Food for Thought

Since we’ve spent the last few days with tummy problems, we thought this an opportune time to share with you what we’ve been eating while visiting Karaganda. While this should not serve (no pun intended) as an all inclusive list of our gastronomical experiences, it does provide an overview of our diet:

-Fried eggs with hot dog pieces cooked into them, topped with dill (dill is big around these parts and thankfully, we like it! We also didn’t mind the weenies in our eggs!)
-Blintzes with strawberry jam or sour cream – yummy!
-Borscht soup – John’s favorite
-Frozen veggies (can’t find many fresh veggies in the produce section of the markets and even if we could, we wouldn’t be able to rinse them in tap water)
-Instant noodle soup
-Pastry pockets filled with meat, potatoes, and some questionable items (perhaps the root cause of our digestive problems?)
-Chocolate (thank God!)
-Cherry juice-delicious
-Smoked gouda cheese strings (pictured above)
-Tea with milk (like the Brits, the Kazakhs take their tea with milk)
-South Beach diet snack bars (thanks to the adoptive parents who previously stayed in our apartment).
-Yogurt (mostly 7% or 5% fat content, so those leftover 100 calorie diet bars are coming in handy)
-Cow’s milk (no skim, mostly high fat)
-Bottled water

By this time you must be wondering… “Wait a minute, John and Sherri are spitting distance from Russia and they haven’t mentioned VODKA?!” Sad but true, vodka has yet to touch our lips. But because we know you all would want us to try some vodka while in Kazakhstan, we’re going to toast, with a shot of vodka, each person that posts a response on our blog. Now, there’s enticement for our friends and family to enter comments-get John and Sherri all liquored up! For my HR colleagues: this is starting to feel like one of those contests Keri and I run at work to encourage employees to attend training. Prost!

Food items available in Karaganda, but that we choose not to partake of:
-Dried fish (e.g., herring, sardines) and lots of it!
-Horsemeat-naaaaaayyyy
-Fermented mare’s milk-sold in tall bottles by old women shivering behind a table on the sidewalk (you almost want to buy some just because you feel so sorry for the little old lady…geez, what a way to make a living)
-Sushi (with the closest body of water being the Caspian Sea on the opposite side of Kaz, and knowing how long it took our DHL express mail to arrive to our doctor in Minnesota (over 1 week!) we’re not touching raw fish!)