International day/night

This spring our school had it's first International day/night.

One of the things that always amazes me about US is how interested and amazed everyone around us is about where we came from and our culture. Our kid's school teachers, coaches, etc, emphasise always how cool it is that they are part of two cultures and speak two languages.

As a result, our kids seem to think it is very "cool" to have parents who grew up in a different culture and be able to spend summers with family and relatives at another part of the world...

I was glad that they were very enthusiastic about the international day/night idea. After all, sometimes kids just want to "fit in", they don't like the idea of being "different" from everyone else. So I was pleasantly surprised that they wanted to go for it all the way. They went to school with traditional outfits and helped me to prepare for the night part...

After school, we had tables prepared with things that represented Turkey and sample food. Our table was at the cafeteria and we served two kinds of Turkish food: "Simit" which something in between a sesame bagel and a pretzel and "Baklava"...

Kids had "passports" and had to go to each table and get stickers or stamps from them. Each table had some sort of activity to entertain the kids. We had lots of evil eye beads and kids got to make some good luck charm bracelets...

There were a total of ten countries represented and everyone got to experience a small part of that country...

We all had great time... The international night will definitely become a tradition at our school...

Turkey - Road trip day 7 (Cesme and Alacati) - Backwards

I thought I figured out how to upload multiple photos to blogger.

Well, I was wrong... Kind of wrong. I did upload them all but for some reason they did get uploaded backwards. Therefore, this will be a backwards post. We will go from the end of the day to the beginning. It should be interesting...

The day ended with celebration of my boy's birthday. He turned six the last day of our trip. He was happy to get a cake with a treble clef on it. We promised him a bigger part when we are back to US but for now he was a happy camper.

Right before the cake, guess what they drank...
Pickle juice.
Such a reminder of my childhood... With a slice of pickled cucumbers in it...

For dinner we were at Alacati. It is a neighboring town to Cesme and quite famous lately with it's small hotels, famous restaurants and shops, and very cute streets.

This was my dinner; seafood salad. It was absolutely wonderful. Before and after dinner, we walked around, shopped, and just enjoyed the busy streets. We found out that we were way too early for dinner and some of the restaurants did not even start serving dinner. But at the end, we found one and we were very happy with it.

Before we headed for Alacati, we went to the town center of Cesme. There is a pretty big size castle in the center of the town. It has been recently restored. It was very well kept, clean, and organized. I can easily say that it was the best castle tour we did in our trip. The view was just breath taking...

Before we went to the castle we had the famous gum cookies. The cookies contain mastic gum and you can smell it and taste flavor in the cookies. They were just out of the oven. Kids were not crazy about them but I and my husband each enjoyed one.

This is the town center of Cesme, which consists of shops, restaurants and bakeries.

We spent the morning at one of the famous beach clubs at Cesme called Paparazzi. The beach club concept was new to us but it apparently means that you get some seating and umbrella in return of spending around $20 per person during the day. They have small restaurants and serves not only food but also drinks, ice cream, etc. and you just hang out.

I have miserably failed to take picture of what I ate for lunch. It was some sort of sea weed salad with a slice of cheese bread. It was really good but no pictures... But there are pictures of my favorite people swimming in beautiful Mediterranean sea...

Turkey - Road trip day 6 (Efes and Cesme)

The next morning we got up to the crisp coolness of Sirince. We headed for breakfast which consisted of many types of cheeses, olives, jams, tomatoes, cucumbers, fried eggs, and tea. We polished breakfast with a cup of Turkish coffee.

I forgot to mention that we were able to find a nice hat for my husband the night before. He had it on every day for the rest of the trip...

This was my pretty pink cup and delish coffee...

From Sirince, we headed to Ephesus (Efes) which is an ancient Greek (then Roman) city. It is only 20 minutes from Sirince which makes Sirince a great spot to spend the night instead of big hotels in Kusadasi or Izmir.

It was remarkable to see Efes which had 25,000 occupants at one point of time. The weather was hot and we made it easy on ourselves by taking the trip up the hill with a carriage instead of walking. Then the only thing left for us was to walk down to the parking lot.

This is my new hat. I felt like Indiana Jones for the rest of the trip...

From there we headed to House of Virgin Mary. Pilgrims visit the house based on the belief that Virgin Mary was taken to this house by Saint John and lived there until her death. The house is actually a chapel now.

After lunch at Efes we drove to town of Cesme. This is a reasonable size beach town which is famous with it's windy beaches and wind surfing. Every year thousands of people come to this town to enjoy the beaches and do wind surfing.

After a long day of walking and heat, we directly headed to the pool.

Someone was really tired...

We stayed in a nice hotel/beach club. The rooms were "OK", compared to the price and the other places that we stayed not great.

For dinner, we headed to one of the cafes by the sea. This town is famous with a sandwich called "kumru". Kumru means dove and we did not know what kind of food "kumru" was for a while. At the end, we found out that it was a sandwich made with cheese, Turkish sausage, salami, and tomatoes. It is like a grilled cheese sandwich but the cheese does not get pressed and melted within the sandwich. They melt the cheese and put all the ingredients on top of the cheese on the grill, then they place the blob of goodness in a sliced bread. And the bread is not mushy sandwich bread but a mini bread made only for this sandwich and in result only for me. As you can imagine I had one...

And I had a dessert too. They are simply fried dough dipped in heavy, sweet, and yummy syrup.

Kids had ice cream and for some reason wanted to be the Statue of Liberty of Cesme...

Well done...