Ulaanbaatar, MongoliaFriday, June 4, 2010
Shopping for food here when you don't speak Mongolian or Russian is all about pattern recognition. Although I am starting to recognize the Cyrillic alphabet, food packages can be very mysterious when you don't speak the language. Yes, it might be obvious that the can contains tomatoes, but is it puree? tomato paste? whole tomatoes? spaghetti sauce?
The only safe bet: Did I buy a package BEFORE that looked like that? When Frank does the shopping, the shopping list includes annotations like "little girl flour" or "cheese with yellow label and a cow on it".
Even in our relatively short time here, packaging has had time to change--and then the fun starts all over again...
