At AUCA these are three options for lunch - Cafe Zebra, where you buy chicken or duck salad sandwiches, the Cafeteria (does it have a name?) where the sheer volume or students there makes ordering food chaos and Cafe Bravo, which is where we tended to eat.
Cafe Bravo isn't a cafe at all, but a little kitchen near the main entrance where you can get whatever it is that they made that day, usually an assortment of meat pastries, three main courses, rice and pastry pastries. We've stopped eating here because there is really no place to sit there. It's right in the front entrance hall, and although there are a dozen or so tables scattered about, the hall is usually filled with students dancing, giving speeches or playing loud techno music. In this picture I think they are doing all three.
In the nice weather we would sit in the courtyard, which is a nice, shady place to sit.
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Do you see those stairs and that trailer? Everyone at AUCA needed to get a chest x-ray to prove they didn't have TB. Right? Let's expose you to dangerous radiation to make sure you're well. We managed to get out of it, as it seemed that foreign faculty were exempt, although I'm still waiting to be told that I need an x-ray.
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This lunch was laghman (sometimes spelled lagman), which is a thick noodley noodle (think lo mein) that tends to be fried. This laghman has chunks of veggies and lamb in it. It's not bad, but in life there is definitely a laghman quota that we have now filled and greatly exceeded. There is also a little strawberry tart and a couple of blini. It is always a fun game at AUCA to figure out if the blini on offer were sweet or savory. I think the ones pictured had meat and rice in them.
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This delightful meal is also representative of what we ate for lunch everyday from roughly late August to mid October. This meal and each of the above trays cost about 200 soms or $4. Each dish being roughly 90-120 som or $2. The dish on YOUR left is rice with chicken. It's a pretty straight forward white rice with chicken chunks in what's likely a mayo-lemon sauce. It works, but it's not the kind of thing I want to eat every day. My son loved it. The round pastry things are sort of like creme filled donuts, except they have sweet cheese in them, like a ricotta or cottage cheese with tons of added sugar. The soup on the right is a yogurt, dill, cucumber soup that is served cold. It was quite tasty. I'm sure there's a name for it in Russian, but I don't know it.
Honestly, for the price the food is not bad at school, but it's not good either. Since the cold set in, we've shifted to a nearby stolovaya...столовя...which translates as "dining room" but has no real equivalent name in English that I know of. I suppose I'd call it a buffet. You grab a tray, get in line and then point to what you want (I always get BORSCHT!) and they give it to you. You pay, sit down, eat and then leave. Not bad and you can get a hearty lunch for two for about 240 soms, or about $5. There are also a lot of "business" lunch deals around town, where you get a three course lunch for about $6 or 300 soms.
Stay tuned for Adventures in Kumis, or How we Learned to Fear Fermented Mare's Milk!
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Cafe Bravo isn't a cafe at all, but a little kitchen near the main entrance where you can get whatever it is that they made that day, usually an assortment of meat pastries, three main courses, rice and pastry pastries. We've stopped eating here because there is really no place to sit there. It's right in the front entrance hall, and although there are a dozen or so tables scattered about, the hall is usually filled with students dancing, giving speeches or playing loud techno music. In this picture I think they are doing all three.
In the nice weather we would sit in the courtyard, which is a nice, shady place to sit.
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This lunch was laghman (sometimes spelled lagman), which is a thick noodley noodle (think lo mein) that tends to be fried. This laghman has chunks of veggies and lamb in it. It's not bad, but in life there is definitely a laghman quota that we have now filled and greatly exceeded. There is also a little strawberry tart and a couple of blini. It is always a fun game at AUCA to figure out if the blini on offer were sweet or savory. I think the ones pictured had meat and rice in them.
.JPG)
This delightful meal is also representative of what we ate for lunch everyday from roughly late August to mid October. This meal and each of the above trays cost about 200 soms or $4. Each dish being roughly 90-120 som or $2. The dish on YOUR left is rice with chicken. It's a pretty straight forward white rice with chicken chunks in what's likely a mayo-lemon sauce. It works, but it's not the kind of thing I want to eat every day. My son loved it. The round pastry things are sort of like creme filled donuts, except they have sweet cheese in them, like a ricotta or cottage cheese with tons of added sugar. The soup on the right is a yogurt, dill, cucumber soup that is served cold. It was quite tasty. I'm sure there's a name for it in Russian, but I don't know it.
Honestly, for the price the food is not bad at school, but it's not good either. Since the cold set in, we've shifted to a nearby stolovaya...столовя...which translates as "dining room" but has no real equivalent name in English that I know of. I suppose I'd call it a buffet. You grab a tray, get in line and then point to what you want (I always get BORSCHT!) and they give it to you. You pay, sit down, eat and then leave. Not bad and you can get a hearty lunch for two for about 240 soms, or about $5. There are also a lot of "business" lunch deals around town, where you get a three course lunch for about $6 or 300 soms.
Stay tuned for Adventures in Kumis, or How we Learned to Fear Fermented Mare's Milk!
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