Monday, April 6, 2009

Breakfast Included - by Christopher



I don't think I've traveled around the USA enough to know if breakfast is typically included in the cost of a hotel room or not.

Also, the times I have traveled around the US, I've probably slept through most of the 'free breakfast' windows of opportunity.

If you write and tell me that I have been sleeping through free breakfast in America, my next thing would be to wonder if I've been missing the kind of great quality breakfasts that Sarah won't let me sleep through over here.

The selection is basically the same stuff everywhere; some bread, various jams, jellies and chocolate peanut butter spread (my favorite), some hard-boiled eggs, some delicious fresh tomato slices, maybe a little fruit sometimes, maybe a little cereal sometimes, stinky cheese and limp cold cuts (I never touch these).

My favorite part beside the chocolate peanut butter spread is the hard-boiled egg. I usually have at least two every morning, sometimes three if I'm feeling like I really need the protein that day. Some places even have the little "hard-boiled egg holder plate" (I don't know what to call it). I really like this thing because it is built with its own hard-boiled egg compartment. You just place the egg in the little compartment and it makes it so much easier to peel the shell off.

My method of eating a hard-boiled egg really annoys Sarah. Sarah eats her meals at least twice as fast as I do. So her method of eating a hard-boiled egg is to cut the whole thing in half with her butter knife and then spoon it out of the shell. My method is to meticulously peel off each and every little fragment of shell, and to pop the whole egg in my mouth.

When I have tried to use Sarah's method, I usually end up getting little bits of shell in my mouth. I cannot stand this for some reason. She has assured me several times that there's nothing wrong with eating a little bit of the shell. But I just keep thinking, "I can't eat the shell, it's bad." I wonder if my parents remember any episode from my childhood that might explain this irrational aversion to eating even the tiniest piece of eggshell.

Some mornings I still have trouble getting up for the free breakfast, even though I am completely in love with the free breakfast. I have to lay there and imagine the feeling of satisfaction I'll have when I peel off that last little bit of shell - the egg naked and unblemished in my palm - and the wonderful glop glop glop of chewing the whole egg up in one big mouthful. This helps me to throw the covers off and get dressed. Then I am really ready for my free breakfast, man.

But sometimes I wake up and I'm lying in bed and it's dark out. I look at the clock and it's maybe 2 in the morning. And the dream I just had was so realistic that I lie in bed for the next thirty minutes with my stomach rumbling, thinking that all I want to do right then is eat a hard-boiled egg. Then I feel unsettled, because I don't have a hard-boiled egg to eat. Because I'm laying in my hotel bed in the middle of the night.

So I end up laying there in the quiet darkness, wondering if there are free breakfasts in the USA. And I wonder if I've slept through dozens and dozens of free breakfast opportunities in my travels through the states.

And then, later, I spin the whole thing out into a 600 word blog post.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

One ferry ride later...

Our time in Turkey is over.

We have moved on to Greece. Internet access on the island is touchy so we might be in and out of contact for the next few days. Just know we are very happy and very healthy and glad to be in a new country!

Here is the wrap-up on Antalya, Turkey.

It was weird leaving Turkey, but we are ready for the next part of this adventure.

Daily Videos

Thursday April 2

Friday April 3

Photos

Thursday April 2

Friday April 3

Thursday, April 2, 2009

European Tour Day 4 - by Christopher

(We shot some great photos, so don't miss the link at the bottom of the post to the Picasa web album of our shots.)

April 1st makes my 4th day of laying low in Antalya. We've entrenched ourselves in a tourist trap, but during the off season. So the costs are low and the crowd is thin.



Most of the whiteys we've seen are of the German or Swiss persuasion. When we passed by the shops the hawkers were more likey to yell at us in German than in English. Which made it nice and easy to shuffle obliviously past them.

We spent most of the day walking around the city. The sun was out all day and the foot traffic was minimal, so it felt like we had the place to ourselves.

We purchased some decent, name-brand sunscreen. We discovered the hard way that the cheap stuff we bought the other day couldn't keep us from being sunburned by a flashlight at extremely long-range. I think it's just a bottle of some weird food condiment.

So now that we're both lobsters we invested in an bottle of something with English writing on it. Better later than never. We're eager to get back to the beach after we heal.

We took a trip to the local museum, only to discover that the entry fee was more than we wanted to pay. But we managed to eat a great slice of cake on the walk there and we discovered a restaurant with a gorgeous view of the Mediterranean on our walk back; nice bonuses.





In Ankara if you decided to walk to the grocery store and it was closed when you arrived the only 'bonuses' would have been that you managed to avoid being hit by a taxi on the walk there and discovered an especially depressing view of the landfill on the walk back.

Fresh as this memory is in my mind, it's hard not to feel mightily pleased with our upgrade in environment.

Also, Turkish advertising never stops being awesomely bizarre no matter where you are in Turkey:



Um, what are you selling me here? A family of badly injured mannequins with two decapitated uncles? Maybe the various styles and colors of injury care products are on offer here. But I have to think that if I was one of the rare passers-by who was currently on the market for a 'crotch sling' or whatever those weird shorts are, I might feel a little overwhelmed by such a wide array of unrelated and disturbing products.

Not to mention how mismatched the wheelchair is to the toddler inside of it. I understand buying for the future, and I'll grant them that she will grow into eventually. I just can't tell if the ad is cautioning me that, "our shop doesn't stock children's wheelchairs," or proudly asserting that "our shop specializes in novelty clown wheelchairs."

Hit the link for photos and videos of us tooling around town, including me shirtless. Selling point or scare tactic? You decide.

Tuesday and Wednesday in Antalya

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Taking it Easy(er)

Happy April 1!!

Chris and I took a break from our break yesterday. We've been working hard and have felt undue stress for 8 months now, so we're doing our best to ease in to this thing called vacation.

We took a stroll through the beautiful park here.




This is the view from our table at lunch.



Then we did some more strolling outside the old city wall.

This is the gate that divides the old city from the new city. It's called Hadrian's Gate and was built in 130 A.D.



We ran into a fruit market, a grocery store, and several kebab shops (which Chris now avoids thanks to the parasite of '08.)

All in all it was a pretty laid-back day.

We had intended to go to the beach again, but since the sun screen we bought the day prior turned out to be milk, we opted to stay off the beach for awhile.

So we just strolled back to the hotel ate dinner, and went to bed. All in a day's total lack of work.




Daily Videos

Just chillin'