This happened to me all the time in Kazakhstan! I’m a 10 too and you would think I was Bigfoot or a circus clown the way the shopkeepers looked at my feet. I had to get my nice boots in Almaty (the southern capital). As for clothes, I went to the second hand shop with clothes donated/bought from Europe and bought tons of winter clothes there (I had just one not very warm coat, coming from Puerto Rico). A fellow teacher gave me a super-ugly (but warm) coat from Germany because all the nice ones were SO unbelievably expensive. When I left I took the nicer clothes back to the second hand shop and got paid by the kilo.
I recently went to a nearby town to buy some new pants and shoes for work. After going to three shoe stores I was disappointed to find that nobody carried my shoe size (US size 10). The store keepers were amazed at how big my foot was and asked where I had found my current shoes, from the US. I gave up on the shoe search and moved onto pants. I found a small shop on the main road and went inside. I found the most delightful pair of pants and started looking for my size. The storekeeper stopped me and handed me a pair of pants marked XL, she told me they were the largest in the store. Any American woman would automatically be offended by this, but I took the pants into the changing room nonetheless. They didn’t fit.
