Missive from the Congo 007

Originally posted on Wed, 06 Dec 2006 07:34:14 +0200

Sorry for the tardiness of this missive. I must admit to having procrastinated while thinking of what to write this week. So anyways here is a little something on eating in Kisangani.

As you can well imagine we cannot simply go to Loblaws and stock up. There are grocery stores but they are more akin to “dépanneurs” than Loblaws. Over the course of time several stores have been identified stores where we can pick up various supplies and food stuff. A lot of what we eat comes from Canada. Everybody who comes over brings about 30 kilos of “non-perishable food items” such as pasta, pasta sauce, canned meat and fish, sauce mixes, rice, etc.

We also buy stuff that’s hard to get or very expensive when we travel. The towns of Goma and Bunia are close to the border with Rwanda and Uganda respectively. They have much better selection and pricing there since a lot of their foodstuff comes from those two countries. Kinshasa also has a reasonable selection but the prices are also very high. Naturally some things are very cheap such as bananas, plantains, papaya, pineapples. I’m not sure how much those cost because I haven’t had to buy any but they are a pittance because they are “grown” locally. I put grown in quotation marks because I have not yet seen anything that we would recognize as a farm. People simply go into the bush and pick these things. We have a couple of banana and plantain trees in our yard. Canada House in Kinshasa has a papaya tree in theirs.

I haven’t personally done a lot of grocery shopping but here are some sample prices (in US dollars):

• Ground beef $10/kg
• Chicken breast $10/kg in Kinshasa
• Cheese $25/kg
• Heineken $3 per can
• Vegetable oil $3 for 500ml of dubious quality
• Loaf of bread $1.20
• Primus (locally brewed beer) $0.65 per quart
• Coke $0.15 per 300ml bottle 

 
Buying beer and pop is interesting. First it is sold in glass bottles. That is normal for beer but I can’t remember the last time I saw pop in a glass bottle but it must have been the seventies. Second, the deposit on a case of 12 beer bottles or 24 pop bottles is $20. The bottles are worth far more than the content itself. Consider that next time you pay $1.50 for a 600ml bottle of coke. In any event, these bottles are old. They are all scratched up. The beer bottles still refer to the country as Zaire. It hasn’t been called that since 1997. I’m guessing that no new bottles have been produced since the early nineties, at least.

In any event, we do manage to eat though the variety isn’t always there. Next week, dining out.

  

John