Don’t Take Photos in the Supermarket - Management will Ask You to Leave

Shopping for groceries in Doha can be challenging. I’ve shopped at two of the several large supermarkets: Carrefour, the French hypermart and LuLu, another hypermart from UAE. What’s quite good about both of these huge stores is that you can buy just about everything you could possibly need.....IF you can find it! There is some kind of order where like-items are grouped together, but it seems that every time I go back, things have moved. When navigating a busy shop where shopping cart etiquette does not exist, I often find that I don’t have the space or patience to stop and look for the item that was on that shelf last week. With some items, there is very little selection, but with others there is a whole aisle of choice. Like vegetable oil - an entire aisle!

The produce section is most interesting to me. Since nothing 

is really grown here in Qatar, everything is imported. There is

a huge aisle of grapes - just select your country: Tunisia, 

Greece, Turkey, USA, Lebanon, Egypt. Same with apples: 

New Zealand, South Africa, USA, Canada, Jordan, Turkey. 

They have dragon fruit,  jackfruit and rambutan from Thailand, 

arbi (sweet potato) from Pakistan, coconuts from Sri Lanka, 

drumsticks from India, durian from Singapore.....the list goes 

on. There is a section of fruits and vegetables from India. I

saw a vegetable I hadn’t seen before and I didn’t know the 

name of it. When I looked up at the sign, it seems that 

Carrefour management didn’t know the name of it either; 

the sign said “vegetable from India”. 

 Lessons Learned at the Supermarket:

1. Line ups don’t matter here.
2. Never forget to have your produce weighed in the produce section. If you get to the check out without all the little stickers on your food, you’ll have to go back. 
3. Only buy meat from NZ or Australia.
4. Brown bread is really just white bread that’s been dyed brown. 
5. There is never a good time to go grocery shopping - it’s always busy.
6. Nobody uses reusable shopping bags here (even though they are available and cheap). The stores don’t really promote them either. 
7. Don’t take photos in a supermarket. Management will ask you to leave.

Nevertheless, our fridge is full each week and our grocery bill is much lower than it was in Canada. We are trying lots of different foods, but the boys are just happy that we always have ice cream and popsicles in the freezer.