One More Thing

Me, with a perfect marshmallow. Yeah, I know I need to gain weight, I eat everything in front of me, I swear.

A friend of Emiko's host family. Thought bubble: "What the hell?"

Emiko's host mom (right) and friend. They seem to have the idea down. By the way, the metal trough we did this in is normally for shashlik.

I forgot to mention one funny story. Sometimes volunteers give the local cuisine a hard time. The food is good and hardy, but tends to be a bit bland. I get plenty of soup, potatoes, meat, etc. And except for shashlik (bbq'd shish kebab) almost all meat (in Kazakh, Uzbek, and even Russian tradition) is boiled. No pan frying, stir frying, baking, or anything. If you don't boil it, then it's not cooked.

So with this in mind, my story. Emiko (another volunteer) had her mom in the States send her a ton of supplies for making S'mores at her camp in Alga. This we did. The reaction of locals to marshmallows is predictable, they just kind of stare at it. In Alga they all seemed to like S'mores, though the cooking of the marshmallows was pretty funny, mostly because the volunteers all got into an argument over where to cook them over the fire and for how long. Result: One Kazakh kid is munching on a hunk of charcol and another has one toasty brown, just because that's the way their volunteer mentors like them. So when we went down to Aksu for my seminar, we brought along the extra supplies. My counterpart saw them and held up a marshmallow in his hand, studying it. "Do you boil it?" was all he asked. This may not be funny to you, but it's hilarious to us. I think I've been here too long :)