Right before Christmas on my way to the city center I spotted a newly opened and renovated grocery store. This story may look as insignificant to everyone but me. When I saw the new grocery store I felt I have to stop for a minute, so I stood there looking at the building while thought were running in my head. A bunch of old memories and not exactly good ones. I'm not sure how much time I spent looking at the grocery store but must have been around four or five minutes.

After getting myself together, my first reaction was to call my brother and tell him the shop is open again. Needless to say he was as surprised as me. His first question was did you go in? I said no but I'm planning to as soon as possible. After that I called my dad and told him too. The news made an impact on him too.

Basically there was nothing extraordinary about this new store. It's new, modern, well equipped but there is a similar one just 300m away where I've been shopping at ever since it has opened its doors. Then why I was looking at it for minutes you may ask. The answer is because of what it has been once, a long time ago when I was a child. The news brought back a lot of memories, all the bad things that happened during those years.

The old store was closed sometime in the 90's, then stayed closed for like ten years, then there was an Irish pub there, which was closed after a few years. I have never been in the pub, so the last time I stepped in that shop must have been right after the regime change.

What most of you don't know about me is that I grew up in communism and all my childhood was marked by that lifestyle. Those were tough times, full of shortages, nothing like some of you are used to. If I were to tell you how life was back then it would take me a few months and would shock readers for sure but I don't like drama, nor using my dramatic stories to beg for sympathy, so I'm going to limit this topic and try not to write too much about it. However, for you to fully understand my story, I may have to write more than one post.

Food In General

Food during communism was rationalized in the whole country. This means the government decided how much a person needs to eat a month and that's what you were given every month. But if I want to be more precise, this had nothing to do with how much a person needs. They decided how much they are willing to give people a month to survive without starving and that was it. Health and population's well being was never a priority.

There were food tickets printed on paper, to keep track of your monthly shopping. This was only for ordinary people, meaning the vast majority of the population as there were others, like high ranking party members who were entitled to have more food and luxury items as well.

How A Grocery Store Looked Like

Unfortunately I don't have any photos from the shops back then as taking a photo in a grocery store or any other shop could have gotten you into a big trouble. You could have been arrested, tortured, labelled as against the regime and convicted. I don't believe anyone would have dared to take photos.

source

So I'm going to use a photo I could find online, somewhat similar to what we had back then. The only difference is that here you can see labels on the shelves, indicating that the shortage is only temporary. In those times there were no labels left on the shelves as there was zero hope those shelves would be filled with the missing products. There were a bunch of products you could never take from the shelves.

These stores were not just grocery stores, basically each one was a mixed store, empty most of the times. Empty most of the times means there were different products you could buy freely anytime and there were the other products you could not buy even if you had money. What you could see on the shelves were a few types of pickles, mustard, biscuits (sometimes so old and dry you could only eat them after soaking in tea), vinegar, sometimes compote, combs, nail brushes, brooms, buckets, cheap and unpacked soap for washing clothes manually and so on. Butchery, fruit and vegetable shops and bakery shops were separate shops but you needed food ticket for meat and bread as well.

Stay tuned, tomorrow I'm going to post about how much food we were entitled a month, what we had to go through to get products like toothpaste, toilet paper, washing powder among others and what's happened when I lost our bread ticket.