Some people visit museums when they travel. I visit grocery stores. Not instead of the museums, obviously. But give me a free hour in a new country and there’s a pretty good chance I’ll end up wandering the aisles of a grocery store, picking up things I can’t identify and trying to decide whether I’m curious enough to buy them.

Grocery stores are one of the most underrated ways to get to know a place. Restaurants show you what a country wants to feed you. Grocery stores show you what people actually eat. What they grab on the way home from work, what fruit is in season, what comes in an enormous bag, and what gets an entire aisle to itself. And, occasionally, whether the carton you’re holding contains milk or yogurt. I’ve learned that last one the hard way.

Chile remains one of my favorite countries for grocery shopping, largely because you could walk into an ordinary grocery store and find really good Chilean wine for what felt like an absurdly small amount of money. Naturally, I took advantage of this. I’d wander around choosing a bottle of wine, random cheeses, crackers, and whatever else looked interesting. Somehow guava jam entered the rotation. I’m not sure I would have ever thought to pair guava jam with cheese and crackers at home, but travel has a way of making you significantly more willing to put random things in your basket and see what happens.

That’s part of the fun. You don’t need to know what you’re looking for, and sometimes it’s better if you don’t.

Costa Rica gave me blueberry tea and soursop juice. I stocked up on both at the grocery store and became particularly obsessed with the soursop juice. Cold soursop juice paired with empanadas from a little stand became one of those combinations that was probably incredibly ordinary to everyone around me and absolutely perfect to me.

I still dream about that juice. I’ve found soursop juice back home and bought it, hoping for that same flavor, but it just isn’t quite right. Different brand, different place, maybe different expectations. There are some things you can bring home from a trip and some things that apparently require Costa Rica and an empanada.

Then there was Beijing. I lived a block from a grocery store located in the basement of a building. On the way in, you passed some sort of lottery window that I never figured out. I think it was a version of Keno. People always seemed to know exactly what they were doing there. I did not, and that feeling continued downstairs.

Grocery shopping gets considerably more interesting when you can’t read—or even make an educated guess at—anything on the label. Chinese characters were completely daunting when I first arrived. I once bought yogurt when I thought I was buying milk, and I’m certain there were other mistakes that I’ve conveniently forgotten. But I went to that store constantly.

Eggs sat loose in a bin and you simply selected however many you needed. There were more varieties of mushrooms than I knew existed, enormous bags of rice, local produce, and always black chicken, considered a delicacy, which I looked at many times but never quite worked up the courage to cook myself.

Eventually, though, the interesting part wasn’t what was unfamiliar to me. It was watching what was completely ordinary to everyone else. People stopped on their way home from work or ventured down from their apartments to pick up what they needed for that day—a few vegetables, some eggs, something for dinner—and then they’d come back tomorrow. It was simply part of the rhythm of the neighborhood.

That’s what I love about grocery stores when I travel. For a little while, you step out of the itinerary and into someone else’s Tuesday.

Some of my favorite grocery stores in the West Bank were tiny neighborhood shops. They had handmade pita, local beer, and, somewhat less exotically, Snickers. The shop owners were consistently friendly and welcoming. They’d talk with us, answer questions, and share a little about their home.

These weren’t big travel experiences. Nobody would put “visit neighborhood grocery store” on a list of the top ten things to do, but I remember them. I’ve also spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to track down one of the beers I drank there. Efforts have been made. So far, no luck.

Regardless of the country, I have one grocery-store rule: stock up on local snacks. Balsamic vinegar potato chips? Absolutely. Lychee-filled cookies? Into the basket. Something I can’t identify but looks promising? Probably worth the risk.

These inevitably get stuffed into my backpack and become emergency provisions for whatever comes next: wrong turns in the city, long bus rides, hikes that take longer than expected, or excursions where lunch somehow never materializes. Some of my favorite travel foods have been things I bought with absolutely no idea whether I would like them—it has become my travel philosophy of sorts.

I’m lucky now to live near a large Asian market, and I can find most of the spices and sauces I remember from China. I can buy soursop juice, even if it’s not quite the right one. The West Bank beer remains elusive.

Maybe that’s part of why I keep wandering grocery aisles when I travel. We bring home photographs and magnets and whatever else we can cram into our suitcases, but sometimes the souvenirs I want most aren’t things. They’re flavors—a particular juice, a bottle of beer, a sauce you didn’t know existed, or a bag of chips you bought for a hike. Even when you manage to find them again, they never taste exactly the same.

Maybe they’re not supposed to.