Laxmi and Gorkha Shops

Unlike at home, shops is Laxmi and Gorkha don't have storefonts, large displays, or even front doors. They're on the main floor of the buildings lining the road, with apartments above, and the fronts are open to the street. Once you've got past seeing everything crammed together on display, both in the shop and on the stoop, there's all sorts of different shops - dry goods, spices, material, stationary, pharmacy, vegetable and fruit, and many more.
There have been two shops that stood out in particular - Nice Lady's Shop and Chocolate Spread Shop.
Nice Lady's Shop is in Laxmi, and was the shop we frequented the most. A dry goods/general store, we went there the first night in our house, when we were still in some culture shock and buying our first vegetables. The woman running the shop was extremely patient with us, and from that evening was christened Nice Lady.
From that day onward, I don't think a single day passed that at least one of the four of us didn't go to her shop. As the only foreigners in the village, she quickly knew us by sight, and always had a smile ready when we walked up. Over the course of the three months we met the rest of her family as they ran the shop together. Our eating patterns were pretty predictable, and it didn't take long for her to be able to anticipate what we needed. It didn't hurt that we bought bread almost every day and a kilo of potatoes roughly 2 out of 3 days.
While packing to leave Laxmi, Amy and I compiled a list of everything we bought from her shop, and came up with 26 different items. The list ranges from rice to potato to beer/rum to candles, batteries, chocolate bars, lighters and everything in between. Other than vegetables (excluding onions and garlic) and stationary we went to her shop first, and we're pretty sure she knew it. It didn't take long before we started getting discounts (price 100 rupees, for you, 90 rupees - prices are usually printed onto the item, so we knew exactly how much packaged things cost). When we left at the end of March she gave each of us a chocofun, everyone's favourite chocolate bar.
Chocolate Spread Shop is in Gorkha, and was so named as it's the only place in town to get chocolate spread. In addition the shops sells jam, peanut butter, ketchup, honey, the biggest selection of biscuits I found outside Lakeside and Thamel, and even baking powder! The only drawback was that these items aren't too popular with Nepalis, so many things were out of date. It's a bit daunting to buy something that an inch of dust has just been blown off, but I got used to it. As long as it's close to being with the expiry date it's fine.
Check not only expiry dates though, but seals as well. Once Ed and Magnus bought a tub of chocolate spread, only to open it at home and realize that someone had carefully spooned out a chunk from the center of the tub!