Good day. Woke up early, breakfast, little bit of time online, out we go. I slept almost the entire drive and then we came to a farm/winery that a former Hiram student lived on. Spent some time with horses, which I hadn't done in a long time. They produce an absurd amount of body heat. Some were skittish, but most were really friendly, there's some great pictures of them getting really close to people (Swaffy). One tried to eat the strap on my camera case. After that they showed us their wine facility, which they're just getting started. Mosaic, keep an eye out for it in the states in 5 years if we're lucky. We had a taste of Survivor, which was a wine they made of the leftovers at the highest pressing, which should just be crap but actually turned out pretty good. We have a bunch of other wines in water bottles to taste later.

From there we drove into town and ate on the Aegean sea. As Matt put it, it was like home, we were on the water and the meal consisted of only one thing. These fried egg/vegetable/meat/doughy things that were delicious. There was also a sour yogurt drink that very few of us liked, and at the end sage tea that was really good, though Jake's got destroyed by people putting 30 or so sugar cubes into it. I had 4 in mine originally, it went up from there due to others but never got too bad.

We walked a bit, bought some cookies, and then ran into these two guys making a sweet fried dough thing on the street, with a woman standing there. Aysen explained that the woman's father died 40 days earlier, and on the 40th day it's a tradition to give out this sweet bread as a good deed for the family member's soul. So we had some with cinnamon, it was delicious, and thanke them. I like that tradition, I think I'll instate it in the US.

The attitude towards animals on the street seems very different here. People feed them regularly, they look healthy, apparently the gov't sometimes even vaccinates and fixes them, tags them, and then puts them back on the street. The woman, the former Hiram student, I was talking to said it is still viewed as a problem, not so different from the US, but it still looked very different to me.

We walked back and here we are on the bus, ready for a looooong ride to Istanbul.

Friday, March 12th, roughly 2:45-2:50 PM local time