Cuisine. 25th June

The food so far has been excellent, but then again we are all admirers of the Asian cuisine. Off the different cuisines , I think I like the Vietnamese best. Very fresh, lightly cooked, fresh herbs and lot of vegetables. We have had more fish these past three weeks than three years in India.
There has‘n really been anything special. We had dog soup in the DMZ in Korea, but had had dog meat before. I tried locusts & cockroaches in Cambodia, excellent snack with beer. It is all in the mind really, what you eat and what you don‘t. I do admit having some difficulties, but once you‘ve done it, it is fine. They were sold by women by the road side, pan fried and slightly spicy. Otherwise this trip has not been specially interesting in the culinary sense, I have not added much new to my experience.
Except for the Beluga caviar on the North Korean train. I bought Beluga in Hanoi and we thought it fitting to have it in N-Korea. As it turned out, food was so plentiful that we still had 150 grammes of Beluga when we left Pyongyang. So we had it in the restaurant wagon, with chinese rice alcohol instead of vodka. Delicieuse.

28th June.
Urumqi was as is to be expected. We had lot‘s of hand stretched noodles, the local specialty, but nothing fanciful or new.
The train to Almaty didn‘t have a restaurant, so we used the stops to buy food. We had solianka soup at the border, along with three types of piroshki, a kind of deep fried bread with a potato, cabbage or meat filling. In the afternoon we bought a smoked dried fish, a bit like vobla, on a train platform with some salted gherkins and boiled potatoes. Maybe nothing to write home about, but brought back sweet memories of Russia. Dinner is still to be negotiated.

Same day, a few hours later.
Dinner was bought from Kasakh women on the platform. Fried fish, manty, a sort of steamed dumplings, piroshki and hard boiled eggs and beer, while crossing the endless steppes of Kazakhstan.