Shopping in Cusco

Quite a few people have been asking what shopping is like here, so here is a description.

Food

Today, Monday, I went to the little supermarket near our house. It’s one of the few in Cusco, although there is a bigger one opening soon, also nearby. It has about 8 short aisles and 5 checkouts. I normally go there on Mondays to do the main shopping for the week and if I take Benjamin in the double buggy I can put a basket in the back seat and fit everything in. I make the list and then check with Dina, my ‘empleada’ (lady who helps me at home) if there’s anything else we need, since she chooses the lunches 2 days per week and does most of the cleaning.

This is my list for today, which is fairly typical:
Breakfast cereal
Rice
Pasta
Raisins
Toilet roll
Disinfectant
Gloves for cleaning
Raisins
Eggs
Margarine
Worstershire sauce
Chicken and mince (fresh – little frozen food available)
Water (we boil some and get some in bottles)
Juice (Dina makes fresh juice mainly but Sammy often has a little carton when he comes out of school – this started as his treat for going to school on his own and now he gets very disappointed if we forget it!)
Leek and pineapple (most of our fruit and veg comes from the market but sometimes there is something extra we need)

Tuesday I normally go to the ‘milk’ shop. This is a little shop near Sammy’s school which sells mainly dairy products. Everything comes from a farm in the valley near here where they train young ‘campesinos’ (people from the countryside) in organic and ecologically friendly farming methods. I think the farm was started by a monastery. They have several shops in the area and we think these are the only places where you can buy pasteurised milk. We buy milk (in plastic bags), cheese, yogurt and jam there. Tuesday is the best day to go as that is when they bring the fresh produce in.

Thursday Dina normally goes to the market for me. There are lots of markets in Cusco, some under cover and some outdoors, with different sections selling everything under the sun! There are normally areas for fruit and veg, meat (not too keen to buy meat here as nothing is refridgerated) and clothes, and then, depending on the market, a whole mixture of tiny stalls with toys, kitchen things, tools, TVs and electrical goods, DVDs, etc. Dina normally buys things like potatoes, broccoli, peas, beans, carrots, pumpkin, cucumber, tomatoes, choclo (sweetcorn – yellow as a vegetable and purple to make into ‘chicha’, a drink), bananas, apples, mangoes, kiwi fruit and plums (when available). Very similar to the things we would buy at home really, but much cheaper! A lot of what is grown here is the same as in Britain. There is a lot more grown in the jungle areas but we don’t see that very often as it’s a long way from here. Although we don’t have seasons in the same way, the weather here is similar to Britain in some ways (see the ‘weather’ blog entry!) so I presume that’s why many of the crops are similar.

Clothes

As I’ve said, clothes can be bought in the market, although there’s nowhere to try them on of course. There are also lots of little shops in the town centre, plus a few bigger ones, where clothes of better quality can be bought. There are two shops which resemble somewhere like a small ‘NEXT’ (well, not really, but they’re the nearest thing!). There are no department stores here, although there are some in Lima which are just like anything you’d find in Britain. We’ll only visit Lima once or twice a year though as it’s an hour’s flight away so we certainly won’t be going for shopping trips!
We’ve not needed to buy much here so far. I bought Sammy some new pyjamas the other week as he was starting to grow out of his. There wasn’t much choice but I found some fleecy ones, blue and white with little aeroplanes, which don’t look too bad. I had a look for myself as I wear both my pyjama tops at once to keep warm, but I couldn’t see anything I could bear to wear!
Roland and I have both just bought a warm jacket each – indoors it is cold both during the day and in the evening and people often wear coats indoors. Jackets with a fleece lining seem a popular idea and it saves wearing actual coats indoors!

Furniture

When we buy furniture (ongoing – it’s a long process!) we normally either go to a furniture market (the side of the road or a plaza, set up temporarily at weekends), or go to the big ‘shops’ beside the main road, or get a carpenter to make things. We bought a little kitchen table, bedside table and a desk from one of the shops, lounge furniture from a side-of-the road market and had the dining table and chairs made by a carpenter (this took weeks as the first carpenter made the wrong stuff entirely!) The second carpenter was great and he has just made Sammy a special chair (an adapted version of Benjamin’s highchair) as he was fidgeting so much on a normal chair. Mattresses are bought in mattress shops, and then you have to try and find a bed base of the right size to match. We are still just on mattresses at the moment but we are buying a base for Sammy soon from a family just returning to Switzerland who live near to us.

We bought our rabbit cage from a market that was partially on the railway track! Trains only go a couple of times early in the morning and a couple of times late at night (it’s the train to Mach Picchu). This market had hundreds of chickens and ducks in little cages, plus the odd cockerel tied by one foot to a post and a few cages of guinea pigs and rabbits.

Kitchen items

There is a big kitchen shop where you can buy almost anything, so we got most things there. Plastic items can be bought in special plastics shops – there is a street full of them. The best one can take a long time to shop in though. As in many shops here, you have to choose your items from those on display and then get an assistant to write them down for you. You take this list to a desk where they copy it onto a receipt. You take the receipt to another desk where you pay. You then go to a third desk where you can collect your items (once they have been found from the store). It’s a bit like Argos I suppose! I seem to have spent a lot of time in this shop buying things like waste bins, kids beakers, jugs, a washing up bowl, a laundry basket and storage boxes for the boys’ toys. The funniest occasion was when I went to get a draining rack – I wanted orange to match the worktop(!) but they couldn’t find one, despite there being one on display, so I said I’d have green instead, but they brought out blue saying it was green. Then they brought me a small orange one, but it really was far too small. In the end I gave up and went to another shop. They also had an orange one on display but for some reason the girl had to run up the road somewhere to find me one. Then she brought it with the underneath tray missing so off she went again. The only tray she could find had the corner broken off! By this time I was so fed up I bought it anyway, as I really didn’t need the tray part!

So, with perseverance, and good friends like Geoff and Rachel to tell you where to look, you can buy almost anything here. The choice and the quality may be limited, but at least the prices are cheap. However, if you want to buy an Alpaca jumper in a smart tourist shop in the main plaza, that’s another matter!