The long awaited holiday photos

We started our trip in Istanbul, where we stayed with a old college friend "The Turk." We visited the Topkapi palace and went on a tour of the harem, which was beautifully decorated. We sampled some Turkish sweets. Visited the Basilica Cistern, Hagia Sophia
and the Blue Mosque.

Big News - expensive and cold no more

I know that I owe you some photos of our recent trip to Turkey and Greece, but I've been a bit distracted since we've recently found out we'll be moving back to the US. As our flat gets colder and colder each day and the sun is coming out less frequently, I'm quite happy to be heading back to the US. Though I'll miss the friends I've made and all of the travelling we've been able to do while living here, it will be nice to move back to New York...land of the perfect pizza, shops open on Sunday, and sushi delivery until 3 in the morning.

Speaking of sushi, before heading home, we're spending a month in Japan. I'm amazingly excited!

My summer vacation part 2

Our friend Elyse and her husband Andrew stopped by on one of their many international vacations, so again, we had a bbq (and the weather wasn't too bad that day). During the long weekend for the August Bank holiday, I went to a bbq on the roof of our friend Stephen's building (I was kind of surprised that at an event deemed as a bbq there were no actual barbeques and instead we grilled in these disposable aluminum pans with charcoal on the bottom).We also wanted to get into the Bank holiday spirit, so we had yet another bbq the next day. We made shish kabobs (Russian style) and Leo made some lethal cocktails called Suffering Bastards.

And finally, we went to Oxford for the day with our friends Pedro and Iness. This is inside the Natural History Museum in Oxford.And that's pretty much what we did this summer. We'll be headed to Istanbul and some Greek islands this weekend, so upon our return a fortnight later, I'll try to post pictures asap.

My summer vacation part 1

I know I've been terrible at updating this blog...let's just consider it was my summer break. So here's what I did on my summer vacation, even though I haven't had any time off and it's barely been warm enough to consider it summer.

Our friend Steve from college came to visit us with his sister Michelle, so we, of course, had a bbq. We celebrated our friend Caron's birthday with a picnic in Queen's Park. We went to the Royal Opera House to see Swan Lake, which was a birthday gift from Leo's parents, complete with salmon sandwiches and champagne during intermission (Thank you!).

For Heather

As per Heather's request, here is the back garden as of yesterday...tomatoes are on the right against the wall.

Garden update

So, it's been some time since I brought up the garden and I know you're all dying to know what's been going on. Well, we harvested our two marble beets, which I boiled and served with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. I also cooked the leave of the beets, chopping them and sauteing them with some oil, garlic and chillies. Though there wasn't very much to eat, it was all really good!

Everything in the garden seems to be growing well. We are certainly learning a lot about gardening - what we thought were brussel sprouts turned out to be cauliflower and vice versa. We had planted a lot of cucumber seedlings in the spring, all of which died when I planted them outisde. So I decided just to plant a seed directly into the ground, and it looks to be doing very well. If we get one cucumber out of this I'll consider it a great success.

The thing I am most excited about are the tomatoes. We have 6 plants which seem to be bearing fruit. I can't wait till they are ripe enough to eat. The anticipation is killing me.

Back to Portugal

Last month, after Marseille and before we went to the states, we spent a long weekend in Porto. We had loved Lisbon so much that we wanted to see more of Portugal so we found some cheap tickets and took a very, very early flight to Porto. Our hotel was a bit of a ways from the Ribeira (the historic area down by the river) but it gave us an opportunity to see where people actually lived in the city. It also allowed us to get in some good hiking, since the city is quite hilly...down to the Ribeira in the morning was no problem, but back up to the hotel after drinking port all day with a stomach full of tripas a moda do Porto was not as much fun (we actually took a taxi on one occasion). After touring some churches, on the way down to the Ribeira, we stopped at a small restaurant along the river and though we weren't terribly hungry, we couldn't resist some octopus salad and grilled sardines. We then wandered across the river, which actually is the city of Gaia, to visit one of the port caves. We stopped at the first one over the bridge, Calem, and were given a tour where we learned how port was made, how to differentiate between the types of port and were then given some free samples, meant to soften us up so we'd take a few cases home. The tour and the samplings were a bit meager and we later learned that the better tours (and samples) were at the caves further from the river, where they actually made and stored the port on site. On our last day we went to the Croft cave, higher up the hill, and had a much better experience. On our second day we tried to find a beach where we could just sit and relax, but weather and our friend's directions conspired against us. We eventually found a beach (not the nicest since just north of it was a chemical plant of some sort) but it was very windy so we just decided to walk along the coast. There were several beaches between where we were and the Ribiera so we figured we'd be able to plant ourselves on one of them and get some sun. This nice stroll ended up as a death march, with me getting terribly sunburned, us not relaxing on the beach, and getting exhausted, hungry, thirsty...and therefore angry. But, it did lead us to a small, confusing, local taverna where we had some interesting food and a wonderful time.

The place was virtually empty and we went up to the counter and tried to order things from the menu. The woman shook her head at everything we wanted and then pointed to the dishes behind the counter. Not knowing what any of them were, we pointed to a couple, ending up with liver and onion sandwiches and bachalau croquettes...both were delicious. We also got a carafe of what the locals were drinking, which turned out to be beer mixed with wine. After the snack, we got a second carafe (this time of fizzy white wine that came out of a tap) and grabbed a table outside. About ten minutes later the place was full of people eating fried bachalau. It was like the entire neighborhood descended on this place at once all knowing precisely when the fish would be ready. After they scarfed down the piles of fish with several glasses of beer and wine, everyone got a bowl of brown sludge. Some little girls we were sharing the table with finished off their sludge in second and though it looked revolting, the smell was amazing and I had Leo order us a bowl. Somehow, he was able to pick up that this was papash, which is a blood and bread pudding. We tried it and it was really, really good (our Portuguese friends in London were shocked that we actually tried it).

We continued our death march and found ourselves at a street fair which we later found out was for the festival of St. Anthony (this festival is very big in Lisbon, but only the small neighborhood we were in in Porto celebrates it as well). There's a trolley that goes along the coast, which cut straight through this fair, so it was amusing to watch people playing foosball on the trolley tracks have to pick up their game and move it to the other tracks to let the trolley pass. We stayed at the fair until pretty late, listening to local bands, drinking beer, eating sausage and having a wonderful time.

Next up...the US of A