Our Daily Life in Kazakhstan & Food Situation

Ok I will stop harping on the fact that I can’t find any drool bibs. Obviously Lincoln has one on ever single day so it is not like he is going without. Life here is just pretty simple and I don’t have much else I need to worry about. This is a typical day here.

Wake up between 7:30 to 8:00am: Make coffee/tea, have some breakfast, get dressed, brush teeth, make bed, and take vitamins. Pack up 4 diapers, juice, yogurt and bottle for Lincoln. (Clothes if it is time to change him.) I usually try and get online to check my email, so I can download to a word documents all the ones I need to respond to. Meet the driver out in front of the apartment building by 9:00.

9:00 to 9:30: Riding in the car, next stop pick up Aina, then on to pick up Gen and Joel from their apartment. Once everyone is picked up we head over to the baby house.

9:30 to 11:30: Visit with Lincoln. We feed him his yogurt at 10:30.

11:30 to 12:00: The same car ride in reverse. We get picked up first and dropped off last so we get to spend a lot of time riding in the car.

12:00 to 2:30: Our lunch break in between visits.

2:30 to 3:00: Car ride back to the baby house, picking everyone up along the way.

3:00 to 5:00: Afternoon visit with Lincoln. He eats his yogurt/milk concoction by 3:15 and at 4:30 we give him a bottle of juice.

5:00 to 5:30: Same car ride back to the apartment.

* Occasionally we have them drop us off at the market or mall then we walk back to the apartment. Sometime in the afternoon we all go out to dinner together before coming back to the apartment. We try and do all our food shopping in between visits.

In the evenings I write and post the blog entry for the day and upload our pictures to the computer. I check my email and respond to some and write some knew ones. I also shower at night. If I have any extra free time I might watch tv on the computer with Eric or read my book.

I brought some craft things from home to do for entertainment and I have not even touched any of it yet. We also brought a couple games and a ton of movies none of which we have used yet. We were expecting to have a lot more free time than we actually do.

Eric has his own routine for in between visits and the evening. He has to keep up with his work stuff. In his extra free time he plays computer games or watches tv shows that he brought from home.

Since we are in the apartment we also have dishes to wash, laundry to do and cleaning. All the normal everyday life stuff that we can’t avoid even here.

I try to go to bed by 11pm.

On Sundays we only see Lincoln in the morning. Right after our visit Biyanna takes us to run errands that we need to do and takes us grocery shopping. We are normally back to our apartment by 3pm. Sunday’s are a good day to call home and get caught up on emails.

Food Situation

Pretty much all the food we have eaten out is good. We have a few restaurants we know we really like to eat at. Some are too expensive to eat at too often. The restaurant in the Business Center on the other side of town serves the pizza that we love. We try and go there once a week. We can not afford to eat out everyday. We brought from home: oatmeal, ramen noodles, power bars, trail mix bars, craisins, coffee, tea and some candy. For Lincoln we brought: cheerios, teething biscuits and oatmeal cereal.

When we were staying at the hotel, we would eat breakfast there which consisted of 3 sunny side up fried eggs, bread, coffee & tea, yogurt, one banana, one apple and one orange, salami and cheese. This is what we each were served. We were eating well there. We still have some apples and oranges left. This meal kept us full till dinner time which was really nice. Now that we are at the apartment we don’t get this great breakfast and have to fend for ourselves for all meals.

Here at the grocery stores we found a product almost identical to ramen noodles. There version is actually better than the ones we brought from home. This is the variety of our diet here….We eat Ramen noodles either from home or here. Oatmeal that we brought from home (eventual we will run out of this), salami & cheese. We have found several cheeses here that we really like. Frozen ravioli’s, the other day we bought plain pasta and red sauce but we have not made it yet and bread. We have also been buying many different kinds of cookies and soda. We rarely eat cookies or drink soda at home. Doesn’t this sound so appetizing??? Carbs, carbs, and more carbs and cheese this is what we eat. Oh yeah we do buy bottled water, juices, beer and vodka too. Once we bought trailer chicken which we might buy and try again this week just for something different to eat. Oh and yes we bought frozen pizza at the market but we can’t figure out how to use the oven.

Trailer chicken is a whole rotisserie chicken that you buy from the trailer that sits next to the road. It was pretty good the one night we did have it. Although we were so nervous about catching some disease that it was hard to enjoy it. We are not the kind of people that buy food from street vendors normally.

On Saturday nights when we go out to dinner we usually all pig out. We are going to start trying to eat out one day during the week too for the variety and Sundays we usually always eat lunch out while we are doing our shopping.

We both were hoping to loose weight here but with this awful diet I am sure we are both gaining. Hopefully we are not gaining too much since we do walk everywhere we go and climb up and down tons of stairs everyday. Not to mention chasing Lincoln all over the play room for four hours a day. It is good exercise keeping up with him.

Doesn’t it sound fabulous here? It really truly is a fantastic experience being here. We are sure Lincoln is going to love hearing the stories about what we went through to get him. We imagine he will be happy with all the information we have obtained about this city for him. We are taking tons of pictures too, this area seems to be growing so I am sure 20 years from now when Lincoln might want to come back to see it for himself, everything will look completely different.