Feast Week

I hope everyone back home had a good Thanksgiving with lots of food. Although we aren’t celebrating here till next Saturday the 2^nd of December, this week has been full of feasts. Wednesday I made a three dish meal and desert for Artemis’s Cypriot friends that were here. As always it was a great deal of work, but enjoyable to see the girls eating and liking eggplant even though Artemis said the girls wouldn’t eat eggplant.

Thursday I went to Delphine’s place for a French dinner. We made Quiche, a regional dish with squash and a custard desert. It was simple and good, plus a nice change of company.

Friday Dave’s girlfriend Güliz had us over for a party that included both Turkish dinner and deserts, and as if that wasn’t enough her German roommate made some German dishes and Gluehwein. In addition to the roommate there were three other German’s there, so we struck up conversation in German. Good practice since I haven’t spoken much since Darmstadt.

Saturday was a day off from eating almost literally. Pambos and I went for a nice walk in the center with some others. Torino’s center is a magical place at night, and on the weekends it comes alive with additional activity. The main shopping streets are open and lit up in a different way all of the time. I don’t have many pictures at the moment, but I do have the entire fairy tale from Via Garibaldi in photo format. If you fancy viewing it or trying to read the Italian you can download the three .zip files from here in the Torino folder. I then went and watch Inside Man with Irene, aka Bunny, and her friends.

Side note: So I may or may not have mentioned Irene as Bunny before. Irene is a very common name in Greece, and like in the U.S. they use nick names. Little Bunny happens to be the translation of red haired Irene’s last name, Lagoudakou. Thus we call her Bunny and her little sister Katerina Bunny Jr.

Today marked the beginning of a change of pace for me. I actually managed to study for several hours straight today, and I was getting into it for a change. Hopefully I can keep up the motivation throughout the rest of the week. I would say the rest of my time here, but I’m not going to fool myself, little steps. In celebration for a productive day I went to Caglar’s Turkish party downstairs. When Caglar says she will cook or bake no one turns on offer down. I don’t know how the Turkish girls do it, but they had an unbelievable variety of food, and everything was hand made. Then after eating the girls started dancing to Turkish music. It was a food and entertainment evening for the guys. We didn’t have to do anything and reaped all the benefits. Eventually we joined them on the dance floor, but most of us need some prodding from the girls first.

I have been leaving my camera behind unlike Germany, and thus need to collect photos from everyone else. With the amount of pictures and movies taken at all the parties I really should have bought the 4 GB memory stick before coming here. The number of transfers required with my little 256 MB stick will be tiring. I have tried using a crossover cable, but it is difficult to configure everyone’s computer in different languages to work with computer to computer sharing. I will get on it though. Maybe I’ll just go around with DVDs and burn them all at the end.