly.

Of course dates and spices are big sellers here and again the variety is bewildering. Here, you don't simply buy some dates, but you look for a very particular type. A bit like the olives in Spain, which are arrayed in huge vats of so many varieties that you wonder who invented them all.

More colourful choices

I note that they sell the same bottles of water as my hotel. But here they cost 60 baisa whereas in my hotel they charge 1.2 rials (1200 baisa) which in anyone's language is a pretty impressive mark-up! Who wouldn't want to be able to charge 20 times the retail price and get away with it? Nothing like a captive market to let you set the price point.

I continue my walk and decide to do a bit of Mall (Shopping Centre) tourism. The Muscat Grand Mall (MGM, no relation to the film company I suppose) is air-conditioned and big. Not a patch on the Mall of the Emirates or The Dubai Mall mind you - it would be difficult to out-Mall that city, but big nevertheless. I read that the Dubai Mall is "the largest shopping mall in the world by total area, with over 1200 shops". Well, I'm in Muscat, so the MGM will have to do. The MGM seems to be a bit of work-in-progress and is decidedly modest compared to some its peers. I take a quick walk through the Carrefour (I am a supermarket tourist today, after all) and am surprised by how small and decidedly unimpressive the Carrefour is - especially compared to the Lulu I've just been in, or even its namesakes in France or Abu Dhabi. No wonder the Lulu is teeming with customers and the Carrefour seems to be struggling to attract custom. 

It's time for coffee and cake and although there's no Starbucks here (which although it serves pretty ordinary coffee, makes a seriously good carrot cake) there's a Gloria Jean's which happens also to have a nice-looking carrot cake in the display. I'm sold. The coffee is impressively different, with a decidedly burnt flavour which at first I find unappealing, but which in fact grows on me. There's WiFi but I need a code, and you need a local mobile phone number to receive it. The waiter obliges by giving me his phone number and receives the code for me. Chalk up one for customer service at Gloria Jean's in the MGM. Yes - I really should be trying something a little more local than Gloria Jean's, but there's not a lot of "local" here in the MGM.

Tiffin-Carriers (Dabbas) loaded in the Dabbawala truck

Walking back to the hotel I pass by a construction site just as couple of Indian workers from what's obviously the catering company are loading their truck with the "packed lunches" of the workers. Crates of Tiffin-carriers (Dabbas) are being loaded up; somehow this just seems great: here's a modern construction site in Oman; all cranes, cement mixers, reinforced concrete and so forth - and lunch is still delivered in the tried-and-true tiffin carrier by the dabbawala as it has been for decades (125 years, according to the Mumbai Dabbawala.) Not really "local" perhaps - the dabbas originate in India and not Oman - but much more authentic than where I've just had lunch.