Xinjiang, Shopping, and Crunchy Peanut Butter

I have been talking recently with a fellow blogger who is also an ESL teacher in Wuxi, a small city not too far from Shanghai.  He's actually the one who told me it was a "small city" but the population numbers a staggering 4 million!  I guess when you live near Shanghai that's considered small, but for us here in Xinjiang where our home of nearly 200,000 is considered sizable (i.e. worthy to put on a map) and the biggest city, our capital Urumqi, has only 2.7 million people, Wuxi is not a small city by any stretch of the imagination.

As I was writing this teacher, I began thinking about how our life would be different if we lived closer to actual civilization as opposed to the middle of nowhere here in Xinjiang.  It brought me back to memories of our first week here in Karamay, being in shock over just how foreign everything was to us.  We couldn't distinguish Uyghur people from Chinese people, lamb meat from beef, and the only food we actually recognized was rice.  For the first few days we were scared we might starve to death! I'll never forget while Tiff and I were shopping in the city's main grocery store, looking for anything to make our own meals at home, that I found crunchy peanut butter.  It was at that exact moment that I knew we would be ok...we could survive this crazy place.  In an area as remote as Karamay, crunchy peanut butter was (and still is) a gift from heaven.

Even after that great discovery, though, our dieting and shopping habits have definitely changed living here in Xinjiang.  Instead of planning meals based on what we feel like eating, we must plan them based on what is in stock at the store.  You see, unlike bigger Chinese cities or grocery shopping in the west, going to the grocery store is not a chore, it's an exploratory adventure.  Each week we must brave the untamed store aisles which are reorganized daily because the store has far too many employees and not enough work to keep them busy, in search of products which may or may not be on the shelves that week. 

For example, this month we have searched three different stores for butter...BUTTER...pretty much an essential ingredient to any baking that Tiff wants to do in our mini-oven.  To our dismay there has been no butter to be found anywhere and now that we have this big milk crisis staring us in the face, I'm not even sure if we could trust the butter if we found it.  Frustrating!  So which items have been disappearing from our grocery store shelves lately?  Let me see: butter, our favorite graham crackers, cereal, and (can you guess?)...crunchy peanut butter!

I'll admit that there are times when I wish we lived in a bigger city.  It's hard not to, but don't feel bad for us...we love it here in Xinjiang.  We just have those moments, and for me, right now, this is one of them.  I guess I'll just have to go drown my sorrows in a pathetic excuse for a PBJ, the jelly sandwich.