July 9 - day 9 of bonding time...

July 9 - Wed 9 am. Hi everyone - It'll be another hot one today, can feel it already..........
THANK YOU SO MUCH ! for all the wonderful comments and good wishes - it is very exciting to share the news of 'our girl' with you all!

Yesterday (Tues) we had a great visit at the BH, mid/late afternoon. Then we went out for dinner with Bernard and Carole from Montreal - found a restaurant called Kristina's close to our apartments, and had a waitress who wanted to practice her english - excellent! The meals were good - I had cashew chicken with grilled vegetables, and Paul had a mixed meat plate - beef medallions, chicken wings, and lambs shanks. Both were great! We both miss eating meat as we're not eating much of it here, so this was very nice.

We're still getting protein with lots of eggs, peanut butter (Kraft, brought from home - yum!), cheese and some sandwich meats. The fruits and veggies here look good but we've been warned about them, so we're only trying things we can peel - cucumbers, bananas etc. And for water we're getting 5 L jugs for drinking, making coffee, brushing teeth, making ice, etc - but using the tap water for washing dishes, showers. The jugs of water are cheap (150 tenge or approx 1.25 US $) and we can get them at every corner store, so we're going through at least one 5 L every day.

And the junk food is hilarious - we bought 'Pringles'-style chips in these flavours: mayonaise/tomato, paprika, and good old sour cream and onion. There are lots of other odd flavours too - we're still looking for the Caviar-flavoured chips that Sara and Julian had found when they were here - sounds so exotic!

Oh about the shower - we don't want to complain at all as it's working great and we have hot water almost all of the time, but we'll call it 'interesting'....... no curtain, for one thing - and just a hand-held shower head - so you have to twist and contort yourself to try not to spray water all over the floor!

And - we received wonderful news from home - you may have noticed in the blog comments that Paul's family is talking about the 2 girls added to the family this week - Paul's sister Joanne had a little girl on July 7 - her name is Ania and she's beautiful! Everyone is doing great! Love ya Jo and Meb- congrats!

Have a great day!
take care,
Nicole and Paul