Cultural Oddity Moment #8

I'm getting quite a bit of mileage out of the way people cook here, but it's so different that it causes a great many of the cultural differences I've noticed. My family cooks alomst every day. They enjoy eating out just as much as the next person, but when they do the food is no different than what they could have made at home. So how does a family that cooks daily grocery shop? Well, my mother cooks almost every day and she does one mass shopping trip about once a week with small runs if we need specific items or regulars like bread and milk. This family, and I think many others, play by different rules.

Every meal we have the same six mini side dishes. Umma makes one good sized batch of, say, pickled garlic and then for the rest of the week we all just eat a little bit of it each meal. The same goes for all the other mini side dishes, but they're all on a sort of roatation so that Umma never has to make more than one at a time. So for each meal the sides are pretty much covered. Of course there's also always plenty of rice, so that also seldom needs to be bought. The only thing she needs to purchase are the ingredients to whatever the main dish is going to be. Whether it's the soup or the stir fry ingredients, those are the only variables in every meal.

So, does she buy a mass quantity of main dish ingredients to last a couple of days? No, instead she goes out every morning and shops for the day. This way, since most of the ingredients are without preservatives, everything's fresh when she cooks it.

It's this pattern of shopping every morning which has birthed our cultural oddity. There are certain gentlemen who have deal in specific produce and meats that either don't want to sell to the big grocery stores or can't. These merchants drive around the residential areas instead and try to catch all the women out doing their shopping for the day. They announce their wares over megaphones with a recorded message. Sometimes they have many items, so all I understand is "braghbraghbraghLETTUCEbraghbraghbraghbraghONIONSbraghbraghbraghbraghSALEbraghbraghbraghPLEASE PURCHASEbraghbraghbraghbraghbraghTOMATOESbraghbraghbraghbraghLETTUCE." These megaphones are on a very short repeat, so you get used to the pattern very quickly. One went by while I was using the computer, and subconciously I thought that I heard in English:
"Hey, gonna kick you in the mouth,
gonna kick you in the face,
gonna kick you in the chin, in the cheek,
You're a workaholic
shopaholic
chocaholic
alcoholic
Hey, gonna..."
Don't ask me where those particular words came from. Others peddlars opt for the more basic advertising method of just yelling the name of what it is they're selling. For instance one local dude likes to walk through the neighborhood yelling "SAGUAYO!!! SAGUAYO!!!" Literally translated, "It's apples. It's apples." One of my personal favorite merchant announcements is as follows:
banabanabanabanabanaBANANA! BANABANANANABABABABANANANANA!
If you didn't pick up on it, he's selling bananas. Very straight forward, direct, honest marketing. Very old at seven in the morning.

This has been you cultural oddity moment of the day.