valerie
August 24, 2021 - walked by a store which sells products for pets and they had a parrot hanging out on the door
August 23, 2021 - this is maybe my third or fourth time making this red cabbage recipe www.budgetbytes.com/braised-r… I like it and recommend it if you are into cabbage. I made this recipe today because yesterday the red cabbages at the supermarket looked wonderful 😊
August 20, 2021 - there’s a store near where I live called “Marshalls” which I highly doubt is affiliated with the actual company, but I found it amusing
August 18, 2021 - went to a cafe by myself and managed to order a salad (and tea, not pictured) for dinner! Unfortunately the cafe didn’t have a lot of local options. However, I just found out how to find restaurants near me with the maps app people use here, so I now have a list of restaurants I want to visit!
August 17, 2021 - taken in a public area/park facing south where the mountains are visible in the horizon
August 15, 2021 - I’m back in Bishkek, but here’s a picture of some mountains from yesterday that I took on the way to Issyk-Kul Lake
August 13, 2021 - cloudy and “rainy” here today. I say “rainy” because rainy by Bishkek standards so far means ‘it sprinkled a little bit’. It might actually storm tomorrow, though!
(also, all the wires over the intersection are for the trolley buses here)
August 12, 2021 - Non-dairy milk options here are tasty but expensive, so I decided I needed to find something I like which is cheaper and which is also not regular milk. I bought kefir (кефир), which you can also get in the US, though I think people here drink it more often. It’s good. A little thick for cereal, but if that’s what it takes to save a little money, so be it
August 11, 2021 - a local teacher invited me to go on a walk with her, and then we had dinner together! The plate closest to the camera is manti (манты). They are like dumplings and you can put different things inside. Mine had meat (beef) and onions. Then there is a Greek salad (греческий салат) and naan (тандыр-нан, the bread) behind the manti. The dish my teacher friend ordered is called ashlan-fu (ашлян-фу). It is a cold noodle dish which can be spicy. And the pitcher that you can partly see on the left side has compote (компот) in it, which is a sweet fruit drink. It has always been served cold when I have had it, I think because it is currently summer. I didn’t try her dish because I thought it might be weird to ask, but everything I had was very good 😀
August 10, 2021 - Ataturk Park where there is a statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey and its first president
August 9, 2021 - seen from afar during my walk today—a bride in her wedding dress having pictures taken 😊
August 6, 2021 - when you go to a cafe because you think it will have better wi-fi than your apartment, only to find out that while the cafe does in fact have better wi-fi, it’s not that much better
(also, while this “latte” did not taste bad, it did not taste like a traditional latte! the drink did not taste like coffee at all!)
August 3, 2021 - lady setting up a Shoro stand (Shoro is a Kyrgyz company which manufactures local drinks, I previously wrote a post about one of the drinks that I tried)
August 2, 2021 - Today’s lunch! There is a small cafeteria on the school grounds where an older Kyrgyz lady cooks and sells food. The plate on the left has laghman (noodles), plov (rice), and I have no idea what the other food was, some kind of meat with a thick sauce? I need to ask next time. The plate on the right is a salad
