update on food

The night after our conference finished, we volunteers were stuck in Almaty, waiting for a couple days for our trains to leave. I went to an Indian restaraunt with five other volunteers, and while we were oohing and aahing over the food, one of the volunteers said, "Think about how well a Kazakhstani restaraunt would do in America: Manti - potatoes and meat in dough, steamed. Pilmeni - meat in dough, boiled as a soup. Perozhki - potatoes or meat in dough, fried. Camca - potatoes or meat in dough, fried and triangular. Beshbarmak - meat on potatoes on boiled dough noodles. Bauerzhak- fried dough. Sometimes, fried potato chunks. For variety, the famous traditional salads: "Herring in a fur coat" - a pile of fish, under a mound of potatoes, all covered in shredded beets." Then there's Grecheski Salad - canned corn, potatoes, canned peas, sometimes sausage, all in mayonnaise. The only condiments are ketchup and mayonnaise. Sometimes, there is broth soup with meat and potatoes, or sometimes borsch. There is always dessert - very dry very sweet very flavorless cookies, sausage, and white cheese (watch out for rock cheese!). And bread. And sometimes jam, but I think most of us have run out of jam by now. And, of course, tea, with or without milk, often with a lot of sugar.

Uh huh. We looked over our table filled with chutneys, Indian nan, lassi, jasmine rice, and spicy dishes and laughed hard.

It's funny to make fun of the diet here, but I must say that I get pretty excited over manti, have actually ordered Grecheski salad at a cafe, and really only complain about the potatoes. I guess I've adjusted or become less demanding of variety, but sometimes I'm almost crazy for a cesar salad or anything spicy, and I will never again order or make potatoes.