WE MISS WALMART!!!

These are the pictures of our weekly shopping trip to the food bazaar. Disclaimer: These pictures are taken from the hip without a flash as to not appear like a tourist. The bags over on the right are flour sold by the kilo.
Here Ruthy turned around and said, "Mom come on stop taking pictures you look silly"!
Notice you can get some clothes here and at the other end was a few hardware things like screws and nails.
Good price for eggs. 52 com is roughly $1.50 for 10 eggs. Eggs are not sold by the dozen here.
Here is the covered bread tables.

Dried fruit and nuts stand.

The prices are by the kilogram.

Sweat pants for sale.

Walking through the center of the market.

This is the section where we get all our fresh fruits and veggies. They also have spices, flowers and fish in this section.

This is outside our meat market at the end of our shopping excursion. I have not included the inside of the market because the site of it has made several of the volunteers here strict vegetarians.

This is the fresh meat being brought in. We judge this is a cow by the length of the legs. We originally thought it may be horse since that is a delicacy here.

Fresh from the farm taking it over to the scales to weigh and sell to the butcher in the white shirt and black apron.

Look at all those ribs!

Checking our list before we catch a taxi home.

Our $1 Home Depot bags have served us well. Mikayla is on my back taking her afternoon nap.

Here are all our groceries after we have been food shopping. I had my camera with me and forgot to take any pictures inside the bazaar until we were out. I will have to get pictures next week. We did find a Christmas tree this week. It is sticking out of our bag.

Here is lunch as we exit the bazaar. Roasted chickens!

This is looking back at the entrance of the bazaar. We shop every Saturday for the next weeks food.

Ruthy and I signed up to help with the once a month visit to the orphanage of handicapped children with some of our high school students. Here we are on the mini bus they rented to take us all.

Ruthy is in love with the mountains around here and took this picture of the snow capped mountains.

Here we are making butterflies and paper snails with some of the mobile kids.

Ruthy and her two new friends. One is sitting on the floor beside her as they make butterflies.

Linda with a group of the kids.

Here is the girl sitting by Ruthy that we are helping. She does not walk or talk but is so sweet and knows how to create a work of art.

This little girl was loving the pink car we had brought and were playing with her. When we left her in the play group she scooted all the way down the hall to the craft room so I would play car with her again.

Here is one of our high school kids helping out.

Ruthy having fun on their in door slide.

This boy begged for a picture with all of us workers because he knows that we bring copies back of the pictures and hand them out so he wanted as many pictures as he could get the next time we came.

Our high schooler on the right with an orphan.

Our girl on the left.

This is the dinning room for the orphans. They are having soup and bread for lunch.

Washing our hands in the kitchen before we leave.

The kids playing soccer.

Orphanage building #1 in the background.

Building #3 where we did the crafts.

Building #2

Part of our group waiting for our bus to return.

More Soccer.

Robert, Josiah, Ruthy and I are going back Dec. 13th and are part of a mini concert. We are singing Christmas carols in Russian and English as part of the show. There will be break dancing and a puppet show as well. So look for good upcoming pictures of that.

Robert has come up with a new recipe for gluten free cookies that the kids love. They are a Cinnamon and sugar shortbread cookies that Robert wants to call 'Kyrgzy Kow Patties'. I told him we might need to take a poll on that before we put it in a cookbook.

I'm not sure if the name would make every cook in America desiring to make them.

This is just a cool picture of the house across the street from us.

The word cfet on the gate of our next door neighbors means 'light' in Russian. I was talking to one of my friends on skype and she asked, "what do you have to do today?" I told her I needed to put out the trash on the curb and write our electricity number on our gate. She said that was different so I thought I would let every one see it.

This is our light numbers on our newly painted gate. We have to write it down by the 15th of every month so that we can get our electricity bill.

As far as the trash is concerned every Monday you have to put all your trash out in plastic bags and pray that the many stray dogs and cats don't get into them. You can not put out trash cans because they get taken.

When we first got here we were unable to find large trash bags in the stores like you have for trash in the states. Everyone uses the little grocery bags for trash but imagine the number of small bags we have as a foreign family of five. I must say we have cut down on trash a lot but we also found these nice black bags at one of the bazaars and the blue ones come around our bottles of water.Then when you here the trash truck blowing his horn on your street you better be out there to throw your trash in. Or have some good neighbor relationships so they help throw it in for you if you are gone that day. They do recycle plastic bottles so you have those separated out and they go in that big bag over on the right side of the big truck.