Food, food glorious food...

The food really is pretty amazing/wonderful. And a dear friend of mine asked me about it on Facebook, so here we go.

We eat lots of startes, and clockwise from top left is a yougurt/garlic thing, eg

gplant puree, a coastal veggie. a traditional salad, stuffed peppers, and

traditional cheese. This was our first sit-down meal here, and it was the day we wen

t to the beach. I made the discovery that I am not overly fond of yogurt in that use or cheese. And that Turkish people put pickled cabbage in EVERY salad in the country. And that stuffed peppers might just be as good as stuffed grape leaves. mmmmm... the grape leaves don't have a picture, but are really good.

Much of Istanbul is also on the coast, so we get lots and lots of fish. And I don't make a secret

of the fact that I am not the biggest fan of fish...

But my friend Igor certainly is. He likes to try new things, and this mackeral was new to hi

m and he tried it. And played with it. The boy fish met the girl fish. They were having a conversation.

An awesome traditional dish I did get to try- although it was at a resteraunt- ia a pasta-type dish called manti. It is a bit like ravioli with a different shape and a yogurt (They use it a lot in this cuisine, it's pretty good and definately interesting) sauce. A Turkish friend of one of the professors invited us over for a traditional meal and served the homemade casserole-style version and it was pretty awesome too.

The street food, doner, is pretty awesome.

I don't have pictures of it, but it's like a giant spit that turns and makes wonderful wonderful roasted meat... It's pretty lean meat when all is said and done. And the produce prices don't have a comparison factor, they are so cheap. I am thinking about doing a post on shopping... Yes? No? What do you think?

And the drinks are good too! Soda is made with real sugar, and it's

DELICIOUS.

And it comes in smaller cans... 330mL, which is about 10 ounces or so by my guess. I like Coke. And Fanta. And Diet Coke is Coke Light.

Which made me giggle.

And you can't hold that against me because I was jetlagged just then. We'd only been in Istanbul for about 3 hours outside of the airport.

And the lemonadey wonderfulness in the bottle over there with the snack mix? Delightful. Truly great. The snack mix is just okay.

And I'm not going to go too far into guilty pleasures here, but the sweets are pretty awesome. There's some home cooking that might need to have some praise too, but later. If you wish. Let me know. But I have a midterm to work on now.

On that note, I have done my best to make the comments section accessible, and especially when away, I LOVE hearing from y'all. So do me a favor and try to leave a comment, no matter who you are. If there's not a box to write in, you should be able to click on the word 'comments'. I want to see how accessible it is. And hear from you. Here's 3 questions.

• Can you name the musical assocoated with the title of this post?
• What are YOU up to this summer?
• What do you want to know about what I'm up to?