September 7th: Kusadasi was our "chill and soak up the culture" spot of choice. We had
our breakfast (consisting of black seed-filled olives, green olives with pimento, fresh tomato, feta, Havarti cheese, and bread) with a lovely view of the city and the sea. A couple of cats (I believe three generations of them) decided to join us, insisting we feed them the cheese. One even bit my finger for the scraps. Yikes!Since we had a kitchen at our disposal, we went to the nearby market (a mini-Bazaar of sorts) and bought everything from potatoes to the locally-grown peaches, grapes and olives. They even had a fruit that resembled a lime in appearance, but, in actuality, it was an orange. How strange! Of course, being the obvious tourists that we were, we were swindled out of our money when trying to buy tomatoes and some spoons (which, I might add, are quite useful now that I'm in Thessaloníki). All in all, though, it wasn't a bad experience.
There is always going to be one of those "it wasn't funny then, but it is now" moments that happens on every trip. Well, we had it -- Coming out of the market after buying all of that food mentioned in the last paragraph, Mom noticed safety wires attached to our car's wheels and automatically presumed we had been booted by the Turkish police. My mom, acting out of fear, started to probe this poor Turkish man with questions, because he had parked behind us and had the safety wires on his tires as well. He apparently thought we were asking how to go to the Police Station and, not knowing English, he pulled a couple of Turkish passerby and it felt like they were playing "guess what the American is saying" with Mom and I. I'm sure they got a kick out of the whole ordeal. Good grief. Luckily, one of the men in the group knew some English and told us the safety wires had been there all along and that their purpose is to prevent thieves from stealing the rims of the tires. Even now, I have to ask myself, HOW DID I MISS THAT?!
The rest of the day was more relaxing. I caught up with my journal, Tucker went swimming and all of us read a book. We're such nerds (not that that's a bad thing). :) Dinner came and went - Kusadasi was going all-out for their last nights of Ramadan
and had everything from a carnival to singers and comedians. At dinner, Mom and I accidentally switched meals and I experienced curry, first hand. It tasted okay, but my stomach just didn't take to it. Oh well, at least I tried it. We bought my second journal (I think I'm going to need it by November) and had some ice cream (chocolate, mint and vanilla). I proceeded to get everyone lost, trying to find our way back to the car, but we did stumble upon a shop with milk. Note: check first to see if it's buttermilk or not! Oops! We finally returned to the hotel and collapsed out of sheer exhaustion. What a day!
No comments:
Post a Comment