Full Bellies

Today we spent the day doing what we do best in Kiev: walking and eating.  Oh yes, our talents in those areas grow daily.  Let’s talk food!

Today we found a cool indoor market.  We’d been searching and searching for it, only to realize we’d walked by it several times and just didn’t realize.  Woops!

I guess we don’t run in the right circles in the US because it seems caviar is pretty popular with other visitors in Ukraine.  🙂  Everyone selling caviar was determined to sell us some.  All I could think of was what it would be like if a jar of caviar exploded in my backpack.  Ugh.  No thanks!

As most of you know, Jed and I love our coffee.  We may be known at home as coffee snobs, but that may or may not be true.  🙂  After much research, cost analysis, and taste testing, we found the coffee with the best cheap-to-taste ratio to be the coffee sold from the little cars.  These little beauties are parked all up and down the streets here in Kiev.  They’re like little lighthouses beckoning us…come, drink, be cozy…I can rarely say no.

 Our other great food find here in Kiev has been “Puzata Hata”.  Translated it means something like “House of full bellies”.  To us, it means “cheap food and lots of it”.  Puzata Hata is a Ukrainian fast-food chain that is cafeteria-style.  We walk down the line and point at what we want.  It works out just beautifully! Below is a picture of my lunch.  Cucumber and tomato salad up top, then borscht down in the corner.  We totally love the borscht!!!  We found out from Alex and Dariya that you’re supposed to eat special garlic bread with the borscht, so now we do that.  🙂  It’s like dinner rolls with fresh garlic and oil over them.  Yum! The yummiest part of the meal is those little treasures down in the left corner.  Jed and I share that plate…in case you’re wondering!  Those are dumplings filled with cherries and covered with sour cream and sugar.  Holy tastiness.

We were walking downtown and all of a sudden we came up on some sort of festival thing.  We had no idea what they were celebrating, but it was fun to watch.  I think it was some sort of race…

 Oh, did we mention our hotel is a boat?  Ha!  We could see when we booked it that it was near the water, but nowhere did anything mention it was really ON the water.  It’s pretty sweet.  We got a great deal on it and are happy to have wifi in our room.  Thank you, Lord!

Thanks, everyone for praying for health.  We have felt great.  Jed has been eating anything and everything and he is feeling fantastic!  That is such a miracle.  We are very thankful.

Alright, speaking of food, time to go meet some Vineyard folk for dinner.

Bye for now!