Bogotá's Markets Open Before Sunrise. Brussels' Supermarkets Take The Weekend Off.

🇨🇴 Colombia vs 🇧🇪 Belgium

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Colombia treats groceries as a contact sport. You are up before dawn, you are haggling over cilantro, you are being handed a free lime by a woman who has decided, unilaterally, that you are now a regular. Nobody told you the rules. Nobody is going to. You learn by being gently, affectionately fleeced until you aren't anymore.

Belgium treats groceries as a labour dispute waiting to happen. The shelves are immaculate, the chocolate counter is a shrine, and the whole operation shuts for the weekend like the country collectively decided Sunday lunch should be cooked from whatever you remembered to buy on Saturday morning. Two countries, two philosophies, one shared belief that the other one is doing it wrong. They're both right.

Do's & Don'ts: Colombia

Do's & Don'ts: Belgium

Colombia: The Market Doesn't Care About Your Schedule

Colombian grocery shopping operates on two tracks that rarely intersect, and understanding which one you're on will save you a great deal of money and a small amount of dignity. Track one is the plaza de mercado — Bogotá's Paloquemao, open from 4:30am, or Medellín's Plaza La América, which locals recommend to newcomers precisely because it won't overwhelm you the way La Minorista will. These are not quaint tourist markets arranged for your benefit. They are working wholesale-retail hybrids where the flower sellers have usually packed up by 11am and the fish counter does not care that you've never seen a fish that size outside an aquarium. You go early, you bring exact change because nobody wants to break a 50,000-peso note on a bag of tomatoes, and you accept that the posted price is, generally, the price — the haggling tourist guides promise you is mostly reserved for bulk buys, where asking "¿en cuánto me lo deja si llevo tres libras?" is normal and expected. Be a regular long enough and you'll get a ñapa, a small unbilled extra, usually cilantro or a lime, that functions as Colombia's entire loyalty-points system compressed into produce.

Track two is the tienda, the corner shop that exists on every second block and somehow stays in business despite there being another one thirty metres away. Tiendas run 10 to 30 percent cheaper than the Éxitos and Jumbos of the world on everyday items — eggs, rice, drinks, the staples — because they buy wholesale from the Mayorista markets and carry none of a supermarket's overhead. They also don't bother checking ID on Pico y Cédula restriction days, when big-box stores do. This is either a loophole or the entire point, depending on who you ask.

Then there are the actual supermarkets — Éxito, Jumbo, Carulla for the aspirational aisle, D1 and Ara for the hard-discount crowd, PriceSmart for the diaspora homesick for bulk peanut butter — and they are fine. Clean, air-conditioned, utterly unremarkable. Nobody in Colombia tells a story about their trip to Jumbo. They tell you about the plaza, the ñapa, the vendor who remembers their mother's name. The supermarket is where convenience lives. The market is where the culture is, and it opens at an hour most expats consider a human rights violation.

There's also a security instinct worth absorbing fast: plazas are crowded, cash-heavy, and exactly the kind of place a phone disappears from a back pocket. Keep valuables zipped, keep large bills out of sight, and treat the market like the working economic engine it is rather than a photo opportunity. The reward for taking it seriously is a produce drawer that costs a fraction of what the chains charge and a vendor who starts setting aside the good mangoes before you even ask.

Belgium: Closed On Principle

Belgium's grocery ecosystem is, structurally, the most organised thing about the country, which is a genuinely low bar but Belgium clears it with the quiet satisfaction of a nation that alphabetises its cheese counter. Carrefour, Delhaize, and Colruyt dominate — Colruyt being the budget darling, basic in décor but comprehensive in stock, while Albert Heijn and Spar hold Flanders and Aldi and Lidl mop up the discount end with four hundred-plus stores apiece. Everything closes around 6pm on weekdays, everything closes earlier on Saturday, and — this is the part that actually matters — almost everything is closed on Sunday entirely. Not "reduced hours." Closed. This is slowly changing, with Carrefour and a handful of independents experimenting with Sunday trading and foot-traffic data showing Sunday-morning shoppers surging when the doors do open, but the resistance has been fierce enough that Aldi's past attempts to open on Sundays were blocked by labour law and workers walked out over it. Delhaize staff have spontaneously shut nearly a hundred stores mid-strike. This is a country where the supermarket workforce will, on principle, close the supermarket.

Once you're inside, the quirks compound. Bring your own bag or pay for one — nobody's handing you a free plastic sack here. Fresh milk arrives in sad little one-litre cartons while UHT dominates the shelf, sold in bulk because apparently nobody trusts milk that hasn't been boiled into submission and given a six-month shelf life. Expats on Mumsnet's long-running Brussels thread complain, almost unanimously, about the in-store bread slicer shaving baguettes into something closer to tissue paper, and praise Colruyt specifically for the free samples scattered through the aisles like a minor act of national generosity. And despite genuinely good bread and an entire specialty economy of butchers, cheesemongers, and chocolatiers, a third of Belgians still drive across the border to shop in Germany, France, or the Netherlands, where the same groceries run roughly 10 percent cheaper. Belgium built a beautiful, orderly system and then quietly admitted it doesn't fully trust its own prices.

New arrivals hit one more snag that nobody mentions in the brochure: opening a Belgian bank account, and therefore getting a Bancontact card that most smaller shops actually trust, can take several weeks. Until then you're paying with a foreign card the till may simply refuse, which is a uniquely demoralising way to discover that your grocery budget has been held hostage by bureaucracy rather than by prices.

The Verdict

If you want theatre, intimacy, and a grocery run that doubles as a relationship, Colombia wins outright — nowhere else hands you a free lime for loyalty. If you want predictability, a bread counter that would make a Michelin inspector weep, and the civic confidence to simply not sell you anything on a Sunday, Belgium wins on competence. But competence isn't charm, and a country whose own citizens drive abroad to buy their own staples cheaper has conceded something important about its system.

Colombia's chaos is generous. Belgium's order is self-defeating. Give me the ñapa over the UHT milk every single time — at least someone in Bogotá is pleased to see me, rather than a till receipt informing me, politely, in two languages, that I should have brought my own bag.

What Nobody Warned You About

Talesmag, Bogotá post report — paraphrased: with the exchange rate the way it is, fresh food is remarkably cheap; a bag of six avocados ran just over a dollar.

Medellin Guru reader comment, on tiendas vs. Éxito — paraphrased: eggs at the corner tienda came in roughly 20 percent cheaper than the chain supermarket, no loyalty card required.

Mumsnet, "Shopping in Belgium/Brussels" thread — paraphrased: why does the in-store slicer cut the bread so thin, and does anyone else just buy it whole and slice it at home.

Conclusion

Neither country is going to change for you, and that's rather the point of leaving home in the first place. Colombia will make you set an alarm for a fruit stall and consider it a privilege. Belgium will make you plan your entire weekend around a shop's closing hour and call it civilisation. Both are correct within their own logic, and both will make you insufferable at dinner parties back home, recounting ñapas and bread-slicer grievances to people who just want to know if the Wi-Fi was good. It wasn't the Wi-Fi you came for. It was the lime, or the Colruyt samples, or whichever small, specific absurdity convinced you that this was now, somehow, home. Pick your chaos. Just don't pretend either one is "exotic" — it's just Tuesday, somewhere.