Before we went into the store to shop, we took a break in the food court and had some breakfast. I ordered a hot tea. It came in a Dixie cup. I'm not kidding.
While I might not find the scale of this drink small for a desert landscape, what was startling was the amount of sugar I was offered to use in this tiny cup. I'm not sure you can make it out in this photo, but look at the top of the teabag. It's sitting on the bottom of the cup and the top is visible above the height of the water. That should give you a good scale to compare the cup to. This tea was offered across the counter with four packets of sugar. Four. About one packet/teaspoon of sugar for every ounce of liquid. That's just too sweet. Had I put that much sugar in this little tea, it would have been tea syrup, not tea.
Once we got into the store, we wandered the aisles like yokels and marveled at the difference in products offered here versus back in the US. Some things remain the same though. No teen can be without these:
In any language, a story about forbidden love will translate. It's just fun to see books that look recognizable by the cover but read back to front. If you look closely, you can see that the spine of the book is to the right, and the pages flip open on the left. Familiar, but oddly not.
Some of the store's brands are familiar. We saw Dove soap, Pantene shampoo. It looks exactly like it does in the US except all the fine print on the bottle is in Arabic.
A lot of the store's brands are unique and local. Tunis is a seaport town and fishing is a big part of the economy. That was never more evident that when we saw the size of the cans of tuna available. Not just industrial sized... HUGE. I should have taken a picture, but I didn't.
They must use a lot of tuna because there were tuna cans of all sizes and most were locally named brands. I wonder what the quality of the fish will be like? Are these going to be treated like tuna in the US? Don't they x-ray those flat cans or something? I should have more knowledge than I do about stuff like that. Knowing me, I'll probably just buy the local stuff and see how it tastes. People have been eating raw fish for hundreds of years.
Also fascinating were some of the household items. Lamps in Tunisia have a lot more bling than we're used to. Dangly, sparkling bits. I won't say it's tacky, but it's not art either. I know the designers on HGTV insist that a room has to have some sparkle, some reflective surface to bounce light around, but I'm pretty sure this is NOT what they meant. I'm used to looking across a wide selection of chandeliers and seeing a lot of them with crystals that are way over the top. I'm not used to seeing feathers and crystals and colored glass and enameled metal and zebra print all in the same fixture. It's just a step too far, if you get my point.
What I did find a little appalling was the toy section. They do have as many kids toys as any Target or WalMart in the States. Some of them are recognizable from comics--Spiderman, the Hulk, Superman. Some of the toys have movie tie-ins that are strictly American--Toy Story, Cars, Disney Princesses. But the doll section was so strange. In a country where all the inhabitants are of Mediterranean descent--all dark haired and dark eyed with olive skin--all the baby dolls are blue eyed blondes. It was eerie. I looked at all the Barbies and doll babies and thought, "these little girls never play with dolls that look like them!" Strange. There's a time for some globalization and I think the toy department needs to have some diversity. At least a few dark haired, dark eyed baby dolls.
I think that retailers 'sell what they can get' here. I think manufacturers will sell whatever they make to whoever will buy it. Does that mean that Carrefour is not stocking things that are coveted locally, but whatever they can get from their suppliers? Or do none of the baby doll manufacturers in China or Indonesia make dolls of other ethnic looks? The US market is so large and compelling that it guides all their products?
It may be that this is what Tunisian stores have demand for, but that would surprise me. Kids like diversity, but they also like similarity. Maybe it's a matter of scale? The manufacturers make what the US wants because it's the biggest buyer. Then other countries get the remainders. Hard to say. It does make for an interesting stroll through the local stores, though.
--Sandee Wagner
No comments:
Post a Comment