Life Around the Cottage

To this point, Brent has used the Sunday blog post as an occasion to tell you a bit about life here in Kazakhstan. I thought I'd do the same today, but since I've been feeling a bit under the weather the last few days (a cold, I think) I thought I'd keep it close to home. So, how about a tour of the Cottage?

The cottage is two-levels: Kitchen, Living room/Dining room, half-bath on the lower level; 3 bedrooms and full bath upstairs. It's pretty nice, as you'll see.

Lower Level:

Kitchen (and laundry)

Living Room (Dining room is just behind where I'm standing)

First floor bath and stairs going up

Upper Level:

Bedroom 1 (Janet, Doug, and their son Dylan are in here)

Bedroom 2 (this is where Brent and I reside)

Room 3: a TV room, but couch folds out to a bed. Mom will stay here when she arrives.

Upstairs bath

....with nifty corner shower

Just for the fun of it, while we're on the topic of domestic life, how 'bout if I add a few pictures of dinners we've had?

First, let me introduce you to meatpie (kind of like a pizza shaped pot-pie). This is made next door at the firehouse, they have a cafeteria there and apparently have become famous in the town for their meatpies. Our interpreter ordered it for us and we went and picked it up. It's 10,000 Tenge for each pie (about 10$) and easily fed four of us.This next one was my birthday dinner:

Yup. Frozen pizza, Pringles, Wine, and the other half of the cake that we had left from Brent's birthday. (If you click the picture for a bigger version you'll see that these are "paprika" Pringles. I thought that looked exciting. Turns out paprika chips are the same thing as bbq.)

The final picture is the first meal we (OK, Brent) cooked here. It's stuffed pasta. There's tons of this stuff at the stores (you find them in bins in the freezer section where you can scoop it into a bag and buy it by the kilo). Often, we can't decipher the labels and so we don't know what is inside. It's a surprise every time. This first time was good (some kind of meat), but the second time there was sauerkraut inside, a third time there was pumpkin. Neither of the latter two tasted very good w/ the tomato sauce.

I'll conclude with some pictures of our little ones. Actually, I didn't take any pictures today except right as I was leaving after having put them down in their cribs.

Little guy in big pants

Someone's not very tired...