Trabzon elevator

It works simple - if you have a store on the first floor, you can send down a basket with your shopping list and money and the shop assistant will put everything inside. That's what we saw...
The basket came down..

 The man took the money and put the bread in

 And the basket went back=)

One night in Istanbul...

One night in Istanbul we went out for a walk. Alp-Arslan took us to try the famous 'Iskander kebab' which is a pieces of lavash covered with slices of thin meat under amazing tomato souce and yoghurt...

Alp eating=)

Then we went for a walk and suddenly reminded that we wanted to buy a lego for this small boy. It's Onder from Bursa and his son Kutay. Onder helped us very much with the bike and Kutay was around all the time. This boy is crazy about bikes and lego.

So, inside the logo shop there was...yes! You know him, don't you?

And they also built master Yoda's sculpture to balance the forces of Evil and Good.

When we left the shop, we met this strange guy and his dog. He was just driving around on his scooter and trying to attract the girls with his dog. The dog was standing behind him all the time.

Art-market Ortikoy. Part1: cats

We spent several days in Istambul and have got many great memories and good photoes.
Ortikoy is a place in Istambul where the artists sell their pictures and hand-made. It's a nice place for a walk where you can eat local sweets and stare at the shops.
But the first thing to is the cats. Istambul is full of big fat cats, Ortikoy is crowded by them.

some more...

and more...

they are everywhere

sunny jinger cat

People feed them with special potato dish called 'Kumpur'

The cats also have water

At the same time there was a cat-fest with this huge figures

Cats eat here because people feed them. What do the people eat? First of all,  they eat Kumpur - baked potato cut into two pieces and hidden under cut olives, corn, meat, souce and other food. And this is a shop selling local sweet vafels with strawberries, banana, chocolate and cream...

And tea, of course. Everybody drinks tea in Turkey. People make it right on the street, like that

The place is full of hand-made and next post will be about that.

Greek frappe coffee

There is a drink which the Greeks call 'frappe'. If you ask them what's that, they discribe it as cold coffe. Actually, it's made of 4-5 spoons of Nescafe with sugar and coserved milk. They add some water to this mixture and put it into the blender to make a rich thick foam. Then some cubes of ice are added. I think, there's no need to explain why I don't recommend to drink it? If you want to have a claasic americano coffee, ask for 'filtro cofe'. The name for the turkish coffee is 'ellinikos' and it means 'Greek'. They make it with sugar and milk.
This is frappe, for me looks like shampoo in a glass.