Mall fun

I definitely need to get around to making that blog about the mall, haha!
We went on a quick trip there recently and I'm a sucker for journals that I bought this neat one that has snippets of maps on it!
No idea what I'm going to use it for though, as always seems to happen.
I also bought some oil pastels! I think this is really my first time using them and they're pretty cool. I like how you can lay down layers with them and they can be very vibrant. All I've decently so far is a pear and a tree, but I'm excited to try more. I wish it came with more colors though that could be more easily blended.

Fun!

Excuse the orientation.

I also bought this neat food magazine!

Check out that fig!

I need to go through it again, but I'm a little sad because I don't see figs at the market anymore so I can't make any neat things with them now.
But I plan to go through it and check out some of the recipes and learn some new Turkish!

The Rain Arrives!

But it doesn't stick around for very long. It rained here this past weekend. It was very nice!

I sat outside to enjoy the weather (this was before the rain) and try and snap some pictures of the birds. 

I've become good friends with Reader's Digest.

I'm looking forward to more nice weather like this.

In other good news, our package arrived! It had a wig and a book on paper quilling, but most importantly, it had needles for my needle felting!

I quickly made this little pumpkin to celebrate and prepare for Autumn. 

I need more orange!

I can tell I'm going to need more roving already, but I'm glad to finally be able to do this even if it is silly little things. My owl didn't turn out so great, but it's good practice. I'm mentally thinking of what colors I'm going to need soon.

The Farm on the Mountain

Travel entry from other blog.

 2/2

I'm extremely late in posting about this and I can't find the information I'm looking for, so I have to reference my last post about the restaurant. The mountain where this farm is nearby that restaurant, and a long journey upwards. While we were at the restaurant, I told my husband about how it was a dream of mine to travel up a mountain (though I've done this before so I'm not sure why I'm still dreaming, wake up now). Now we were told that we were going to go to a cherry/honey farm before we even left for the trip, but I had no idea it was going to be so far up a mountain. So in a way, my dream to travel up a mountain was again fulfilled that day (specifically, I mean by foot, true roughing it!).

So as we're driving up this mountain, it's not too bad. The roads are dirt, but fairly wide and long enough that we're not making turn after turn after turn. Well, after a few minutes, it did started doing just that. I wasn't terribly scared of falling over because there were trees (even if they were small) on the side, separating us from the doom of falling, and because we weren't really moving all that quickly.

One of the wider roads.

Finally, we arrive at the cherry farm. It's quaint, has plenty of trees (among other produce), and is run by a family. They are very kind and accommodating, allowing us to pick cherries from the trees to eat there.

 

Immediately, I thought of George Washington.

 

Peek-a-boo!

 

Cheesy cherry smile?

 

Other part of the farm with awesome mountain view.

 On the other side of the cherry trees, opposite the vegetables, there are beehives in boxes. Not put into the boxes, but built inside them. In the United States, I've only ever seen willing bee handlers handle the bees by putting on a white puffy suit with a mask set far from the face. Not here! One member of the family comes over, opens one of the boxes and pulls out a sheet of honeycomb. He blows some of the bees off and begins cutting a slice of the honeycomb. As he cuts it and hands it to people, he's plucking off leftover bees and it's really pretty amusing.
 

Boxes of bees and honey!

The bee whisperer.

 

He's basically a human honey badger.

The honey was delicious of course. It was a hot day and I imagine that the heat had something to do with how runny the honey was, but that made it more tasty really. Sadly, no pictures of anyone partaking. I apparently wanted to save some for later because I got some in my hair also. No worries, it washed out just fine.

After our little farm visiting adventure, we headed back down the mountain. The view was just as spectacular going down the mountain as it was going up. We were actually on the other side of the mountain and got to see a sliver of ice still there, higher up and stuck between crevices of the mountainside.

 

If you look right in the middle and shift your view right a bit, you can see the white of the ice.

 We reached the bottom of the mountain safely and I captured a crooked photo of the town we went into when we left the mountain.

It almost looks like we're going up, but really we were headed down.

 Again, a very fun trip! I think I've heard that September/October is the time for honey harvesting so we're looking forward to that!

A trip to Saklibahce

We did this trip a few months ago and I had it published on another blog.
After some consideration, I decided to do away with that blog and instead post travel things here.
So here it is!
Part 1/2.
----

So to escape some of this intense heat, we decided to take a trip to Saklıbahçe.
Saklıbahçe is a quaint, but not so little restaurant near the city, Çıftehan, in the Niğde provence of Turkey.

The trip there was peaceful and despite the fact that I brought books to read and a doodling pad, I was content to just stare out the window at the scenery.

Mountains in the distance.

Cool bridge.

My husband, on the other hand, had some serious Pokemon battles to wage.

Slacker.

After a nice ride, we arrived at the restaurant. I hadn't seen any pictures of the establishment so I had no idea what to expect and for the longest while, thought Saklibahce was the name of the area. This restaurant does indeed look small at first, sitting on the side of a busy mountain road. When we first arrived, I thought maybe we were at a rest stop, but its meek outward appearance was nothing to judge it by. After walking down three flights of metal stairs on the side of the building, we were surrounded by its quaintness.

There was a varied style of seating.

These tables are set in a stream of sorts so you can have cool mountain water running over your feet while you dine.

A very cute enclosed and seat cushion style of seating.

A more open, but romantically secluded style of seating. Also note the chicken.

The biggest style of seating, which we chose. Check out that nice water piece!

If you haven't guessed it yet, water is a big feature of this restaurant. Next to where we sat was this boxed structure with water flowing into it.

Check out the fish!

Look, ducks!

So right away, we were pretty enthralled with the scenery. There were other seating areas and fountains and even a pretty nice playground in the middle of it all.

Environment aside, the food was also pretty spectacular. The menu is pretty simple, but that definitely doesn't take away from the quality of the food. To start, we were given plates of salad, a plate of spicy sauce, and a basket of bread.

No wonder the tables are huge!

After munching on that for awhile, another plate with rice and french fries came.

We couldn't wait.

It wasn't too long after that our main dishes arrived.

Balık Izgara - Grilled Fish.

Et Izgara - Grilled Meat (in this case, lamb)

I love how they cook food here. It's always so flavorful and you can really tell it was actually grilled. This restaurant's food was no exception. Both the fish and the lamb were great, and the whole meal was definitely more than enough to fill us up. We also got a plate of cherries and (I believe) apricots. Also tasty beverages!

This drink was sweet, but light and very fizzy!

This is definitely a place we want to visit again and I'm especially interested to see how it looks when the weather gets chilly!

All photos were taken with an iPhone  4s.

Baklava, the magical fruit

Okay, so it's very much not fruit. Not at all. But it is delicious!
I've never really cared for baklava. The few times I tried it back in the States, I just wasn't really impressed with it and thought it wasn't a dessert for me. But little did I know the many variations of it. And further did I not know just how delicious Turkey can make it!

My first encounter with baklava here was at a bakery nearby. Some friends wanted to stop by and get some things so I tagged along. At this point I had no idea how delicious Turkish baklava was so I didn't get any.... Sad.

I had my first bite of this awesome dessert on a trip back from Tarsus. Our guide knew a good place for ice cream so we stopped there and got ice cream and free samples of baklava, fresh! Wikipedia tells me this is usually eaten cold or at room-temperature, but eating it while it was still warm from the oven got me hooked and I'd gladly eat it this way if no other way was available.

My second go around with the dessert was at a carpet where a whole tray was set out. I'm pretty sure I ate the most baklava out of every one there (not combined, jeeze!). This only confirmed my first impression. This baklava is delicious. It wasn't simply a good recipe from that particular store good, but Turkey has the whole recipe figured out and it's great.

So finally! After many trips to the mall and telling myself that I should get some baklava because I know I want, I got some!

Yarım kilo cevizi baklava. (Half a kilo of walnut baklava.)

It's taken a bit of restraint, but I've only eaten 4 pieces so far today. I think that's good.

It looks like a little sandwich.

A glimpse of video workings

I've been trying to stay on top of updating things regularly, my Youtube channel especially. While it's relatively easy for me to blog about things because they can be mundane, I feel like my Youtube videos are better off not containing the mundane things I would put here (oops). I'm sure they're still kind of boring in their own way, but I know the only way to get better is to keep trying, haha!
But I was lucky enough to be presented with good material to video. One of my husband's gifts for me for our anniversary was one of those Japanese Kracie Donut Making kits. We've gotten other kits, like hamburger, and candy sushi, but done them in private really. So for this and since he got specifically for me to enjoy, I decided to make a video of it.
I haven't finished the editing for it yet, but here's a picture of the finished products (and some mess).

Mmm donuts~

Our first plant!

One task that's been particularly difficult to achieve is growing a house plant here. Mostly because we're new and don't know where to look for such things. I've got my Amazon wishlist full of seeds and planters and kits, but then not knowing where to obtain soil, there they have remained. I saw a few plants during our first visit to the Sunday market, but a lack of cash and general wariness about them prevented me from getting them. But I think it turned out well because we finally went to the mall! I'll talk more about the mall in a later post (I want to get more pictures), but there's a store there that has some nice plants. We chose the one below!

It's growing up so fast!

I also have no idea what kind of plant it is, but it was healthy looking and a nice size to put on the shelf. I think for our next trip though, we need to get bigger pot and some soil as it seems to be growing well and I'm sure would appreciate the extra grow room.

Since Autumn is soon I'm not so gung ho about getting things to grow, but I wonder what kind of plants they'll have around here if so!

Hair stylin~

I've never really been particularly interested in hairstyles other than what my hair will look like after a cut and without styling, but because my hair is getting pretty long now I've become more interested.
I tried out this style because it seemed easy enough. Just put a headband on and start tucking hair. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, but it looked great once I got the hang of it!

The front looked a lot better than the back.

I'm looking forward to trying out more styles and also to checking out wigs to give myself more of a "full head of hair" look. So much so that my Amazon wishlist has about 10 or so wigs in it (all but 1 under $10 too).
I'm also hoping that I get the hang of it and it opens me up to cosplaying as well!

A turkey among the flowers

The conversation was favorite flowers. My husband had forgotten mine and he tried to trick me into thinking he had a favorite, but I knew he didn't. Then we just started talking about flowers and which ones he liked. I forgot the name of the ones he was talking about. Now I only remember the turkey.

Which one of these is not like the others!