The Juice of Life!

One of our biggest accomplishments so far in Russia has been finding all the components required to make coffee. We just completed this task yesterday. I know what you are thinking. If you remotely know Nicole or I you know you don't want to be anywhere near our 1000 square foot apartment with both of us in it if we have been coffee deprived for 2 weeks. Have no fear, like many things here, those that were here to receive us made sure we had all that we needed, coffee included. Our friends were so kind to give us their coffee maker to get us through till we found one. And find one we did when another friend here took us to the big Okey, a superwalmart type grocery store. I went through the whole process of buying an electronic appliance (see The good, the bad, the Russian-- Nicole's report two weeks in, on shopping for electronics above to understand what a headache this process is.) So here is our coffee maker...




And simply enough we found coffee beans at the local produkty where we do our daily grocery shopping. Although ground coffee is not popular, it is available. Most Russians drink Instant coffee. And apparently when they do drink ground coffee they make it via coffee press, aka french press. As those are abundant..... what is not abundant is the coffee filters that our coffee maker requires.... now it begins to make sense as to why there were only 2 electronic coffee makers at the Okey.... and absolutely no coffee filters.... and the salesman that tried to convince me that the filter in the coffee machine is the plastic cone that holds what you and I would call a coffee filter...... so not be defeated the search was on.

Eureka.... 3 hours into a search on the 4th day of looking through what must have been 20+ produkty and house ware type stores I was looking through Isles of coffee presses and heard from the other side of the store Nicole exclaim,,, Here they are,,, and sure enough behold right next to the fabric softner (I mean really? fabric softner...?) we discovered the fountain of alertness themselves, Ladies and Gentlement behold, the coffee filter.... All will be alright in our household
By the way, if you are reading this before we talk to you,,, and you know who you are,,, we are forever indebted to you, and we can return your coffee maker whenever you will be home, so give us a call with a good time for you.