Grocery shopping in Madang
and other first impressions
Cucumbers thick as a fist, eggplants skinny as a finger. Bundles of unknown greens. Long brown leaves of local tobacco and newspaper pages to roll it in. Sweet potatoes, lychees, limes. Plantains and sweet bananas by the bunch. Mangos, though their season is ending. Pineapples, whose season has just begun. Coconuts with holes cut on top for drinking. Boiled sago patties and fried slices of cassava. Salty peanuts knotted in plastic wrap.
Such are the wares of the biggest outdoor market in Madang. They are arranged in neat piles on the ground, their prices marked in pen on squares of cardboard beside them. My favorite row is next to the lagoon where the fishermen’s wives sit behind ice boxes packed with that day’s catch.
“Rainbow Runner. Shark. Yellow Fin. Sweet Leaves.” The women smile at us, two sweaty, gaping whites who don’t know any of the names. Not many whites visit the market. In fact, I’ve never seen a single one.
A tree branch extends over the lagoon and on the end of it a little boy bobs up and down. Four men in a kayak set off towards the sea. We buy a Red Emperor for fifteen Kina and stroll on.
When it’s rainy, each woman opens an umbrella above her mat, transforming the market into a blooming garden of colorful, plastic bulbs.
But not today. Today belongs to the sun. The sun in its infinite wisdom slows me down, roasts me pink, dilutes my thoughts in the wash of its all-encompassing glare. Feeling dizzy, I accidentally step in a patch of mud.
We’re walking towards Andersons, the main grocery store, to buy whatever the market woman cannot grow or catch. But first I rinse off my toes in a puddle. Can’t be tracking mud into Andersons! This is a clean, posh place.
Noodles, milk, rice, beer, iced coffee in a box. Andersons is stocked with imported goods from Australia and Asia alongside a selection of proud PNG-made brands and some produce from the market at wildly inflated prices. At least three employees stand by the door to open it for you, oh member of the rich elite, and wish you good morning, good afternoon.
In “The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide,” Anne Carson writes that a stranger’s method of knowing something is to eat it. I agree with all my stomach but would add that buying the stuff to eat can be even more instructive.
In any case, the outdoor markets versus Andersons’ grocery store more or less sum up my first impressions here. Over these first few days I’ve experienced Madang as a city of picturesque tropical charm and awkward luxuries. Awkward because that isn’t why we came. Awkward too because they are still luxuries, even for our Western budget, and yet we’re expected to prefer them. Papua New Guinea isn’t one of those poor countries where first-world foreigners are automatically launched up a social class. Papua New Guinea isn’t actually all that poor, or wouldn’t be, if the wealth from mining and cash crops were even close to fairly distributed… but that’s another post.
Our house is charming and awkward too. We live five minutes from the sea and are surrounded by coconut trees that drop their fruits right onto our lawn for us to find in the morning.
And yet our wealthy residential street has all the desperate comfort of any suburban dystopia. Except that when the men drink after work, they don’t stumble home and watch TV, they roam the streets looking for trouble. And find it…
We were told to leave our lights on all night every night, to prevent break-ins. And I (the female half of ‘we’), was told not to leave the house alone, not even during the day.
I’ve since figured out when and how it’s safe to travel alone, but those first days, well … I spent a lot of time watching the curtains billow. Our curtains are patterned with stripes of flowers in a seventies’ palette of brown, orange and beige. Behind them are the glass slats of our windows, kept permanently tilted to let in the breeze. Hence the billowing. Behind the slats is a screen to fend off bugs and behind that are green splotches of mowed lawns and palm trees and a sky that’s blue or white, depending on the weather.
The weather. It’s always either blazing hot or just about to rain or raining. The rain mostly comes at night and ranges from cozy drizzles to proper thunderstorms. As we sleep, the sound of rainfall and rustling palm trees is punctuated by staccato squawks.
Once in a while the idyllic soundscape is interrupted by the jangle of the chain locking our fence, startling us up out of sleep. I yank the curtains aside, sure that gangs of robbers are toeing the doorstep. It’s just Simon though, our neighbor, fetching betel nuts for Jessica.
Jessica lives with her husband, their three little kids, and her cousin Simon in the other house on our compound. Beyond buying food, cooking dinner, and the occasional load of laundry, Jessica doesn’t have much to do. During the day, she walks back and forth to get her own betel nuts and cigarettes. Sometimes I loiter with her, wandering around our lawn to greet neighbors across the fence and check whether the fruit in our trees has ripened.
Fish, taro, bananas, two kinds of greens, papaya for dessert. She piled the feast high on a plate for Daniel and me, insisting her family would eat later. Hospitality is not taken lightly here!
For all the locked fences between us, my neighbors and just about everyone I’ve met have proven not just hospitable but genuinely friendly. They don’t only erect signposts of friendliness, smiles and polite questions, they spend considerable time and energy to show us where to go and how. To make us feel at home.
Ever so gradually, that’s where we are.
