valerie
October 31, 2025 - took this picture at the beginning of August at the abandoned Kochkor Bazaar location. I was with a fellow volunteer when I took this picture, and he commented that he would caption it, “me at the end of volunteer service” 😂
October 30, 2025 - inside a yurt at Song-Kul where my friend and I ate lunch, along with a group of tourists. This was at the beginning of August
October 28, 2025 - kumis (fermented horse milk) and honey (мёд in Russian). Actually, it’s not that weird, because when I lived in a village, sometimes people drank kumis with honey. And I know that late season kumis can be very sour. But it still sounds weird to me 🙃
October 27, 2025 - you can buy Lucky Charms in Bishkek (and Fruity Pebbles, on the right). One box is very expensive, though
October 26, 2025 - my fiancé took a kid’s menu at Dodo Pizza, and we (mostly he) created our own imaginary pizzas on paper. There’s pizza with pizza (or as I called it, pizza-ception), pizza with banana, and pizza with Mandarin (Chinese…of course that was my idea and execution)
October 24, 2025 - checked English notebooks today and found a few interesting things in Friday Freewriting. This particular student has been writing a love story for the past three weeks that she has been expanding upon 😁
October 22, 2025 - honey shop called Доктор мёд (“Doctor Honey” in Russian). Took this picture while I was waiting for the shop assistant to return from their smoke break (they were standing next to the left side of the building, not pictured)
October 21, 2025 - passed by a Big Man shop with a ‘big man’ mannequin. (the shop is Biggman, but the light of the second G being out makes it look like two words)
October 20, 2025 - Taiwan is so controversial that this boba shop removed “Taiwan” from their decor. (To be fair, it’s not uncommon for Chinese people to come to Kyrgyzstan for work, and I assume most of those people are from the mainland, where Taiwan is known as ‘Taiwan province’)
October 19, 2025 - our first strudel attempt. The dough was too thick, but oh well. We’ll try again another time
October 18, 2025 - a street of houses on the way from our apartment building to a supermarket nearby
October 17, 2025 - intricate picture drawn by one of my students, but apparently not important enough to take home from school
October 16, 2025 - someone brought a shopping cart into our apartment building. I assume they were moving something, but it was kind of strange to see, considering there are very few supermarkets with shopping carts this big in Bishkek
October 14, 2025 - simple, satisfying meal for our Sunday night family dinner. My lovely fiancé did all of the hard work 😊
(a cafe near us offers discounted Sunday meals for ‘families’. We were told that day that we don’t qualify as a family bc we don’t have kids…hence my salty stress on family)
October 13, 2025 - even my Russian fiancé has no idea what these Snickers bars are referring to…must be about an event or group or joke that we are just out of the loop on?
October 11, 2025 - small stream of water near an end of the line bus stop, where we were waiting for a bus after eating Georgian food (which I didn’t take a picture of 😭 but it was so good)
October 9, 2025 - same cat I posted a picture of at the beginning of September, this time sleeping next to food that someone left it 😁
