6 tips for shopping at Prague grocery stores

2 responses to “6 tips for shopping at Prague grocery stores”

1. Gordon says:
   April 18th, 2008 at 5:19 pm

   I have posted a link to a few blog entries I have created on my various trips to Prague.

   It is a really nice place and will hopefully not suffer too much at the hands of the stag-weekends.

   Shame that the flight service from Bournemouth to Prague has stopped now!

2. student from Prague says:
   June 7th, 2008 at 7:54 pm

   Hello, it was very interesting for me to read this article. It’s always interesting to know what turists and foreigners think about your country. I’m from Prague and I think some of the statements aren’t true.

   For example “conditioner is not sold in every store, and is in rare supply at some of the larger stores” - of course you can’t buy conditioner in grocery store, but you can buy it in every supermarket or hypermarket (such as Tesco, Hypernova, Interspar etc.) or if you want to buy it in smaller shop, you should find shop called “Drogerie”. I’m sorry I haven’t found appropriate word in US English - it’s “chemist’s” or “drugstore” in GB English, but it isn’t a shop where you buy medicine, that’s called “Lekarna”. “Drogerie” is a shop in which
   you can buy cosmetics and household goods (drugstore chains are for example Rossmann and Droxy).
   But if you were shopping in some Vietnamese shop I can imagine that there wasn’t some types of goods. These shops are exploding in recent years. They are small and quite expensive. They belong to type of shops called “Vecerka”, which mean that they are open
   in the evening (=”vecer”) and at public holidays. Their role is to buy there what you have omitted to buy and you need it imediatelly - for example you begin to cook at 8 p.m. and you find out that you have run out of oil and the nearest bigger supermarket which is opened is too far, so it’s easier to pay few Kc more for it and to put up with another brand than you buy normally.
   I think conditioner doesn’t fit in this category - you mostly can wait till the “Drogerie” is opened or - if it is so urgent - you can take a taxi to another part of the city to some non-stop opened hypermarket
   We have also discount stores chains which offer low prices of goods but if you wan’t to buy any concrete product (your favorite brand) you rarely succeed. They have limited number of products and the products can be low-quality (names of these shops are Lidl, Penny, Plus, Norma etc.)
   The foodstore chains - supermarkets are for example Albert, Kaufland and Billa.

   To the pastry - I think it depends on the people. I like the French baguettes and I of course all types of Czech pastry from “rohlik” and “houska” to “chleba”, but when I visited USA (I was only in California) I didn’t enjoy any kind of pastry which was sold in the supermarkets. Czech “chleba” has very special taste, so if you aren’t used to it, you can dislike it, but if are use to it, you hardly find anything similar in some foreign countries.
   The bakery is “Pekarna” or “Pekarstvi”. If you want something sweet, the patisserie is “Cukrarna”.

   To the ketchup - I have surprisingly the same opinion. I dislike our ketchup. Maybe it’s because our family buy Heinz even if I was a child (now I am university student). And it could be interesting for you that Heinz could be bought here also in the communist era (as my parents told me) but of course not in normal shops! It was occasionally available in special shops in which you was able to buy only if you have special vouchers - so it was inaccessible for most people.

   To the milk - in bigger stores you can usually buy three types of milk (”mleko”):
   1)”plnotucne” = with “full of fat”, 3.5% of fat
   2)”polotucne” = with “half of fat”, 1.5% of fat - this is most common and in the smaller shops the only one
   3)”odtucnene” = “defatted”, 0.5% of fat
   You can recognise them by the colour on the box - the 3.5% is usually red, the 1.5% blue or dark blue and the 0.5% green or light blue. “% of fat” is “% tuku” and it is written somewhere on the box.
   That curious product you have bought was probably some kind of milk drinks (”kefir”, “zakys”, “podmasli” etc.) - some people like that sour taste.
   I am not sure what do you mean by “skim milk”, but if it is synonym of “cream” - milk with plenty of fat (in CR 33% fat), from which you can make whipped cream, it’s called “smetana” and it’s usually sold in small boxes of 250 ml (mililitres, 1 litre = 0.264 gal., 1 l = 1000 ml), “Trvanliva smetana” is the same, “trvanliva” means “durable”- but be careful not to buy “zakysana smetana” - it’s sour!

   I think dictionary is a very useful think anywhere, but in the Vietnamese shops you should have sometimes Vietnamese dictionary :-). I was one day very surprised because I wasn’t able to find some common kind of food and the man in the shop doesn’t understand me! (I was then trying it in English, but it doesn’t help - it’s very strange feeling not to make yourself understood in your country of birth.) But most of the Vietnamese (especially the younger) can speak Czech fluently.
   As for English I am not sure - we are learning English from primary school since the beginning of nineties, but the level of teaching foreign languagues is quite low (because of low salaries of teachers at the public schools). I think most people around thirty and younger can speak a little bit English, the older generation rather Russian than English and of course the seniors were learning German at school. It’s because of our history, as you can maybe see By this I don’t say that everyone can speak or understand foreign languague, but everyone was taught any.

   So this is end of my endless post. If you have any questions, you can ask. I think I’ll be visiting this sites more often.