2022.10.06. Három a magyar igazság

It’s our 3^rd day here and also our 3^rd consecutive day of shopping.

We are also spending more and more money every time so I really hope that we will just stop here and avoid shops for at least a few days now. Today, we went to Emart, a Korean store not too far from our apartment. It’s supposed to be a bit on the expensive side but it’s two whole floors and it has so much stuff. There were even two food courts and a bookshop and some random kiosks inside. We started off by getting two humidifiers, since the air is very dry here and we kept getting parched (and my husband even mentioned how he felt his eyes getting too dry). Then we bought some kitchen equipment (although we were pretty well off to begin with, since the apartment came with basic stuff and I’d also brought many things from our kitchen back in Hungary) and washing liquid and shampoo and body lotion and shaving cream and such, before moving on to foodstuffs.

One of our new humidifiers

Fresh produce really is expensive, there’s no denying that – definitely more expensive than in Hungary, although not by as much as we’d have expected. Pastries and canned foods and typical Asian things like sushi or nori or noodles were actually significantly cheaper than they are at home though. All in all, I’d say we will probably be able to spend about the same amount of money (or perhaps a bit more) on foods here than we would at home, only we will have less fresh produce (and less variety) and more grains and legumes. And we’ll need to put a bit more effort into finding plant-based ingredients, probably.

We’ve seen quite a few strange and new foods too, but we decided not to try them now as even the ‘basic’ items we had in our cart were basically new to us, and maybe it would be better to keep trying new things gradually, not everything all at once. Keep the magic alive and such.

Speaking of magic! I’ve also gotten my hands on the Mongolian translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The bookstore in Emart had the whole series but I am only collecting the first book in languages I do not speak so that’s the one I bought. I am really excited about that. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to read it, but then I’m also pretty sure I’ll never be able to read the Irish or the Polish ones either. I just like having the translations from countries I’ve visited (or the ones which I can or plan to be able to actually read, ofc).

Apparently, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is so successful here that it takes both the first and the second places on the top chart at the same time.

As we’d bought so much stuff, we decided to take a taxi back to the apartment instead of walking those 1.5 kms. Cue our most surreal taxi experience ever. It was harder to get a taxi now since it was that time of the day when families are headed home from work/school, and most cars had kids and parents sitting in them, not lone sharks looking for passengers. However, a random Mongolian guy saw us trying to get a taxi (my husband was trying to find someone on the taxi app, a verified taxi and I was just holding my arm out, trying not to drop bags full of groceries) and he hailed a taxi for us. At first, I wasn’t even sure they’d stopped for us – it was a family of three, a young couple and a baby girl who was about a year old. To be honest, I was pretty sure they had not stopped for us but the Mongolian guy from the street indicated that we should get in and (once he had managed to clear the back seat of toys and the kid’s car seat) I asked the driver if he was a taxi and he kept nodding so we shrugged and got in, together with our 5 shopping bags. The couple did not speak any English and the woman tried translating to Russian for us (using her phone) but finally understood that English would suffice better. They managed to take us to where we wanted to go and we were so grateful that they’d stopped even with a baby in the car (and clearly not being a regular taxi) that we gave them 4 times the price they asked for – it would still have been a completely acceptable taxi price back in Budapest, I must add. I guess we’ll stop giving taxi drivers such excessive tips but for now we’re just incredibly happy with being able to get to one place from another and not having to pay a fortune for it.

Our grocery haul, still in the bags...

..and loaded out onto the kitchen table.

In the evening, we’ve had a modest but (finally) veggie-filled dinner and just chilled out. And tomorrow, I’ll finally go and take a look at the university proper-like – at least I hope so (Munkh was supposed to meet me today but he asked that I go tomorrow instead as they were really busy all week with the 80^th anniversary-related things).