Random Thoughts

We went to the neighborhood bazaar on Thursday (okay, actually I'm going to start calling it the "pazar" because that's really how it's pronounced and spelled in Turkish). Eh hem...so as I was saying we went to the pazar this week and came home with this: Does that look like an abundance of fruits and vegetables to anyone else?!?!? We didn't buy that much because we're crazy health nuts. We're not on a cleansing diet (although we could stand to be) and we aren't hosting an army any time soon! The reason we came home with that much is because we still can't quite picture in our heads what a KILO looks like. For 29 years I've been working in pounds, ounces, cups, tablespoons, etc. and I can roughly judge what that looks like (a pound of apples...I can see it now). But when I say in my best Turkish to the lovely vegetable seller "a kilo of broccoli please"...I still really have no idea what he's going to hand back to me. Maybe I'll just take this picture with me the next time as a reminder.

President Obama is in our neck of the woods this week. And by "our neck of the woods" I mean OUR NECK OF THE WOODS. He will be speaking at the Parliment which is maybe 5 miles (or should I say 8.045 kilometers :) from our apartment. Today, as we were driving on a very popular street, we were stopped so that a very expensive car could pull out of a restaurant. We then saw (what appeared to be) two secret service guys jump in and the car joined the rest of the 5 vehicle motorcade. There were 3 black mercedes vans with very very tinted windows. I started to wonder if it wasn't the President. But then I remembered that the restaurant they were pulling out of was the Soup restaurant (yes, there are restaurants just for soup here). Certainly the President wouldn't brave the public just for some soup, right?