"Same Food for Years and Years, I Hate the Food I Eat"

While the host family situation has vastly improved, my cuisine choices have greatly decreased. Nearly everyday I am offered heaping plates of gretchka, what Ukrainians call buckwheat. It is also called kasha. It is a food staple here, I know, and as our medical officer has told us numerous times, it is unbelievably healthy for you. "You'd pay 10 bucks for this stuff at home!," she boasts. Personally, I wouldn't pay a dime.

Truthfully, I am the only American here that I know who just downright hates the stuff. Most people either really like it or merely tolerate it when it is served in the morning to them with a lot of chicken meat.

The other volunteers in town offer me tips to improve it, telling me how they like it best. "Put some gravy on it," "smother it with butter," and so on. But nothing works for me.

A few evenings ago I got served a plate of it along with two (tasty) ground chicken cutlets that vaguely resembled crab cakes. I was then given a bowl of bouillon soup with some chicken wings and some other meat part that I could not recognize. I immediately thought, well, okay, I can put the gretchka in the soup. This was a trick that Sveta back in K-- would do, and it worked awesomely. For whatever reason though, it just didn't do the trick. All it ended up doing was distributing the buckwheat onto two plates, hopefully masking the fact that I ate only a small portion of it. And let me say in my defense that gretchka is really, I mean really filling. I don't know why anyone would need to eat more than four spoonfuls of that stuff anyway. It's mealiness always makes me feel like I am going to explode.

One volunteer in town has suggested that I stage a protest, much in the same vein as his pre-Orange Revolution revolt against his food enemy, the weiner. Sick of eating them morning, noon, and night, this otherwise affable individual one evening had been pushed too far. Taking the aforementioned villianous object into his hand, he waved it around the table, declaring, "No more weiners! No more weiners!" His host sister translated, mortifying his host mother. But that did not stop her from serving them the next morning.

I would love to eat hot dogs all the time and on occasion will stare longingly at them as I pass by the street vendors on Sovietskaya. Then I snap out of it and realize they are on hardish rolls that are much too big and are covered in carrots and cabbage, and there is no ketchup in site. *Sigh.*

I suppose that I could take a happy medium and explain that I just can't stomach buckwheat, much like I can't eat little fishes like potato chips, but another part of me thinks, enough is enough, you know? I won't eat holideitsz, milk, little fishes, salo (pig fat), fish soup, and various meat parts that I can't recognize (ever since I ate pig lung, I've decided this just is a good stand to make). I just fel that I should at least attempt to eat everything else.

Of course that does only remind me of my first site visit here in November, when I was almost killed because I decided to eat mushroom soup. I'm from Southeastern PA, I know my mushrooms and energetically told them "da, ya loobloo gribby!" only to see that the "mushrooms" that I'd be eater were teh kind that you find growing on the side of trees, what is more commonly referred to as the other name for mushrooms, fungus. Oh, how I thought that I would die. It was certainly a deciding factor in my procurring a cell phone, for medical emergencies!

So the moral of this story? Enjoy your pizza, burritos, General Gao, crab rangoon, fajitas, steaks, pot roasts, lasangas, crab cake, and everything else, because it sure as hell beats buckwheat.