Air ionizers, anyone?

Chizhevsky's air ionizing lamps (люстра Чижевского): can't decide.
I have an ionizer which produces only negative ions, and the author of this site, Aydar Tuktagulov, criticizes this type a lot, promotes bipolar ionizers as opposed to unipolar models and refers to the sanitary norms of RF. BUT one paragraph of the norms says that it's allowed not to have positive ions at workplaces with sources of electrostatic fields (office equipment etc), and it's exactly my case (well, not workplace, but at home I have so many appliances!)

"В зонах дыхания персонала на рабочих местах, где имеются источники электростатических полей (видеодисплейные терминалы или другие виды оргтехники) допускается отсутствие аэроионов положительной полярности." САНПИН

If you, (occasional) reader of this blog, have any ideas or experience or heard about somebody's experience, don't hesitate to tell me, ok?

Some quotes in RU with my rough translation

From the book by Kapten (Ю.Л.Каптен)

1)
"Болезни возникают в теле в основном по следующим причинам:
-сон днём,
-бодрствование ночью,
-чрезмерность в сексе,
-движение в толпе,
-потеря правильных отправлений,
-плохая диета,
-утомительная умственная работа"
стр 190

"Illnesses arise in the (physical) body mainly from:
-sleeping at daytime,
-staying awake at night,
-excessiveness of sex,
-moving in the crowd (?),
-(?),
-bad diet,
-tiring brainwork "
page 190

2)
"Спокойная уверенность в том, что самое лучшее обязательно случится" стр 191

3)
"... рассматривает грех как практическое или умственное действие или чувства, которые затрудняют, препятствуют духовному развитию человека" стр 199
~ "... see the sin as an action in practice or in mind or feelings that impede spiritual development of man" page 199

4)
"... покаяние есть не что иное, как психологическое действие по приведению в соответствие высших духовных устремлений и ценностей индивида с конкретной самооценкой его практической деятельности" стр 199
"... repentance (of sins) is nothing else but a psychological action of bringing into harmony 'the higher spiritual aspirations and values of the individual' and concrete self-assessment of his practical activities" page 199

5)
"Ложное чувство вины, ощущение своей греховности, по сути, препятствуют дальнейшему росту духовности, затрудняя прогресс" стр 199
"False guilt, feeling of their depravity, essentially, impede further spiritual development, making progress more difficult" page 199

From a lecture by Torsunov: hierarchy
^ реальный контакт с объектом
| медитация (концентрация ума для достижения связи с объектом, материальным или
| духовным) личностная или безличностная, на слух (поёт и слушает святое имя)
| практическое знание
| теоретическое знание

^ real contact with the object (when you see God you don't need to meditate any more)
| meditation (concentration of mind in order to connect with an object, material or
| spiritual)
| practical knowledge
| theoretical knowledge

8 things to work on

To improve your spirituality (according to Jasmuheen):
1) understand that your thoughts create the reality; programming power of mind
2) meditation
3) prayer (Thank you!)
4) service
5) nature
6) exercise your body (yoga, martial arts...)
7) diet (at least vegetarian)
8) music and singing (only positive lyrics and instruments that don't have a negative impact on cells)

I heard a lot about giving some 10% of income to charity but when I see beggars I don't believe them... And what I heard from Jasmuheen in one of the many videos on the web actually helped me to solve this issue of wanting to give some coins and not believing those who ask for money. Finally I've decided to change 10% of my income to coins and 10-ruble notes and give 10 rubles to each and every beggar and street musician I see till this 10% is finished. It feels good :)

Meditation

Dad gave me a book which is really worth reading. (RU) Рекомендую: познавательно про медитацию в разных религиях на востоке и на западе.
Ю.Л.Каптен, Основы медитации (вводный практический курс). Самара: ИЧП АВС, 1994.-362с.

Vocab

August

I've been eating mainly peaches and nectarines the last couple of weeks. Fewer meals a day but considerable amounts of fruit each meal. Psychological dependence on food is significant... Sometimes I realise that physically I don't want any food any more (!) but psychologically yesss.

He-he, during the last three weeks: (just trying to recall everything)
1 peaches (from Azerbaijan, Crimea, Greece),
2 nectarines (very sweet, or very juicy, red, pink),
3 cucumbers (from different regions of Eur part of Russia, or what my relatives have grown),
4 tomatoes (from different regions of Eur part of Russia, pink, red),
5-8 dill, parsley, green onion, garlic,
9 apples (from Crimea, or from our parcel),
10 raspberry,
11 gooseberry (a lot, from our parcel, or from the neighbours'),
12 several young carrots (what my relatives have grown),
13-14 some cherry (from our neighbours' parcel), some sweet cherry (it's not good any more)
15 yellow plums (from my mum's parcel)
16 some grapes
17 hazelnuts (from South Ossetya)
18 a couple of bananas
19-20 orange juice, tangerine juice (when I work in the centre)
21 several melons
22 black currant
23-25 one white marrow, one green marrow (zucchini), a couple of very small pumpkins
26-28 lowbush blueberry of two types (черника и голубика), cowberry (брусника), cranberry - one Sunday we spent some three hours at the marsh just eating these berries! =)

It took me some time to type this list, maybe I still forgot something. Anyway, about 30 different types of food, with peaches+nectarines+cucumbers+tomatoes comprising some 70-80%.

Breatharians Baranova and Jasmuheen

Smile =) Yoga Video

Yoga Videos 1938

Jasmuheen (talk) and Kailash (music)

Raw mono... what's next?

They tell me sometimes that I'm being too radical now.
I say no, it's not that radical.
They ask me "what can be more radical?"
Well, what about not needing physical food at all? Living on love/light/prana/...
A couple of links:
link 1
link 2
(in RU)

My current level of spiritual development is far from the one necessary for that. The next at least 2 years my new cells will be replacing the old ones that I got before going raw and you can't receive enough prana before the energy channels widen. You must first be physically healthy, and only then enjoy freedom from food.
Raw mono -> widen channels to receive cosmic energy -> be able to live without physical food

Meditation

I have never tried to meditate, but really want to! I've read and heard so much about the effects and importance of meditation that now I'm ready to learn. The only similar experience I have had by now were the 5 minutes of relaxation at the end of yoga classes, and I liked it.
They say it's easy, but something doesn't let me chase away the thoughts. I'll be trying to quieten my mind and reach that feeling of oneness.

Not about food

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that I didn't feel the need to talk about food any more. I don't initiate a conversation on "healthy lifestyles". Despite being absolutely sure about the necessity of switching to raw diet when fighting cancer, among other things, I don't promote raw foodism. It's actually quite hard to stay calm and not to react sometimes, because one of the people with cancer I know is mom of my best school friend, and at the same time my mom's good acquaintances are orthodox doctors who work with cancer patients every day and try to help them with chemotherapy. I don't even start talking about my views on cancer and treatment and what human beings shouldn't consume with them as they wouldn't want to see me or my mom again after that. I do answer questions though.
So food is not an issue any more. I think I got used to this diet =) although still only on my way to proper mono raw diet + drinking water. I'd need a couple of years of that way of life to see my physical body and health improve.
Now I'm focused on the part of myself which is not the physical body. I can't find the right words for it. It's not "psychic", it's not "soul", it's not "thoughts"... Non-material part of me, maybe?
One author who influences me most now is Wayne Dyer. Many of the ideas similar to those he touches upon or discusses in his books are not new to me, but somehow I tend to forget them and need to be reminded time and again. I am grateful to him =)

In the countryside (nostalgia)

Last Friday I went to the place where I used to spend summers in my childhood. My family has a house in a village not far from Mozhaysk and Borodino (the fields where the famous battle between the Russian troops headed by Kutuzov and the French troops headed by Napoleon Bonaparte took place), it's to the west from Moscow. The house is actually abandoned, nobody lives there in winter and very few people very seldom go there in summer. I hadn't been there for some 3-4 years and this time took the keys and went there alone. It was upsetting to finally come and see what I saw. I can say it's the place I loved most in Russia. And when nobody takes care of the land and the house you can easily feel it.
We used to plant paprika, tomatoes, a lot of cucumbers, strawberries, peas, zucchini, pumpkins, marrows, but this time I saw only one row of cucumbers, carrots, onions, garlic, several square metres of potato. When I was a kid my family had several beds of potato at least 1 km long each! No wonder we never bought potatoes. The apple trees in the garden are so old now, but still bear fruit. The raspberry bushes when not taken care of start to dominate other plants, and it is exactly what's happening in one part of our vegetable garden. Poor bushes of gooseberry and black currant, all surrounded by raspberry bushes. Yellow raspberry grows where it used to. In other parts of the vegetable garden the same old black and red currant bushes appeal to the eye. I remember one cold rainy summer day when my relatives lost me. They found me sitting under a black currant bush hiding from the rain and eating berries :)(Heard and liked the phrase: In Russia there are two winters - one white and one green).
It's a pity it's only several times a year but still it's so good to eat something directly from the bush =) They say the real good from a vegetable/fruit comes only the first 15 minutes after we pick it (tear it off) because only then the fruit is "living", the energy of Life is still there. It tastes better for sure =) And I fully enjoyed it that day in my garden. I really want to live in the countryside and grow my own vegetables and fruit, as we used to do years ago.

Prices at the Preobrazhensky market

July is a wonderful month! It's warm, the daylight is long, and there are so many yummy things at the market. I've been focusing on fruit and berries recently.

1 EUR ~ 44.5 RUR
Cherries: 40-50 RUR a kilo
Sweet cherries: 50-80-100-120-150 RUR dark, pink&yellow. Yellow sweet cherries from Armenia 200RUR (my favourite)
Peaches: from Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, the Crimea (Ukraine). 40-70-80-100-150 RUR, my choice is 80 RUR
Nectarines: 40-80-90-120 RUR
Blueberry: from Vladimir, Murom (regions in Russia). 70-80-90-110 RUR a kilo
Raspberry: from different Russian regions. 100-120-150 RUR a box (~700gr)
Melons: Astrakhan, Uzbekistan. torpedo, kolkhoznitsa (varieties). 40-50-80 RUR a kilo
Hazelnuts: South Ossetya. a new harvest, those milky hazelnuts, sold still covered with the green part, love them. 150 RUR a kilo. Sold only at one stall.

Why not Economics any longer

Listen to yourself. What is it what you really want to do in life? Not those goals imposed by the society or even very caring relatives. I'm still struggling with my mum, she has her own vision of my life, she still thinks I belong to her when I can belong to myself only. My university mates are buying flats in Moscow and good Japanese cars, and my mum wants me to make a lot of money as well. But my view of the world is different, I don't want to be striving for money all my life, I am grateful to and for what I have now.
Do I want to be an office rat? Work long hours inside concrete buildings with poor ventilation stare at a PC? Or work for a company that is one of the leaders in doing harm to the Earth? No. The first step is to realise what I don't want. Done. The next step is to realise what I do want. I started to move in this direction. I believe that doing something with languages (translating, teaching) will minimise my own negative impact on the environment.
There're many books by those who realised 1) how beautiful the world is 2)that we human beings are (supposed to be) its co-creators 3) that abundance is here, we must only see it 4) that the power of our thoughts is limitless, and dreams&wishes do come true, with a lag in time 5) that love and gratitude do miracles 6) that giving (love) is better than taking (love) 7) that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience, etc etc etc ........ Many authors are of the late XXth century, still alive and writing more. Many cite Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, the Bible, the Qur'an. Many cite other modern authors, usually healers, naturopats, psychologists. I've read quite a few. Many books are very interesting, well-structured and the ideas are so simple and I've heard them so many times, that it's surprising how come I've never really processed, so to say, those thoughts myself.
It takes time and effort to become aware of the negativism of our thoughts, the many stereotypes we automatically absorb while growing up. But once you start tidying up your mind :) you find it very exciting! You gain that independence in thoughts that many of us really dream of. In my life only the last couple of years brought me this new perception of myself, so I am quite new to this self-improvement field. But those several gleams I've had so far were really amazing! I absolutely agree with somebody who said that if you recall only one prayer a day let it be "thank you". Being grateful not only in words, but really feeling it is a marvellous inner experience which opens doors to abundance in the physical facet of our world as well.
Economics is about decisions on allocation of limited resources. In Microeconomía by Michael Parkin (I have a Spanish edition) I read: "Todas las preguntas de la economía surgen de un hecho sencillo e ineludible: no siempre se puede obtener lo que uno quiere. Vivimos en un mundo de escasez". And this is exactly the idea I don't support any more. The universe has everything a human being might need, and it's a matter of time to receive it (let's not think of what time is for now). How much time is needed depends on the person's qualities, openness to the abundance etc. But beware! Be careful in wishing something! You will get it, and what will you do then? ;)

Fasting and week-day names

Do you speak Irish? Maybe you know several Irish words? I don't know a word in Irish myself but I've just learned one curious thing: the days of the week Wednesday and Friday are called fasting and Thursday is the day between fastings. Wow! In the Orthodox Christian tradition Wednesday and Friday were banian days as well, although in Russian the meaning of the names is different (Wednesday sreda means middle, Friday pyatnitsa means the fifth day of the week).

Sweet cherries

At least 1/3 of my current diet are sweet cherries, mainly dark-red ones.
Countries of origin: mainly Uzbekistan, but some are from Azerbaijan, Moldova and Armenia
Prices: 80-280 RUR a kilo (1 EUR ~ 44 RUR). 120 RUR is the most common price for dark-red and red sweet cherries at the market I go to (Preobrazhensky). 80 RUR is the evening market price for pink&yellow sweet cherries there. One of my favourite kinds is the yellow sweet cherry from Armenia, they cost 150 RUR a kilo and it's quite hard to find these. Extra large very dark sweet cherries cost 220-280 RUR a kilo.

July

Busy again. From early morning till quite late at night with several free hours at noon. Sleep about 5 hours a night, not enough for me. Move a lot, by mainly short distances in polluted areas (15 minutes on foot to the closest underground station). Spend a lot of time in metro and in concrete buildings, surrounded by crowds of people or working with people (not with a PC).
The cherry period will come to an end soon so I'm eating as much as I can afford every day. The prices are reasonable at the market, but I don't have time to go there often and have to buy fruit next to metro stations.
Bingo, I drink at least two mugs of water every morning.

June

The entire month of June I was very busy, slept less than I needed, spent almost all my time inside, was nervous because of lack of time - not really a healthy way of life. Strangely enough the monorawfoodism aspect was ok. I ate small portions of fruit and vegetables during the day, so the absolute majority of my meals were fine from the mono perspective. But in the evening I couldn't avoid mixing everything. Now that I'm quite free again I eat a lot again and mix even fruit with vegetables, uff. Drinking water is still a big issue, just can't drink it.

I read one monorawfoodist's diary. He's mono since some 8 months ago and he's tried mixing stuff recently. He says he felt the difference in clarity of his mind although the body reacted ok. As my reasons for rawfoodism are related to both physical and non-physical (spiritual, mental) aspects of life I'm even more convinced to switch to a 100% mono now.

It's the season of sweet cherries now. I'm a big fan of those and taking advantage of good prices at the Preobrazhensky market. 3 kilos of dark, pink and yellow sweet cherries a day? Easily! And with pleasure =)

Linden trees are in their full blossom now. They smell so good that I enjoy my morning walk to the metro station as there are a lot of linden trees on my way.
Good olfaction can cause some inconveniences as too many people smell bad and the air quality in many parts of Moscow is really poor.

What do you think about the decision of the court in the case of Daniel Hauser?

Nuts and seeds

Yesterday I tried raw unsalted pistachio nuts and loved them a lot! I know only one place in Moscow where they are sold, and not that cheap (165 RUR per 0.5 kg, 1 EUR ~ 43.5 RUR). We ate the 300 gr too quickly =)
Something is wrong with the white sesame I bought. I put it to soak, but today it smells bad and doesn't start to germinate after enough time for this.
After I started to soak all seeds I don't like them dry anymore. They change their taste after the crucial moment of waking up due to water.

Sesame / Sprouts / Weekend Market

Sesame seeds:
Yes! After 2 days they started to germinate. I am content. So sesame milk is going to be my daily drink for the coming weeks.

Really living food:
More sprouts of all kinds when they are up to 1 cm long and wheat grass up to 10 cm. This, the wheat grass thing, will be my next step. Already know where to order and when.

Weekend market:
Hurray, sweet cherry from the Tashkent region (Uzbekistan)! At affordable prices (350 RUR a kilo, 1 EUR ~ 44 RUR), in comparison with the cherry sold at Azbuka vkusa supermarkets (750-1500 RUR a kilo). And strawberry that smells strawberry, from Krasnodar greenhouses.

Soaps / Sesame / Ekadashi / Mum

Soaps:
I like natural soaps, love to choose them for presents =), but it's not easy to find one without animal fat or glycerin. So I am happy now as a wonderful savon d'argan artisanal came to me as a present from Morocco (soap with argan oil by Coopérative Marjana, à 14 km d'Essaouira sur la route de Marrakech). If you have never tried it you don't know how pleasant a soap can be!

Some recent changes:
The colour of my skin is getting whiter and pinker. I noticed it only today looking at my hands and I really like this change! Since several days ago I have been feeling cold. I know this is usual for many people who just start switching to raw foodism. In my case I felt wonderful in September-October, slept with a fully open window with 13C. But now it's 20C in my apartment, and I am wearing a sweatsuit.

My weight is low but stable (obviously, the BMI shows I am underweight). My mum's weight has changed considerably but gradually and smoothly, minus 10 kg since December (~5 months). She didn't limit the amount of food nor restricted the number of products. Just ate everything she wanted, raw, with a bit of salt, then sea salt, black pepper, some oil; during the last 5 months she had, besides raw food, some thin Armenian pita (лаваш), bread, several times she ate boiled potatoes, braised vegetables, stchi (Russian cabbage soup, щи) and puff pastry patties (слоёные пирожки), some cheese, milk, coffee. It was a drastic change in eating habits for her, but she feels much better with her current food preferences, which makes me happy as well. She perceives it as a temporary diet, but how suitable is the word "temporary" when she is going to keep to it for the coming year for sure? =).

Sesame seeds:
Read they are all treated with some alkalies in order to remove a specific taste of their hull. I don't know if to trust this info, but yesterday I put some seeds to soak to see if they are alive. By now none has started to germinate.

Ekadashi:
Still try to follow it twice a month. Yesterday it was ekadashi, but I did eat, so I am having a dry fasting today, on dvadashi, instead. My mum joined me today.

A post with pics

La-la-la, my mum has just returned from Morocco and brought me 3 types of dates and several oranges. In such countries oranges are usually not treated when they are for the domestic market, and you can see that they are different from what is sold in supermarkets in countries-importers. They are not that clean and the orange-peel colour is not homogeneous. The taste is superb.

Tomatoes:
One of the Azeri tomatoes I bought at the weekend market contained no seeds! I couldn't eat it. The rest were ok and tasted good.

I read a comment (#11) by somebody whose tastes coincide with mine :)

My fridge can look like this sometimes:

Black sesame "milk":
Yesterday I prepared it for the first time and I loved it! Surely I'll buy some raw white sesame seeds and try them this way as well. Sesame is a wonderful source of Ca as Ca from it assimilates best. For me sesame milk is a way to drink more water without making myself do it.

Grocery shopping / Emotions, habits, traits of character

My monodiet development:
Fruits separately. Sprouts (wheat seeds and mung beans in germination) separately. Vegetables and root crops both separately and mixed, but already minimizing the number of ingredients per "salad". Dill, parsley, green onion, coriander and similar both separately and cut into "salads". Cucumbers, cauliflower, marrows, sweet paprika on their own. Tomatoes with garlic or with radish, or guacamole (tomatoes with avocado, garlic, lemon juice - could be without lemon juice). Korean style carrots.

Bananas: I guess the majority of bananas nowadays are GMO, and when I learned this I even avoided them for a while. But as for now I still do love them, and it's not good to suppress one's wants for a long time =) So I've been buying and tasting every brand I came across. Now I find tasty only one type of bananas, those with Gold Sun Ecuador sticker. I hope to enjoy a lot bananas somewhere in southern Europe when I'm there in late August (if I'm there...)

Tomatoes: I remember the pleasure I got from tasting Turkish tomatoes in Istanbul after my long Dutch experience. It was a drastic change then. Turkish tomatoes sold in Russia are really bad, and the tests by Roszdravnadzor (a governmental agency for health and all kinds of safety issues) show in many tomatoes a very high residual chemicals level, above the standards (but still they are on the market - it's Russia...). These are actually the only tomatoes reported to contain a high residual level of fertilizers on the market. I doubt it, as there are tomatoes from Spain and Holland which don't smell or taste like tomatoes. We avoid them. The tomatoes that taste good are imported from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, and the prices range from 150 to 250 RUR now (1 EUR~44 RUR) while other tomatoes cost 100-120 RUR a kilo.

Young garlic: just wonderful. Smells nice, contains much more water than late summer garlic. Yes, it's possible to eat several cloves in a monodiet way =) But usually I squeeze it on tomatoes.

Weekend market: summer is coming and the choice is bigger and bigger, and finally there is radish (it's not common to have radish in winter here, only at some supermarkets, looked at as very "artificial"). They all claim on their price-tags it's from Krasnodar (the most southern region of the RF), and I believed them. The second time I came to buy radish I saw some small Israeli packets with radish beyond the counter lying in the same place where the very big packet with what they called Krasnodar radish. They just opened the small packets and put the radish into the big packets from which they eventually took it to weight for the customers. I don't have anything against produce from Israel (I am not very familiar with it, usually it's not bad, their sun gives it all its love). But I try to minimize my chemicals intake =) so my first choice is produce from the countries of the ex-USSR. When I commented my finding to the seller, she just asked me with a sigh if I was taking that or not. I felt offended and went away. A women at a stall nearby was honest with me and said her radish was from Poland. At another stall radish looked different and I was told that that one yes was from Krasnodar.

Changing the character and my reactions: everything is changing automatically, with all I've been reading and watching. But many of my traits of character and reactions need intentional and deliberate efforts to change, and it's hard. By now I have found the most important issues, not through a meditation, but through a systematic deep contemplation, have written them down and realized that I had never seen them so pronounced in me before nor has my mom. I believe learning oneself is the most interesting thing on Earth (the second interesting thing is exploring Nature). The most destructive emotions and habits are as follows: feeling shame (испытывать чувство стыда), censure (осуждение), envy (зависть), pity/compassion (жалеть, жалость). I know that according to the standard modern paradigm it's good to feel compassion and shame. According to many healers it's not as it is self-destruction on the energetic level which passes on to the physical level (physical health, life in the material world), so the way to improve the energetic level is to change the habit from feeling pity etc. to shedding love to everyone. I believe the healers. Their words are in line with Hinduism and Christianity. But although I understand what to do many of my reactions are changing extremely slow.
I have also started to realize what my fears are. An enormous amount of work is ahead. Every time I learn something new about the world and about me I am happy for a while but then realize that there is even more to know. And the world is getting bigger and bigger! A wonderful sensation!

Impressed / Babies

My good friend from Krasnoyarsk is going to become a father in September! And most of my classmates have already married or are getting married this year. 24-26 is the age by which the majority have their first child. Incredible. I am not ready yet even if I had a fiancé. I was brought up in a culture where a good wife is supposed to cook well and I had been learning and was considered to be good at it. And in my dreams I was planning to open a restaurant. Now, with my raw foodism, it turns out that it's been in vain. I will be searching for a husband among raw foodists and even if he is not a raw foodist but a vegan, I won't kill food =)

I was so impressed by the news from my friend that went to take a look at the shelves with baby stuff at a supermarket and the prices. Poor things! They are fed with tinned soup with beef since 12 months! sold under "борщик с говядинкой" where bold letters are diminutive-hypocoristic suffixes as if everything related to babies should be "small" (in every sense).

It's really a pity that nowadays babies are not put to nurse if mother doesn't have enough milk but are fed with artificial milk formula. It's a pity many young mothers choose not to breastfeed even if they have enough milk. And more and more young mothers lose milk because their own food is too artificial (like coke and potato chips) and lacks uncooked ingredients.

O tempora! o mores!

Habits/Affirmations

It's so hard to change habits. For example, I want not to feel anger anymore, but the society has been showing me that a right reaction to certain circumstances is anger. So all my life I have reacted accordingly. Now I want to stop being influenced that much and want to think myself. It's such a new idea to me =)

While wandering in youtube I came across a nice interpretation of positive affirmations. Check this out:

Korean carrots recipe

It's been a while now that I stopped using salt or pepper, or oil. But today I saw a wonderful almost raw version of "Korean carrots" salad and understood how much I missed it. Ssso. This is the post which seduced me =) (in RU). They say this salad integrated into Russian cuisine when many Koreans were moved by force within the USSR during the Stalin era.
I want to share it with you, because it is easy and quick to prepare, tasty, a bit spicy, wonderful as an appetizer. Your dear ones will appreciate it.
My version:
-Good fresh carrots, washed and peeled: slice (better grate) them into spaghetti-like strands, some 5 cm long and 1-2 mm wide.
-Black and red (cayenne) pepper: cayenne pepper, together with garlic, is what gives the whole thing such a special taste.
-Several cloves of (young) garlic: cut in small pieces or squeeze.
-Oil: sesame, or olive, or sunflower. Just a bit.
-Freshly squeezed lemon juice: just a bit, 1 lemon for a medium bowl.
-Sea salt.

I added black sesame seeds and used a spoonful of olive oil.
Mix everything very well! And place into the fridge for 30 min - 1 hour.
I couldn't wait that long and 10 minutes were enough to marinade. I ate the whole bowl with pleasure and am feeling fine now :)

Bon appetit!
PS: this is not my pic, I found it on the web

My mango experience %)

Wow! I already eat much less than a month ago! For example, today I had 2 apples for late breakfast, 2 apples for lunch, 3 ripe bananas when I was in the centre in the afternoon, "super intense salad" (tomatoes, dill, red onion, green onion, a lot of squeezed out garlic, a bit of lemon juice - what a mix! just wanted something bitter) for dinner, a small Thai mango for late dinner, a glass of water during the day. Yesterday it was just several big apples and about 1 litre of water and "infusions" during the day. This is a change, the next step =)

I got a small sum of money quite unexpectedly and, to pamper ourselves, I went to the most expensive supermarket (can't help but mention that their website is so badly translated into English) and bought 3 small Thai mangoes. They are sold only at one chain (to my knowledge) and are expensive (~200 RUR each, 1 EUR ~ 44 RUR). I'd been wishing to taste the Thai variety since I first saw it in a supermarket in winter, but the price ... Now, done! It's delicious! very soft and exquisite, with almost no fibres. The colour is nice, entirely yellow, with no green or red parts. The next variety to taste on a special occasion is Australian (there are not many Australian varieties on the Moscow market, so I am generalizing). I saw it the first time today, in the same supermarket. It is ssso big! and it is even more expensive than the Thai one (850 RUR a kilo, so 1 item would cost ~500 RUR). Mmm