To give or not to give... a gift

When I was little, I remember that every year around new year, the national day of teachers and mothers' day the parents' representative of our class was gathering money from our parents to buy gifts to our teacher(s). I remember how irritated our parents were every time they were asked for money. Since we are two sisters, of course, my parents had to pay twice for each occasion. I thought this was something done only in Turkey. God, how wrong I was.. When our daughter began attending daycare, I learned that the same tradition existed also here in Italy. The amount that was asked increased when we changed schools and my daughter began the kindergarten. This year she is in elementary school and we pay even more! I wonder where this thing will lead us to... And you should hear about the presents the parents' representative has got for two of the teachers (thank God that she bought gifts only for two teachers and not all the others). This year the primary teacher is getting a Gucci foulard, and her assistant will get a Gucci silver bracelet. I have never bought any Gucci stuff for myself... Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Gucci, or Prada, or all the other designer stuff. The thing that disturbs me is the extravagance in the gifts. What happened to the good old modesty?

Oh, my son is in daycare by the way, and we never had a parents-teachers meeting for his class, so we do not have a class representative there. Yet, someone has taken the initiative (as always is the case) and has sent out notes to us parents, asking for money to buy gifts for the teachers :-) We have already left the asked amount at the school's secretary since we have no idea who the initiative taker is, and what kind of presents she has in mind....

Do you buy gifts to the teachers of your child? Do you think it is necessary? For me, they are doing their jobs, and are getting paid for that (in our case, getting well paid I presume, since it is a little private school). I do not see why I am forced (not literally, but, hey, the pressure is there; if every other parent has paid, you are also expected to pay) to give/contribute to a present if I really don't feel like it....

Xmas objects everywhere in the living-room

We are ready for Xmas in our house. Last Saturday, December 8th, Iris and I decorated our tree as we do every year exactly on December 8th. It is a holiday here in Italy and it seems to be the right day to begin decorating the house and mounting the tree. I said 'mounting' the tree because some years ago we decided to be environment-friendly and bought a plastic tree which looks quite good in fact. Of course the smell and the real green of a little pine tree is more beautiful but it is a pity to throw it away after the holidays are over. We have tried to plant our trees after the holidays in the past, but none of them survived, so we gave up.

In addition to the tree we have other objects that we take out only at Xmas time. This is our electrical '7-candles light' that we have bought in Norway in 1998. I saw on hedikliev that the same light exists also in Sweden. In Norway they usually place this light in their windows and that was what we used to do in our other house. Unfortunately, in this house we don't have a proper place in the windows so we place it over one of the furniture in our living room.



Over the fireplace and on our coffee table we place different candle holders. The Santa-figured candle holder was a gift from our gasoline station a few years ago. The Santa-hat on the coffee table belongs to Iris.



The candle holder on the left is one of my favorites. It was a gift from a friend of ours some years ago. The snow ball shaped tea-light holder is from Norway, we bought it in 1998. The other tea-light holder below is Swedish and it was a gift from a friend who visited us in 2003. I love these Scandinavian design objects.

As is the tradition Iris has written her wish-list for Santa and placed it over the fireplace. She began writing it in early October and every week one or two new things are added to the list :-) This year she wants objects of Winx Club, different games of Winx, computer of Winx etc. There is a Winx mania in Italy among little girls, and of course, my little one is also a part of it :-) There are some electronic toys, dolls and few innocent stuff like colored pens, a new pencil holder on the list as well. My favorite on the list is: computer come quello della mamma, a computer like my mother's :-) Eh, I know that also the father would love to get a computer like mine (a MacBook Pro), but my little one, I guess you should wait some more years before you can get that wish granted ;-)



Iris likes Xmas and Xmas decorations a lot. She also likes making drawings of the Xmas tree. For now, we have only two drawings in the living room: one over the fireplace and one on the Xmas tree itself :-)



The decorations on our tree increase every year with the edition of new pieces. The two pieces in the photos above were Xmas presents from one of my husband's assistants a couple of years ago.



These two were products of the tiny hands of my Iris. The first one she made in kindergarten, the second one even before, when she was still in daycare.

I think that this is one of the most beautiful decorations we have. It was a gift from my Norwegian professor Trond. He sent it with his Xmas card in 2004, saying that the minute he saw it he thought about Iris :-) The little girl sitting under the tree with black braided hair does look quite much like Iris :-)








These five figures above are my traditional Norwegian Santa Claus, 'nisse' (click the link and read the story of nisse in Wikipedia, really nice), that protect our tree :-) I bought them in 2003 in Bergen at the Christmas Shop, Julehuset, an all-year open traditional Xmas decorations shop, along with some other decorations. One of them was broken, but I didn't have the heart to throw it away, so it has been glued (as can be seen in the photo).

The last important Xmas item in our living-room is the tree mat. When we bought this plastic tree I also looked for a nice tree mat to put under it, but didn't like the items in the market. Hence, I went to a shop that sold beautiful cloths with traditional Xmas figures and bought two different textiles and made my own tree mat using one textile as the border and one as the center piece. I even used an old bed sheet as lining under the mat ;-) I am very happy with the result.

I got tagged

I was tagged by müzi some time ago, only now I have the time to write..

When I was little (ben küçükken) I was a good and silent child, I think :-) I was rather shy, didn't talk much, was mostly interested in my books and school work. When I was in elementary school whenever I had some problem with the kids in my class I called my (younger) sister and asked her to 'fix' the problem. I remember her beating up a couple of kids that were disturbing me :-) I liked being the brain behind the scenes, if you know what I mean ;-) I had a nice name among teachers that I didn't want to destroy ;-)

I am in fact (ben aslinda) still a little bit shy. I thought that I had overcome the shyness during my years in Norway, but every now and then it takes over me, like two days ago, when we were at a Lions Club dinner with my husband, the speaker was bullshitting about the school system in Tuscany, about the rights of the kids, about the number of foreign kids in schools etc and I just didn't have the guts to stand up and say exactly what I mean. Ufff... In fact I am quite good in giving public speeches, making presentations and stuff (so they say), but maybe I was afraid that my Italian was not 'good enough' (my horrible perfectionism!)? I don't know...

The first time I cheated in an exam (ilk kopyam) must be in a history exam in high school. I cannot remember well. I didn't cheat usually. I was the one who was helping others in exams. But in high school I began thinking that memorizing the exact dates of wars and treaties was a waste of time. I preferred solving a few extra maths or physics problems instead. (God, do I sound boring?)

My cellular phone (cep telefonum) is not an elongation of my body, but I do feel a bit irritated when I forget it at home, worrying that they might call from the school of the kids, or my mother may call and I cannot answer back. I do miss the time before any cell phones existed.

My most stupid characteristic (en saçma huyum) must be my perfectionism. I do not only try to do my best in anything and everything I do (from cleaning the house to writing a thesis), but I expect the same attitude also from others! This is wrong. I only disturb myself and nobody else gives a damn.

Love (ask) cannot be explained by words. If you can answer the question "why do you love him/her?", that is not real love, because for loving someone you do not need a reason, you just love. It is love when a smile appears on your face only on hearing his/her name. It is love if you feel a sudden flush of heat in your body on seeing him/her. It is love if you get goose bumps only by a little touch of his/her hands. Although I define myself as a realistic person with feet firmly placed on earth, when it comes to love I think I am an incurable romantic :-)

The blogs that I like the most (en sevdigim bloglar) are the ones that I try to follow and sometimes leave a comment.

I want to tag metin, fulya and alp&ege'nin annesi. If you were tagged before, sorry, I haven't been following the blogs very much lately...

Magical days...

- It is that time of the year again.... We have to be creative! Creative in gift ideas, creative in decorating the tree, creative in finding the right food to prepare... I have a love-and-hate relationship with Christmas. I love to see all the streets with beautiful lights, the shops full of red and green stuff, people walking hastily from shop to shop trying to find that special gift for a loved one.. But I hate that I should sit and be 'creative' again in finding the right gifts for everybody. Tell me, what shall I buy for my in-laws??? What can you buy for people that have everything and that really don't have a special need or a hobby?? My father-in-law likes hunting, cooking and gardening.. Some instruments for gardening: bought, cooking utensils and books: bought, special clothes for hunting: bought already. What is left there to buy? My mother-in-law does not have any hobbies at all, also due to some problems she has she cannot knit or do other handcrafts either. She doesn't cook, it is the father who usually does the cooking. She has only her gym hours, that's all. We have bought things for a nice and comfortable bath, pullovers, candle holders, electronic photo frame (I know, not personal enough the last two). And this year?? I am really out of ideas. Oh, I shouldn't forget that I have also a brother-in-law and his wife to think about... nightmare.... What do you buy for people that you see less than five times a year??

It is very easy to choose for the kids, on the other hand. My daughter has already written her letter to Santa Claus with a loooong list of toys&co. that she would like to receive. My son is too little to even think about gifts but he is crazy for toy cars, so that is easy...

When it comes to my mother, sister and other close relatives from 'my side', I have already found the right gifts, packed them and placed them in my mother's luggage to be taken to Istanbul.

- My daughter told me a few days ago that some kids in her class don't believe in Santa Claus. They have told her that it is the parents that buy all those gifts for their children. She asked me: "But is there really a Santa Claus?". I asked back: "Do you believe in him?". She said: "Yes". "Then Santa Claus really exists", I said. "But then why do those children say that he doesn't exist??". I said: "It must be because they don't believe in magic, but you do, so Santa Claus exists".

- Yesterday morning my daughter lost another tooth. This morning, in the little tooth box that she had put her tooth in and placed under her pillow, she found two 2-euro coins! "It must be because I lost two teeth recently", she said :-) In fact, one of them was from her grandmother and only one was from the little mouse a.k.a. mother ;-) She was so worried that she would lose it on the Christmas night, because what if Santa Claus and the little mouse arrived at the same second and one was afraid of the other and ran away without leaving gifts/money??? :-) Luckily it didn't happen, she was relieved :-)

A fairy-tale from the blog world

Once upon a time in a country far far away there was this 50 year old child. He was bragging about being a communications and public relations expert, but was full of bull. He had this blog where he claimed to be doing a 'service' for the big country that he was living in (which was not his own) because he was bringing people with different views on issues related to that country. He was preaching that freedom of speech was the most important thing on earth, and that country did not give that right to his people. That he was open to different ideas.... Bull, bull, and even more bull... One day one of his co-authors, the one who was always not only cleaning up the mess of his blog and his English, but also editing his articles for online dailies, did the mistake of criticizing him. Oh my God! What a mistake it was! His highness preached about freedom of speech but not everybody was entitled to have that freedom! How could a co-author criticize him??? He was the infallible, the one who was always right, the one who knew everything, the ultimate one. He could easily point out when some person was writing sensational posts in his blog, but when his co-author said the same thing about him he just couldn't take it. He got very pissed off. Began insulting the co-author. Sent threatening short messages to her mobile phone. Left threatening voice-messages claiming that she had blocked him from his own blog!! He was so ignorant that he didn't know that a co-author has no administrative rights on a blog other than posting. In the mean time the co-author did not even respond to his rootless claims and threats. She just canceled her authorship from the blog of that arrogant child and left. The threats lasted two days. After some time the arrogant blog-owner who could not tolerate to be criticized and therefore was spreading nonsense rumors about his co-author, sent a message of apology to the mobile phone of the co-author saying that he was wrong in thinking that she had blocked him from his own blog. She did not respond to that message either. Some weeks passed after these episodes until someone on his blog has asked him what happened to the co-author, why she is not posting any more. And the shameless arrogant child who claimed to be an expert in communications answered, lying: "She could not handle some critics and as a co administrator, before she left, she took all my administrator features away. So I can not change one thing on this blog." Lie no.1: It was not she who couldn't handle critics but him. Lie no. 2: She was not a co-admin but a co-author of that blog. The x-co-author had no idea how the arrogant communications expert had lost his admin privileges on his own blog, all she could do was guess. He was either too high or too drunk to remember what he had done that day and did something wrong while he was playing with the settings of his blog.. She could not believe the ease the 50 year old child was lying about things and spreading lies about someone who had done nothing but helped him in the past (which she regretted dearly). The x-co-author had a clean conscience knowing that her only mistake was having helped someone she did not know well. All she wanted was that her name and e-mail address were removed from the blog of the arrogant 50 year old child....

The lessons we get from this fairy-tale:
- Never help people that you do not very well, on internet.
- Stay away from people who claim to be communication experts. They can be experts in lying.
- Never believe in everything you read in a blog/comments of a blog without questioning the facts it claims to be giving. If these 'facts' are about 'people', ask those 'people' first before making judgments about them. There can be a totally different story behind the so-called facts that are offered to you.

Disclaimer: As the title says this is a fairy tale, told to give some lessons. Any resemblance to actual people or events are only coincidental.

In sickness and health

- I was sick yesterday. So sick that I didn't even get near my computer, think! :-) On Sunday we went out to see the fresh oil from the little producers around our area. There, around the stands, we ate something prepared over the grill. We think that we got poisoned by the things we ate. I spent the whole night between the bedroom and bathroom. Iris was also sick but she survived by not eating anything and my husband managed to go to work although he wasn't feeling well. Luckily my son and my mother didn't eat from the same thing and they were saved. I spent the whole day yesterday in bed. Today I am feeling fine again.

- I need urgent help. I should buy a present for a friend of ours who is celebrating her 40th birthday this weekend. I think that it should be a personal present, but I am having trouble deciding what could be the best thing to buy. Any ideas???

- I added a new link to the blogs that I follow, take a peek: talk turkey.

Halloween; the chocolate shop

Halloween is over. Iris was so excited about Halloween this year. She wanted a witch's outfit, but was content with only a hat & wig :-) For the first time we bought a pumpkin and carved it to put a candle inside and placed it out in our balcony. We did a trial of the outfit and the pumpkin the day before Halloween.



On 31st when we came home from school, she changed in her black clothes, put her wig and the hat, took the broom in her hand and was ready to knock on the door of our downstairs neighbor. Sander was dressed all in red; was the little devil :-) He cleaned the floor of the neighbor's kitchen with his sister's broom :-)



Yesterday I was in a dream shop for all chocolate lovers: Slitti Café, in Monsummano (Pistoia). You enter the shop and begin breathing in coffee and chocolate. They produce different types of chocolate and offer quality coffee. On the walls there were the clips of newspaper articles in different languages about Slitti products. They are world famous. I couldn't help taking a couple of pictures in the shop.



On their coffee stand there was a bag of very particular coffee beans: the kopi luwak, the most expensive coffee in the world. On the information leaflet it said that kopi luwak is the rarest coffee, which originates from the Sumatra island and is produced in very small quantities. It is nothing but coffee berries eaten and passed through the digestive system of a local animal called luwak. This animal goes during the night into the best coffee plantations and feeds on the sweetest and ripest berries selecting them one by one. The gastric juices that favor its digestion create a fermentation process that is absolutely unique for coffee, thus explaining its totally different and original taste. The beans, once swallowed and then expelled by this small marsupial, are collected from earth in these plantations and then disinfected, the coats containing the beans are broken and beans washed, dried and packed into 20 kg bags. The taste of the coffee from these beans is extremely thick, characterized by a flavor of cacao, aromatic herbs and bitter orange marmalade.

After reading this I took a last look at the bag containing the kopi luwak beans, with a price tag of over 600 Euros a kg. I don't think I will be able to taste that coffee, even if it is offered for free....

Traveling again..

We are going to Canada! Me and my husband, alone again, in Canada, meeting our friends and my sister. We always wanted to go there one day, and last year, right after Christmas, we decided that it was enough doing the same things every year: the family lunch, opening the presents, eating until we die... We decided that next year would be different, that we would travel, alone, far... to Canada. During the year there have been some periods that made me think that we wouldn't make this travel after all. But finally, two days ago, we bought our tickets, so it is for real, we are going. We will leave Florence on 23rd of December and will be back home on 3rd of January. I am so excited. It is rather far, we haven't traveled so far since our honeymoon (which was in Mauritius), and I am afraid it will be cold there. But hey, I managed to live for 10 years in Norway, I should be able to survive a mere 10 days in Canada, no? ;-)

Toronto, get ready, here we come :-P

Facebook brings back old memories

Some weeks back I have been introduced to facebook.. I don't even remember by whom, but it became an addiction now. I found so many old friends that I didn't have any contact for many years. I found even two of my elementary school friends G.T. and M.S., and with G.T. we began exchanging messages, talking about our other classmates...

I attended Zühtüpasa Ilkokulu (now the name changed to Zühtüpasa Ilkogretimokulu; before elementary school was for 5 years, now they increased it to 8 years eliminating middle schools which were 3 years and thus making 8 years of education obligatory for everyone, which is a good thing) in Istanbul, from 1975 to 1980. We had a middle aged female teacher Z.S. who was not embarrassed to wash the brains of her little pupils by making them repeat the name of the then prime minister, evidently from her favorite political party. I had come to the conclusion that it was high time she got herself a pair of glasses when, on one occasion in 1975, she asked 'whose mother are you?' to my cousin who was, then, only 12 years old!!! She had her daughter Y. in our school, too, a little, roundish, always-smiling girl. All in all Z.S. was not a bad teacher, but we all hated her when she, in our last year of elementary school, asked for going on retirement, leaving us with a new teacher in the last months of our time in that school.

I don't remember the exact number of pupils in our class, which varied from one year to the next, with some leaving and some others coming in, but it must be a number around 30.. I should admit that I cannot remember all of them. My best friend was E.A., I shared a desk with her. She was a silent girl, rather tall for her age, and I considered her as my little sister since she was only one month older than my real sister (me and my sister have only 11 months difference in age, born in the same calender year actually). She came from a family with three children, with one older sister and a younger brother. Her father was a merchant of fabrics and I remember her mother made for her kids clothes from those fabrics as well... Her father was rather traditional/religious though her mother didn't carry the headscarf. E.A. had quite often ear-infections. She wore glasses. I don't remember which middle/high school she attended after graduation, but I know that she was studying medicine later at the university. We saw each other a couple of times, then lost contact. I had heard that she had begun using a headscarf. I don't know where she is now, or what she is doing, whether she is still 'covered' or not... But I still remember where she lived when we first met, and the apartment they bought years after and moved with her family; I had been invited to both.

Then there was S.Y., one of the two girls that were both called S. (the other one was S.T.; I will come back to her later). S.Y. had beautiful eyes, I remember. She had a little brother which, years later, attended my high-school. S.Y. was sitting at the desk that was orthogonal to mine, on my right hand side (we used to put three desks together, two facing each other, and a third one orthogonal to those on one of their shorter sides thus forming an 'island' with 6 pupils), with the only boy of our 'island' next to her. I considered her a beauty. She had long straight hair, I had short curly. She had colored eyes, I had dark brown. I wore glasses, she didn't. I liked her a lot and thought that if I were a boy, I would choose her as my girlfriend :-) I know that she attended an all girls school after elementary school, as G.T. and S.V. two other girls of our class. S.Y. was studying journalism at the university, if I am not mistaken. Now I have learned from my friend G.T. that she is married and has a family.

S.V. was the only blond of our island. She had long blond hair, light colored eyes (however, I cannot remember the real color of her eyes). She had a younger brother, M. Her father had a patisserie, 'lucky her' I thought ;-) Think that she could eat all the chocolate, the cakes and sweets she wanted, whenever she wanted. I think her father still has that patisserie at the same spot as it was over 30 years ago. They used to live near a pharmacy that my parents took me to get injections whenever they were prescribed by our doctor. Afterwards they bought a new apartment in a tall building nearer to our house. G.T. told me that S.V. is also married now and has a family. I don't know if she is working and what she has studied at the university.

Next to S.V. there sat a tiny girl, S.B., who seemed so thin and delicate that I was afraid she would break if I held her arm. She always spoke with a very low voice, she was very shy. She lived on a street right across the school. If I don't remember wrong there were some issues in her family, and I caught her crying many times. She got sick very easily and was away for long periods due to her sicknesses. I felt like her protector; not that I had done anything for her as a protector, but I felt that she needed protection. I would love to know where she is now, and how her life turned out to be...

The only boy of our island, M., was a silent boy as well. I don't remember much of him, not even his surname...

There was one girl, D.A., very thin, tall, most of the time with short hair, very straight hair. She wasn't in my circle of friends, and I didn't have much to do with her then. But later, after many years our paths crossed in an awkward way.. I knew that she was studying law since my sister had met her many times at the law faculty of Istanbul University. I was seeing her brother H., who was two years older, at my university in Istanbul, and I had heard that he had gone to Norway to study, as I had done a few years later.. During my first year in Norway I met a Turkish guy with whom I shared the kitchen at the dormitory, and I began to be quite fond of him. He wasn't interested in me, but that didn't matter ;-) He was a graduate of Bogaziçi University, my old university in Istanbul, and was studying towards a master's degree in sociology in Bergen. That same year when I went to Istanbul during X-mas vacation I went to visit my friends at my old university, and was sitting at one of the cafes, when this guy entered (not totally unexpected for me because I was hoping to see him there, I knew that it was his favorite cafe) hand-in-hand with D.A.!!! Do I need to try to explain how I felt?? :-) I don't know how but they knew each other and apparently it was more than friendship. I pretended not to see him and not to recognize my classmate from elementary school. After that incident I didn't even think about D.A. let alone ask anything to our 'common' friend about her. This week I learned from G.T. that D.A. had become a very good lawyer, that she has a son and is probably divorced.

D.A. was the best friend of A.E.A., another nice and silent girl in our class. If I am not mistaken she had an older brother, and she had lost her father quite early. I know which high school she attended afterwards, but no more than that...

D.K. was a very cute little girl, with huge, sparkling, dark eyes, and she was ready to smile all the time. She began school with some days' delay because she was visiting her aunt who lived in the USA. Now, that was something, having an aunt in USA :-) She had an older brother, in the same class with the brother of D.A. She wasn't particularly smart, but she was loved, because she was really sweet. Many many years later, when I moved to Florence, I was looking for a translator for my wedding ceremony, and I met a girl at the honorary Turkish counsel's office. After some hours of talking with my new friend we found out that D.K. was her cousin! The world is small, or what! She told me that D.K. didn't study after high school, went through a wrong marriage, divorced, and now is married again with a good guy, and is still in Istanbul.

G.T. was one of the hard-working and silent girls of our class. I remember her always with a smile on her face. I found her on facebook a few days ago, and seeing her pictures I should say that she hasn't changed much. She still has that nice and kind smile. She has become an engineer and is working at the same company for 12 years now. I cannot believe that such an intelligent and nice girl is not married yet. Hey guys, what are you waiting for??? Oh, I know, being nice is out, being a bitch is in nowadays ;-) If you are too good, they don't like you....

M.S. is the cousin of G.T. and he was also in our class. I remember him with his roundish glasses, and I remember his sister, N., who was in my sister's class. Some years ago, during one of my trips to Istanbul, I saw a picture of M.S. next to his article in a newspaper . He has become a journalist, a very successful one. I was so proud to see that a classmate of mine had become a loved figure in Turkey.

Then there was T.G., a not-so-thin boy, with dark hair and dark eyes, one of the most hardworking ones like myself ;-) I felt that there was some kind of a race between the two of us. I was playing mandolin and he was playing the guitar. If he was the class-head, I was the vice-head, or the other way round. I remember him saying 'you are my secretary, since I am the head, you should do as I tell you' :-) His grandmother used to live in an apartment just across ours and when he visited her we went out to the balcony and waved at each other. If I am not mistaken his mother was working and it was usually his grandmother that came to take him from school. Later he also had a sister, E. After elementary school he was also successful in the high-school entrance exams and got in to a French school. I lost track of him afterwards.

I liked a boy more than the others. His name was K., and even though I try hard, I cannot remember his surname. The only think I remember about that boy is that his mother always went around with dark glasses. Rumor said that she had two different colored eyes, one brown and one blue. Isn't it strange that about the person I cared most I remember the least?

G.T. reminded me of a boy named T. I think it was that boy with the open ears and open mouth .. His saliva was running all the time, right G.T??

The last year of school we had a new friend in our class, from Van. He was so different then all the kids that I was used to seeing around me. He seemed so rough, so macho. One day he made me very angry and I cannot remember why, but I was really furious, so furious that I wanted to hit him. But I knew that he was stronger than me, and he was from the east, meaning that most probably he didn't know how to treat girls and could hit me back, so I needed to find a way to hit him and get away with it. When our teacher entered the classroom after the break, everybody sat at their desks and this guy was standing next to the teacher, talking, I just got on to my feet, ran to him, hit him many times on his arms, crying, and went back to my seat. I cannot forget the surprise on the face of our teacher who would never expect anything like that from me, the pupil of her eye, and to tell the truth, neither did I.... :-)

Well, folks, if you also want to dwell in old memories come and join us in facebook. Who knows, maybe we are related, as friends of friends of friends..... ;-)

The 187th page

There is some kind of game going on among the Turkish bloggers... They write about a specific thing, like the cities that they have been to/want to go to/want to live in, or 3 recipes that they have tried, or some other stuff and they call 3 (5) other bloggers which are supposed to write about the same thing. I have been called by Alp&Ege'nin annesi to write what stands on the 187th page of the book that I am reading these days.

I usually read many books in parallel (I am so used to doing parallel computing ;-) ). But right now I only have one book (and many magazines) on the table next to my bed: Leyla'nin Evi (Leyla's House), by Zülfü Livaneli. It is about Istanbul, about three people who do not know each other, whose lives would normally not cross. They belong to different worlds. But something causes them to get involved in each other's lives.. Zülfü Livaneli is one of my favorite authors and I loved this novel, too.

On the 187th page (which I was reading last night, by the way) there is a very short paragraph of three sentences. It finishes as: "Cünkü ne de olsa adab-i muaseret kurallarini bilen koklü bir aileden geliyordu." (I do not translate, sorry)

Other than this book the magazine that is always in my hands nowadays is the 2008 catalog of IKEA, and on its 187th page there are furnitures for children.

Now I want to pass the torch to B5, müzi and archi*sugar.

I am back! (not that I have been gone anywhere, but...)

It has been 4 weeks since my latest post. Well, if you can consider that a post, only two lines where I am sending you to another blog so that you can read something that I had written..

I have been extremely busy these weeks. First of all my little one began going to daycare. He had a period of insertion in the system, where the duration of stay at the school increased day by day and finally since last week he began staying at school from 8:30 in the morning until 16:30, nearly 17:00. He had no problem in going to school, meeting new people, both adults and kids like himself. He is a very independent little boy, just like his sister. No crying when we leave him at school, no crying when he falls while playing... They say that he eats everything (and in abundance) at lunch and snack time. He is a very good boy indeed. He is so sweet that during his first week one of the little girls in his group wanted to 'taste' him, and gave him a big bite on his left cheek! The teachers said that he was left there in awe without knowing what to do. He went around with a round blue mark on his cheek for a week after the incident.

Then, of course, began our sicknesses.. First me, with stomach-aches, sneezes, coughs.. It lasted two weeks. Afterwards it was Sander's turn. Poor him, he had an ear infection, he couldn't go to school for an entire week and had to use antibiotics. Now he seems to be fine.

And last, but not the least, important thing on my agenda was finding a job. I have been searching on the net every single day. I got contacted by two people, who wanted to discuss job opportunities with me. One of them was for a job in Ireland, so I just had to forget about it. But the second one is here in Italy, although it is not in Florence, it is close by. Today I had to do a programming test for this position. It works like this. They send you a problem that needs to be solved algorithmically, and coded, run on the data set that they include in their mail. Then, everything that is produced (i.e. the algorithm, the code and the output) needs to be mailed back to them in 3 hours. Well, when you have only 3 hours you cannot do much. Luckily they didn't expect me to find an optimal algorithm for the problem, but just any solution. I only had time to write the code, compile it and get rid of any compilation errors, and then write my assumptions and sketch the algorithm for the solution. I didn't have enough time to debug the code, which, right now, is not finding a solution to the problem, but with a few hours' work would work just fine. I wonder what they wanted to see with this test... Now the ball is in their hands.. I am waiting for their next step.

I will try to write again here every now and then. By the way, I have already begun writing the rest of our vacation in France, but didn't get the chance to finish it yet.

I am guilty

... of not writing here, on my own blog, but posting over there. Check out my pasta news if you want to see an old photo of mine (from 1999), or this one to learn some maths ;-)

Vacation in France, part 1

On 31st of July we left Florence at 15.00 and went directly to San Remo, a small town by the sea (famous for the national music festival that takes place every year in March if I am not mistaken) near the French border. Since we arrived at 20.00 after two episodes of Sander vomiting in the car (only a few hundreds of meters away from our friends' house) we couldn't see the town center but watched the beautiful sea from the terrace of the house instead. The house was quite strange, built on a hill right by the sea, with many levels and stairs everywhere inside and outside. The rooms were maybe biggish but fitted on a strange plan, the workmanship not good, kitchen too little for the size of the house etc. Anyway, the view of the terrace was beautiful, and we were there only for the night, with no intention of buying the house ;-)

Before I tell about our next day I should mention one of the dishes that was served by our friends that night: raw tuna fish. I was skeptical at first but then I thought about sushi and said 'why not'. It was delicious and very easy to prepare (I prepared it for the first time two days ago).


Raw tuna fish
Cut the fish in (roughly) 3 mm thick squares of 3 cm long edges. Then place the fish pieces in very salty water, salty like the sea-water, for about 15-20 minutes. Afterwards take the pieces out of the water and let all the water run out. Season with extra virgin olive oil only (no lemon juice!). The fish prepared this way is to be served with freshly diced tomatoes and basil. Absolutely finger-licking delicious :-)

☀☀☀

OK, going back to our trip. On the morning of 1st of August we woke up, got ready, had a cup of coffee and some cookies, thanked for the hospitality of our friends and set out for France. We tried to choose the less curvy roads on the navigator so that the little one didn't vomit and the mother (that would be me) didn't get all dizzy and sick in the stomach, but my husband also bought some anti-seasickness chewing gum and syrup 'just in case' (which proved to be very helpful all through the vacation, in fact).

Our first stop was Monte Carlo. If you are traveling to France from Italy following the sea you cannot (and should not) avoid a stop in Monte Carlo. When you enter the city you begin breathing in 'money'. The luxury cars, the buildings, casino signs here and there... You also get the feeling that the space is scarce seeing all the tall buildings glued to each other, parking places all underground, streets quite narrow.. Then you slowly swirl down the hill following the Formula 1 tracks. I felt like I was in the Monte Carlo car race simulator when I recognized most of the streets, the buildings, the tunnels.. While I was turning my head continuously to the right and left trying not to miss anything I noticed that I had lost the chance of taking the picture of the famous casino building :-( But then we were already in the harbor area and we decided to park the car so that we could take a walk and get a bite; it was already noon and we had two hungry monsters in the back.



The boats, well yachts (or 'floating villas' might be the right description of what we saw), in the harbor were amazing.. We even witnessed some rich guy being delivered his new yacht. Not that we want a floating skyscraper, but an 11ft sailboat wouldn't be bad to own one day ;-) Anyway, dreams aside, Monte Carlo is a beautiful rich city, a vision to the eyes, a nightmare for your pocket.. We sat at a cafe in the harbor area, ordered a toast, a crepe and a hot-dog (see the size of that hot-dog in the photo below!) and some things to drink, ending up paying as if we had eaten at a restaurant in Italy. The parking bill was of the same caliber as well. So, we ran out of Monte Carlo before finishing all our money in the first 48 hours of our vacation and got back to France.



Our target for the day was Grasse. We decided not to take the highway so that we can see around, hence we took the road that runs parallel to the sea line. The next city on our route was Nice. When we entered the city from the suburbs I was shocked, to tell the truth. It was far from my imaginations... no different than the suburbs of any other big city, lots of road work here and there, a lot of foreigners, quite ordinary architecture... We rushed through Nice without getting out of the car, but of course we went all the way to the esplanade, driving slowly, watched the beautiful buildings, the beaches, the prestigious hotels, people walking lazily under the sun.



The thing that I began noticing everywhere we went in France was the flowers on and off the streets. There were flowers hanging down light poles, there were flowers in the middle of the large avenues, there were flowers at the intersections.. everywhere... really beautiful.



After Nice we continued on the seaside road and decided to stop at Antibes. It was nothing special. We just went for a walk in the town and by the sea for an hour or so and had to go back to the car and go directly to Grasse since it was already afternoon and we had no place to stay for the night. We drove inland this time and arrived at Grasse, but continued driving in order to find a hotel. After a few inquiries at the hotels we found on the road we chose to stay in St. Vallier, at a little hotel. Our room was on the top floor, with two French beds (my God, how little those beds are). We had to sleep each with one kid that night.

Our day ended at a restaurant, well a small dining place which I wouldn't know how to call, in the village. We took a table outside, under a huge tree and did eat quite well but we were dying of laughter when we were first given the menu. Why? Because there were 'lawyers with shrimp sauce cocktail' and 'ice children' :-) These were the exact words written in the English language menu, believe me! I tried to take the photo of the menu but partly because it was covered with a plastic layer and partly because the waiter took it away from me fast when she noticed what I was doing, that it didn't come out very well. Look below :-)


It turns out that both 'lawyer' and 'avocado' are 'avocat' in French, and whoever had translated the French menu into English must have just gotten the French-English dictionary, looked for 'avocat' and wrote the first word that appeared next to it: lawyer. 'Ice children' was the English for 'ice cream for children' by the way :-)

More about France soon...

The Austrian experience

Finally the vacations are over. I was bored of filling and emptying luggage, doing the laundry and ironing.. :-P
The last leg of our summer vacation was the best. Me and Gabriele had a great time in Austria. Our hotel was in the state of Carinthia, more specifically at Katschberg, in Spittal. It is a little mountain village with a few hotels specialized in summer and winter vacation packages for families with kids. It is a definite paradise for families really. All the hotels have animation for kids during the day and in the evening, plus special menu at their restaurants, family rooms equipped with kitchen stuff to prepare food for babies etc. There are ski-schools and ski-kindergartens for the winter season as well. We are thinking of returning there one winter with our kids.
In addition to all the kid oriented stuff each hotel has some kind of spa, with swimming pools and whirlpools, different kinds of baths, beauty treatments and massages. The weekly package that we have bought included some massages and treatments, too: hot-chocolate massage, classical upper-body massage, 10 minutes of solarium and half an hour in the hay-bed. We did them all and added some others to the list: hot stone massage, lymph drainage, facial treatment and, the best of all, lomi lomi nui. Lomi lomi nui was a great experience that lasted 1,5 hours with Hawaiian music in the background, relaxing smell of the massage oil and the able hands of the masseur. I would definitely recommend it to people that want absolute relaxation.
Apart from spending a lot of time in the swimming pool and the spa (I miss the hammam and sauna, and lying down on the rocking beds in the silent relaxation areas, sipping my green tea and reading a stupid magazine) we went for long walks every day either at Katschberg, on the hills, or nearby locations. It was extremely green everywhere we went. The forests were full of all kinds of berries. I have no idea how much I ate everyday during our walks. I just couldn't help myself from stopping to get nearly each and every berry around the walking tracks.

One day we went to St.Michael, down the ski tracks of Katschberg, a little village with its typical wooden houses all covered with colorful flowers hanging down the balconies. The park in the photo below was in St. Michael.
On a rainy day we went to Spittal, just for an hour or so. On our way to Spittal we stopped at Gmünd to visit a private museum: Porsche Automuseum of Helmut Pfeifhofer. Did you know that although Porsche GmbH was founded in Stuttgart in 1931 it was building cars in Gmünd during the 2° World War and moved back to Stuttgart later in the early 1950s?

We even tried something new in Austria, for the very first time in our lives: golf. There was one hour of free golf lesson at the nearby golf club on our first day and we decided to give it a try. Watch the video below and see how it went for me :-P I did enjoy it, but I should warn you, I couldn't feel my arms that evening. It was tough :-)

It was a wonderful week in Austria. We came to the conclusion that we have to repeat these vacations-for-two whenever we get the chance.. to keep our sanity ;-)

Soon I will write about our 10 days in France. Keep checking this page ;-)

Came back, going again...

I am in between two vacations, again. Came back from France last week Thursday, and leaving for Austria tomorrow. This time alone with my husband. Will be back after a week. I will write all about our vacation in France when the vacations are over, in September that is. In the mean time you can take a look at my first observations about France here. I will be having massages and doing Nordic walking next week :-)

Bye!

On the road again

It is the end of July and here in Italy August is the month of vacation. So, tomorrow we are also leaving for our summer vacation. Target: France. Plan: no plan, as usual. We like just packing our luggage and driving off. The only thing we know about our vacation this year is that tomorrow night we will sleep at a friend's house in San Remo, then on Wednesday we will pass over the border to France. We want to see mainly Provence. We have no idea how long we will be gone, and where we will make our stops. This means that I won't be able to write anything here until September. I will of course have my computer with me, I cannot travel without a computer, badly addicted ;-) Since we are planning to stay at little bed&breakfast hotels or farm houses I don't think we will have much Internet access.

I wish a beautiful vacation to all that are planning to go on vacation. Until September, bye!

Chocolate+Basil=Delicious!

I just have to give you this recipe of a delicious double chocolate cake that I learned and tried out on Sunday. Sunday, around lunch time, I was watching the news on an Italian TV channel and during the news there was a cook that gave the recipe of a cake that was to be cooked in microwave oven. It sounded very interesting because the cooking time was only 8 minutes. I didn't write down the recipe, nor did the cook give a real recipe with measurements of the ingredients. I only watched what he did. When I learned that my in-laws would pay a visit to us later that day, and that it was our wedding anniversary I decided to bake this cake so that we could celebrate our 7 years of marriage with our visitors in the afternoon. I need to warn you: if you are not used to improvising and/or measuring the ingredients 'with your eyes' rather then liters/cups and stuff, don't read it ;-) Oh, one more thing: your microwave oven should have the crisp function. Here it goes:

Put butter and bitter chocolate pieces in a bowl that can go in the microwave and melt at 160 watts for 2 minutes. I didn't have bitter chocolate at home, so I skipped that ingredient. If they do not melt thoroughly in 2 minutes, leave them a bit longer at the same power. In a big bowl whisk (don't use a hand blender) 4 eggs and sugar for about 1 minute. I added about one and a half 'small water glass' of sugar, though I usually use not that much sugar in my cakes I added that extra half a glass since I didn't have the chocolate which would have contributed to the sugar content of the cake. Add in a pinch of salt, baking powder, dark cacao powder, a little bit of all purpose flour and mix well. I used one small water glass of flour. Mix in some milk. I didn't measure my milk, just poured in from the bottle as much as I thought was necessary. Finally add the melted butter and chocolate in the batter. The result will be not thick and not excessively liquid. One important last-minute ingredient: fresh basil leaves. Wash some fresh basil leaves and add the shredded basil into the batter. Grease the crisp tray of your microwave oven and cover it with flour as well. Pour in the batter and bake using the crisp function for 8 minutes. Your cake is ready in circa 15 minutes, preparation time included. You can serve it with whipped cream, or vanilla ice cream, garnished with fresh basil leaves. I am planning to bake it again using bitter chocolate with chilly, mmmmm...

Buon appetito!

An entrepreneur is born

Since yesterday my little daughter decided to earn some money and began working (!). She decided to sell her drawings and paintings :-) Her first exhibition was on the coffee table in our living room. She put little labels on each painting with the price in Euro. Some paintings had two labels with two different prices. We asked her why they had two different prices. 'The buyer can choose which price to pay', was her answer :-) She first forced my mother to buy two paintings. Then my husband bought 5 paintings, so she was very happy. I bought one only, and she gave me another one as gift, since she had to open more space on the table to put more paintings :-) After selling each piece she sat down and 'produced' more to sell. She even 'ordered' one painting to my mother, told her what to paint and where on the paper, and when the work was done she added also that one to her collection on the table with a price tag: 100 Euro! :-) In the afternoon when my in-laws paid a short visit to us they couldn't escape the 'pressure' and bought two paintings, one of which was the one that my mother made (no, they didn't pay 100 Euro, they did a hard bargain and ended up paying a few Euros only). Right now my little one is waiting in the garden, her paintings in her hand, that our neighbor downstairs returns home from her daily jogging tour so that she can sell some paintings also to her.... When we ask her what she will do with all that money she says that she will put some in her bank account, and she will buy ice-cream and frozen yogurt with the rest...

A new blog..

As of today I am the co-author of the blog Internations Musings: Istanbul, Florence and Athens, originally of Hans A.H.C. de Wit, the husband of a dear friend of mine, Ozlem.

For a while I have been editing the postings, correcting a mistake here and there without touching the essence of the posts, nor changing the style. Now I will try to write some stuff also myself every now and then.

Don't forget to check our blog when you have time :-)

Vacation at Giannella

We are back. We came back Saturday around noon after a 2,5 hours drive under the heat.


Vacation was nice, it is always nice. But I cannot say that I could rest much. I had my mother with me, yet she was not much help since she has some problem with one of her knees. She had to sit, put her leg up and put ice on her knee everyday. She couldn't walk much either. Unfortunately this year our apartment was in one of the rear corners of the housing complex, so we had to walk a bit to get to the beach, which, for me, was great. Everyday I had to cook, wash the dishes (by hand), wash some clothes/bed-sheets/towels (by hand), take care of the kids, play with them in the sea, wash them when we returned from the beach, clean the house, tidy the house, shortly do everything that I usually do at home and more (like cleaning the house, or washing the dishes and clothes by hand, that I don't do at home). I was so exhausted at the end of the day that every evening I went to bed around 21.30!!! This means that I didn't manage to keep a diary as I planned to do before traveling. I used my computer only to listen to music, play some DVDs for the kids or transfer the photos from my camera, that's all.



Anyway, let me make a summary of our two weeks down in Giannella (Orbetello). This year we wanted an apartment with garden. They have given us a two bedroom apartment, one room with a double bed, the other one with two single beds and in the living-room a sofa-bed for two. So we had more than enough place to sleep. The living-room was spacious with a kitchen-corner and a big dining-table. The garden was quite big, with huge pine trees, and a big charcoal grill. There were porches both on the front and back part of the apartment and we used the table out in the back porch for dining instead of eating inside.



The housing complex is only a few meters away from the sea, separated from the sea by a road. The beach is quite large and sandy, a dream for all the mothers of little kids :-) My children were making sand castles, opening wells, lying down and rolling around on the beach non-stop, when I managed to take them out of the water, that is ;-)


The second week also my in-laws rented an apartment there and we were at the beach all together everyday. I don't know if this was good or bad for me.. I had a bit more time for myself, for lying down under the sun and reading my magazines since they helped me take care of the kids, but the kids became more spoiled and unmanageable as a result of their presence, as is the case most of time when the grandparents are around.

All in all it was a nice change for us, we all got a nice tan and had fun for two weeks.

Now about Giannella and surroundings. Giannella is a fraction of Orbetello, a town in the province of Grosseto in Tuscany. Orbetello is situated on a tongue of land projecting westward into a lagoon which is enclosed on the west and south by two long narrow sandy spits, and on the seaward (southwest) side by the peninsula of Monte Argentario. One of these long and narrow sandy spits is Giannella. On one side of the land you find the salty lagoon, on the other side the sea and in the middle of the two there is the road that connects mainland to the peninsula of Mount Argentario. The sea has a fine sandy base, always crystal clear (you see the little fish and crabs practically on the shore) and quite shallow, so it is a paradise for families with little children (that is one of the main reasons I chose this place for our vacation). Giannella is situated at the mid-point of Orbetello and Porto Santo Stefano, an old little fishing center now an important vacation point and the port from which you can take ferries to the Giglio and Giannutri islands. Another little port in the peninsula of Mt. Argentario is Porto Ercole, a charming fishing and holiday site. All of these beautiful places are located in the southern coastal part of Tuscany called Maremma.


I would recommend the coast of Tuscany for your summer vacations. We prefer this coast to the Adriatic coast of Italy mainly because it is less crowded, the coastline is beautiful with rocky and sandy beaches addressing different tastes, there are pine tree forests combining the freshness of the blue with the relaxing effect of green.... Quite a poetic scenery indeed...

PS. I began writing this post yesterday morning and can finish only now. It is really difficult to find time for myself with two monsters around me the whole day. You bet I am looking forward to September when both of them will be at school the whole day ;-)