Snow was falling, snow on snow...*
>> Tuesday, 20 March 2012


Now, if you live in Moscow (or perhaps, even if you don’t) and are responsible for doing the weekly shop for a family of four, at this stage you will probably be thinking “That’s not bad. I wonder where she shops?” but the thing is, I didn’t do the weekly shop. This was just a top-up trip.
Food shopping in Moscow may not be as expensive as in cities like Tokyo (a friend visiting there recently speaks in hushed tones of finding a punnet of 6 strawberries on sale for $200), but it’s not easy to do if you are at all budget-minded.
This is - for the time being at least the blog of an expat. So I freely admit that whilst I do on occasion frequent the kiosks and markets you find everywhere in Moscow, my food shopping is done mostly at supermarkets or hypermarkets. Life, I’m afraid, is just too short – especially in the cold weather – to traipse from one stand to the next in pursuit of a stall holder who actually takes the tomatoes you’ve asked for from the perfect and glossy specimens on display, rather than from the bargain basement poor relations (bruised, wrinkled and spotted) nestling out of sight behind the counter.
However, that does not mean that I frequent the chandelier-decked stores at the premium end of the market instead. There’s profligacy, and then there’s shopping for your staples in some of the swankier supermarkets on offer in Moscow. No, generally I join the masses at a certain French chain of hypermarkets, which may be less ruinous on the pocket but is not for the faint-hearted. I have been known to walk into one of the bigger hypermarkets here, take one look at the chaos inside, and turn around and walk out again, unable to face it.
Mostly, it seems to be Russians who shop in this outlet. Certain expats of my acquaintance pale visibly when I mention it's name, and I have to admit that if one’s only experience of a Russian hypermarket is of a late afternoon or weekend visit, I can see why. Russians en-masse can be formidable enough, but come between a babushka mid-afternoon and her choice of banana in a self-selection fruit and veg section and she won’t be the one carried out on a stretcher.
So I do my shopping early, when I can. And when I can’t? Well, if you should find yourself in downtown Moscow at a hypermarket carpark, and notice a woman sitting behind the wheel of her car chanting ‘Om... Om... Om...’ before gathering up her assorted plastic bags and entering the fray, don’t judge me please...
A friend sent me a link to the youtube clip below (thankyou, C). I love it. And I would just like to say that yes, this probably is for real; planning a surprise like this for a bride is not inconceivable here. Provided the groom has the cash to pay for it, obviously.
Growing up, and in my twenties and thirties, I was adamant that I would never wear a fur coat. All those supermodels claiming “I'd rather go naked than wear fur” had it spot on as far as I was concerned. “Why oh why would you wear the skin of an animal when there were perfectly good man-made alternatives available?” was my take on the matter, and I stuck to that argument. It wasn't hard, mind you; not only was there next-to-no fur available in the shops I frequented in London, but it's easy to be holier than thou about these issues in a climate where it rarely gets colder than minus 2 Celsius.
And then we moved to Moscow in January 2010, slap bang into the jaws of the coldest winter in a decade.
Oh boy.
Unsurprisingly, I found my attitude to fur shifting. Not only does it do the job nature designed it to do — keeping the wearer warm as toast — but you see it everywhere. This is surprising to me, because as anyone who has wandered through retailers in Moscow selling them will know, a fur coat does not come cheap — a new one from a high-street store will set you back anything from $1,000 to $30,000, depending on the quality of fur you want. So, it's not a purchase to make lightly. Devotees will tell you of course that if you look after it properly, a fur coat will last you a lifetime, but doing that brings it's own set of additional costs — there's the cleaning, and then the over-summer storage in a special facility. And yet, if you take a ride on the Moscow metro today, I guarantee that between 20% and 50% of the adults you see will be wearing fur.
Repeated exposure to anything changes perception, and halfway through my third winter here I'm a lot less judgmental on other peoples' choices to wear a fur coat than I used to be. Suddenly, the sort of comment a visitor to this city made to an acquaintance of mine on learning that the fur coat the latter was wearing was the real McCoy — “You should be ashamed of yourself!” — starts to sound not only incredibly rude but also more than a little blinkered. Live through a Russian winter yourself before judging other people's ways of staying warm, would be my advice to any new arrivals.
In the interests of full disclosure, I still don't wear a fur coat myself. I can kid myself that this is because my ethics are still intact, but it may also have something to do with my innate belief that, more often than not, they make the women wearing them look somehow middle-aged (a state I am far to close to to mess about with). And I'm afraid that I have to admit that if the sheepskin shearling coat of my dreams suddenly popped up in my price range, I too would be clad in the skin of an animal.
Obviously, my supporting rationalization for this purely hypothetical choice would be that since, as a confirmed carnivore, I eat lamb, I can see no reason why I shouldn't wear sheepskin. So it's lucky for my ethical sensibilities that mink, sable or chinchilla pie aren't on menus too...
This post first appeared on my other blog 'Diaries of a Moscow Mum' over at The Moscow Times online....




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