It started out on Tuesday with an early stinky-fish day (when the stinky fish man comes to the house with a box of fish for good boys and girls).

That's Noel picking bones out of the whitefish.

For Wednesday we made Noel's potato gratin. The secret is you deep-fry the potatoes first.

For Thursday I made two pies:

Apple crumb, and

*yawn* pumpkin. The pumpkin was by request; I rarely make it because I find it boring. Though I did get a recipe the day after Thanksgiving for a pumpkin pie with a pecan-pie topping which sounded much more interesting. I also hardly ever make pecan pie because it is so sweet.

The crust decorations are little crust cutters from Williams-Sonoma. The set has a leaf, an acorn, a pumpkin, and a turkey.

The fancy cutouts require a bit more attention lest they burn, but I think they made the pies look very fancy. And the chasm in the pumpkin pie was easily hidden with whipped cream.

And I have genetics that reach into central Asia, which is where the banks have limited matches and are always looking for more. Maybe I could say I joined the registry because they needed me.

But I really did it for selfish reasons. I'll never meet anybody who gets my liver, or my heart, or my corneas with their superhuman vision. But if you donate marrow, you might get to meet the recipients. You might get to meet their families. They will have your blood inside them (their blood changes to your blood type!).

I hope I never need to go to the marrow registry. But I also hope that the swabs I sent in last week are a match for somebody, and I can help save a life.

(And yes, I do give blood, but that's a totally selfless donation. I wanted to do something a little more selfish, too.)

This is the first of the pair. I used the toe I like most, which turns out to not work so well with a Turkish sock design. The central motif (that looks like a weird spider; I have the sock tipped over so you can also see the side pattern) is called pervane, which means a moth that flies towards light. The word for a wool moth is actually something else entirely, which should tell you something about Turks.

The side pattern is a pair of variations on themes and ideas that come up often in Turkish sock knitting, though actually the curved lines I put into this design are rare. I was happy to start reading Betty Harrell's excellent (and again, out of print) Anatolian Knitting Designs, which is written by somebody who both spoke Turkish and spoke directly to the knitters. She also concentrated on one specific cultural group, Sivas women in an Istanbul shantytown, so in her book the same pattern does not have eighteen different names. When I make a scan of the appropriate page, I can also show you what the actual elma -- apple -- pattern looks like.

That book has a lot more detail on the development of patterns and how they go together on the sock. I'm nowhere near as relaxed about perfection as the villagers are, though, so I spent a week fiddling with the details of my design in Photoshop, making a perfect chart and resolving all the weird intersections of patterns. Definitely a first-world problem.

Anyway, in a couple of days of knitting I've gotten halfway up the foot on the first sock, and things are moving along rapidly. I've also learned why Turkish socks are structured the way they are. The common square Turkish toe, made from a strip of fabric knitted up and then stitches picked up to add two more sides works well with the usual structure of a front, side, and back pattern that each end up on their own needle.

My next challenge is to learn how to spin the proper yarn for socks, which turns out to also be the proper yarn for knotted-pile rugs, as they used the same stuff.

Noel and I take a weekly Turkish class, and I often have knitting with me to work on until class starts (at which point both brain and hands are actively engaged in the class). Anyway, we got onto the subject of Turkish socks, which are sort of notorious there in the same way that those foam cheese heads are famous here. Our teacher said, "we call them baklava socks."

And then it clicked for me. I have Anna Zilboorg's very fine book Simply Socks (also published as Fancy Feet). In it there is a pattern that confused me, because it is called "apple," but it looks absolutely nothing like an apple.

Look:

That's a photo of one of a pair of lovely socks knitted by Flickr user hiddimaus, and that big central diamond pattern there is the "apple" pattern. (The Ravelry project page for these socks is here.)

Now, Turks know their apples.

This is Noel next to one of many many enormous piles of apples we saw while driving around in the countryside. No Turkish peasant would be at all confused about what an apple looks like. And other patterns that are meant to look like things like dogs or knives or mustaches actually kind of look like the thing in question. So why is the pattern called "apple" when it so obviously is not an apple?

As it happens, a native speaker of English (and most other European languages) may not know that in Turkish, you pluralize words by adding "-lar" or "-ler" (depending on the rules of vowel harmony that don't matter much right now), rather than by adding an "s" as we do. And for reasons that can only be full understood if you grow up with a Turk, there are a lot of words that look and sound similar that mean totally different things. So if a native English speaker looks up the word "elmas" in the translating dictionary, they are likely to stop at "elma" which means "apple," assuming the "s" just makes it plural, rather than continuing down to "elmas" which means, of all things, "diamond."

The pattern is a diamond. Elma means apple, elmalar means apples, and elmas means diamond (elmaslar means diamonds).

This is what can happen when you translate blindly with a dictionary.

After all, we can always lose a couple days in New York. Even if it is a heat wave and the temperatures are ridiculous, and the hotel screws up our (prepaid!) booking and moves us across town for the first night of our stay, requiring us to haul our luggage all over Manhattan every day we were there.

We had a bunch of drink vouchers for United that were about to expire, so on the flight in I had a couple glasses of white wine. I think it was the fact that I was knitting a baby sweater while drinking that lead to the glares from people sitting around me. That, or they were spectacularly unfriendly people.

We got into JFK to find that a) the Airtrain had caught fire and we had to take a mysterious series of buses all over the place to get to the subway, b) the aforementioned prepaid hotel had messed up our room, and c) it was getting late, many decent places to eat were closed up, and what was left was either expensive or offensively loud. We had dinner in the wine bar under the hotel and then crashed.

The next day we slept in (not really, but waking up at 8am California time means waking up at 11am in New York), dropped our luggage off at the hotel for the second night, then took the subway uptown to have lunch at Shake Shack. That was pretty good, though by the time we got there I was drenched in sweat. We shared a table with two nice UMass grads, who informed us in all seriousness that when men wear red shoes, it means they are gay.

Then we went on an epic walk through Central Park, mostly towards the Guggenheim but also entirely in the wrong direction.

After a couple of hours of tromping through the park in the heat, we really, really enjoyed the air conditioning at the Guggenheim, even if much of the museum was closed off for renovation.

Then we met some friends of mine for yarn shopping and dinner. I had lobster, because in the summer on the East Coast, the lobster is amazing. And it was.

The next day we took it easy, packing up our luggage and taking the subway down to have breakfast at Shopsin's (definitely worth the schlep), then visiting a perfumery in Brooklyn, because that's the kind of odd place we like to go to. Then it was getting on into the afternoon and we headed to the airport for our flight to Russia.

At which point the heavens opened up and we were stuck on the plane, but at the terminal, for hours. At least I got a lot of knitting done, though I did drop my tiny double-point needles lots of times, and almost had to give one up for lost.

Then we were in Moscow.

I've got piles of photos to write about, but first a few basic things about Russia:

1. The language + alphabet barrier is a killer. Unlike in Japan, in Russia there are only very rarely signs in Romanized Russian, so I spent most of my time trying to sound out words (and my grasp of Cyrillic was not so great when we arrived, either). When I was able to sound out words I was better above to navigate or figure out what things were, but that took a real, concerted effort. Many words were so long that by the time I got halfway through them I forgot what the beginning of the word sounded like. I had no ability to look at a word and know what it said. So THANK GOODNESS we were with friends who both speak good Russian and helped us get around and talk to shopkeepers and buy museum tickets. Seriously. I would not go to this country without somebody who has been there before and can speak at least a little Russian. For most people that would involve going with a tour group.

2. Toilets are... well, first of all they mostly cost money (15-30 rubles), rarely have toilet paper (you bring tissue packets with you just in case), and almost never have soap or any means of drying your hands after washing up. I should have brought a supply of wet wipes in packets for the above situation. And also because just experiencing a Russian public toilet makes you want to compulsively wash your hands all the time, since you know nobody else washed theirs.

3. Food in restaurants is good but a bit bland, even for somebody who likes bland food like me. We enjoyed Georgian food (which is a little like Armenian), Assetian pies (Assetia is a region in Russia), and blini when we ate out. If you are so inclined, there were many many Subways, plus KFC, McDonald's, and Pizza Hut; we were not so inclined. Most often we ate meals at the apartment, picking up salads, bread, sausages, fish, cheese, and so on at the grocery store. We ate very well, but it would have been difficult to do so living out of restaurants (though I find this to be the case in most parts of world).

4. In June, you have two important seasons at the same time. On the one hand, the high school students are graduating and there are huge celebrations all over. We managed to be in St Petersburg for their celebration, and then in Moscow for theirs. This is a terrible time to be in these cities unless you want to get terrifically drunk and yell and watch fireworks. The drunk part can be hard though, because Moscow prohibited the sale of liquor in the city for the event. Also in June, you have the puch, which is the fluff from cottonwood trees, that fills the air. And sometimes your apartment. This is just kind of sweet and charming, except when it gets in your nose and mouth.

5. The Metro is cheap and fast and easy to use in Moscow. Buses are slow and unreliable and a bit confusing. Almost nobody uses the buses. Also, the escalators in the Metro go ridiculously fast. Dangerously so. Then you get used to it and come back to the US and all the escalators seem really slow. The Metro stations go between plain-jane platforms and ornate palaces of Socialist-Realist art. You can see them better if you don't try to do it during rush hours.

6. Most museums and churches have formalized the bribes people used to pay to take photos. You can pay for a photo pass for most places (but not all) that allows no-flash, no-tripod amateur photography. It usually costs less than $10. Also, yes, it is possible to get totally tired of looking at ornately decorated churches packed with gilded icons.

7. Russian women walk around in the most incredibly high heels in all weather and conditions. The sacrifices they are willing to make for fashion are awe-inspiring. And they're really walking in those shoes, hauling ass over several miles of park sidewalks, for example. Mad props to the Russian ladies, everybody. I suspect they could take any of us in hand-to-hand combat (maybe they wear the shoes so they have a pair of weapons on them at all times).

I'm sure it's some freak thing about my phone, since this is not something my friends with iPhones complain about, but basically, if somebody were to steal my phone and download my location, they'd get a set of locations that are exactly NOT where I ever go. So good luck with that.

This year I decided to reknit it, since I think the pattern is really lovely.

This is also a moment to show off my new modeling dummy. It's pinnable and the height is adjustable, so in theory you could use it as a dressmaker's dummy, but I got it for modeling finished knitted and sewn things I want to photograph. So much easier than dressing up the dogs or messing with the timer on the camera.

While we're here, let me take a moment to tell you that nupps are not that hard to knit -- I find them quite fun, actually, and they really do look better than beads. The trick is to put two yarnovers instead of one, then let those extra yarnovers out when you go to purl the whole thing together.

This shawl was knit with one skein of Malabrigo lace, in "Sunset," of which there was a substantial amount left over. I didn't like the yarn, myself, but many people love it to tiny pieces and swear by it. I just don't like the feeling that the yarn might pull apart, it is so loosely spun. YMMV.

This is a scarf I've been working on, very slowly, for Noel. It's knit from the Blue-Faced Leicester I spun at the Black Sheep wool judging last year, and I call it my $4000 scarf because of how much time has gone into it. I'm about halfway done, but the pattern is very fiddly (I'm using a couple of Alice Starmore cable patterns) and scarves are inherently boring to me, so it's taking forever. I've been carrying it around in my knitting bag while I work on other things, which does not actually work to get a project finished.

This is a pair of gloves I knit up over a couple of weeks. I've been playing around with glove design and while my experiments were interesting, I finally just decided to just use a pattern, at which point it went much faster. I still need to weave in the ends on the right glove, and sew the buttons on, but they're pretty much done. I got the yarn at Madrona this year, and it is a much nicer colour than it appears to be in this photo. I like knitting gloves, and I have some nice orange yarn I will probably use for another pair, though not with the button detail.

This is my second go at the Swallowtail Shawl. Goldie ate a big hole in the first one I made several years ago, while I was working on the edging. This one is going much faster and I am keeping it well away from animals. The yarn is Malabrigo Lace, which I really don't like at all, because it feels too soft. I know it has its own strength but I dislike feeling like the yarn I'm using might not survive blocking. I love the colour, though.

And last night I decided to play around with the Turkish cast-on, which is a seamless round cast-on for toe-up socks. I have several balls of Knitpicks Essential sock yarn a friend gave me, so I'm going to make a pair of knee socks. Since I'm going to Sock Summit in July, I felt like I should knit a pair of socks (I knit one pair when I was a teenager and was not enthralled). So far so good, and the cast on was nicely fiddly, but I am kind of dreading the dull expanse of the leg. I am liking theses little 4" needles, though; they are a lot easier to handle on small projects than 6" double-pointed needles. I bought a whole set of them from Knitpicks a while ago; I don't think they sell them any more.

The reason for all this productivity is that a month or so ago I spent some time organizing my piles of yarn (I inherited a bunch of yarn recently), and I hate having piles of unused materials hanging around. I decided that I should actually sit down and work on knitting projects more often to use up the yarn, and oddly that has meant I've been finishing projects rather faster than I was before (I'm not sure how that works, really). I want to use up an entire bin of yarn this year, but we will see how that goes.

The second weekend in November we flew to Minnesota for a surprise birthday party for my in-laws. Noel's parents were born within two days of each other, and they were both turning 70, which is a pretty significant birthday. With the help of an old friend, we tricked them into coming to a restaurant where the three kids and I were waiting to surprise them.

They were very surprised and a great time was had by all.

There's the family all together: Joanne (the family friend who helped coordinate it and managed to keep the secret perfectly), Lynn, Anne, Michael, Sandy, and Noel. In front of the restaurant.

The next day, the weather gave them another surprise birthday present, which was several inches of wet soft snow. My sisters in law immediately got stuck in the driveway while going shoe shopping.

The next weekend, A Verb for Keeping Warm had their store-warming party, a big celebration of their fancy new location in a real retail space. I'm a big fan of Verb, and next weekend I'll be teaching a class there on the physics of spindle spinning.

They had this awesome cake, made to look like a bundle of fiber in their "Thai Iced Tea" colourway.

Then it was time to plan for Thanksgiving. I started by taking out the traditional turkey mold.

I love this mold, but unfortunately I can only justify using it maybe once or twice a year.

I modified my last pumpkin pie turned into cake recipe to make it spicier (it tasted a little bland even to me, which is pretty bland indeed), but I didn't like how the cake came out of the mold. So the next few days were spent on experiments and then truly deconstructing the idea of cake.

But you'll have to wait for the big reveal on the final product, because the day before Thanksgiving is also a holiday in our house; it is Stinky Fish Day. Noel stays home from work and the Stink Fish Fairy (the Fedex guy) brings the special package from my family:

It's a big package of fish and bagels from Zabar's.

A good time was had by all, though not everybody got some fish. (The dogs traditionally get the skin from the whitefish, though, so there was a happy ending for them, too.)

For Thanksgiving dinner we brought the potatoes and the dessert. We re-imagined the potatoes as a trifle, layered with hash browns at the bottom, then purple mashed potatoes, then potato gratin, then white mashed potatoes, then purple again, then a piped layer of mashed potatoes beaten with extra cream to make them pipe better.

The deonstructed deconstructed pumpkin pie turned into layered pumpkin desserts: the bottom layer was a circle of pumpkin cake soaked in ginger syrup, then a ginger-fig filling, then a boiled sugar frosting, then another layer of pumpkin cake, a layer of whipped cream, and a little miniature bundt cake top. It was kind of over the top, but it worked OK. Too bad I was totally stuffed from eating an entire turkey drumstick before we got to that course.

And by popular demand, I made Charlotte's peanut butter cup cookies, all six dozen of which were devoured or squirreled off by the other diners (and since we have two cake's worth of trimmed pumpkin cake bits to eat, this was not a problem).

Of the three things we made, I was most impressed by how fun it was to pipe potatoes.

This week I will make the mincemeat filling for our Christmas pie. We're having friends over and baking a ham (or two). There may be piped potatoes involved.

Now, I'm not muslim. I hadn't even been to the Middle East before the trip to Turkey this fall. But that doesn't really matter to airport security. I don't look like the American stereotype of a muslim terrorist, female or otherwise. I strongly resemble my Portuguese mother, and I don't think this country has ever been on the lookout for Portuguese terrorists.

But that name. That funky, Middle Eastern, terrorist name that nobody can say. It gets me every time.

(Don't get me wrong; I am very attached to my name and it is a part of me. I would never consider changing it. And it has its uses: seeing how Americans react to it tells me a lot about their secret bigotry against people who are different from them in even only one very small, insignificant way.)

Since the mid-90's, airline travel has almost without exception involved extra searches for me. Yes, for those keeping track, that is before 9/11. By extra searching I mean body pat-downs, luggage searches (they bring your hold luggage up to a private room and go through it in front of you -- I recommend buying luggage with zip-out liners unless you like sewing), searches where I have been asked to remove clothing (before we got the TSA, they often asked me to do this right in front of my fellow passengers, and got angry when I asked for a private room), and more.

To be fair, I've only ever had one cavity search. But I wonder how many of the people who are so worked up about the choice between the full-body scanner and a pat-down have ever had to take off their underwear in an airport at the command of a guy with a gun? A guy with a gun who might not even be an American citizen, since in the bad old days they didn't require that for airport security.

Back in the 90's, airport security was run by private companies. They had very little oversight. San Francisco had some of the most sadistic security staff I ever encountered, including one woman who hit me around the head with the metal-detector wand because I didn't hop to her commands fast enough, and one guy who refused to allow me to get my pat-down from a woman because it would hold up the line. I regularly had my breasts not just touched but grabbed and sometimes twisted. I've had hands and wands and whatever was available shoved between my legs. Airline travel meant bruises and humiliation for me, and sometimes bleeding.

Still, I traveled. For work, for vacation. None of my fellow travelers ever posted any outraged protests of this treatment online or in the media. There were no congressional hearings. This was considered to be reasonable security to address the threat of islamic terrorism.

The TSA has been pretty good for people like me. They train their staff, and there are standards for hiring that seem to be much better than what those private security firms used. I like that agents have to be citizens. Since the TSA took over airline security, I have not been actually physically harmed during a search, and I count that as a big plus. But I have been searched. My luggage has been dismantled. My choice of carry-on items, my reasons for travel, my religion, my place of birth, my travel plans for the next year have all been questioned at varying levels of detail. I've been asked whether I changed my name or if I have aliases I use.

There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when I fly. I expect that anything and everything is grounds for questioning. We arrive at the airport ridiculously early for flights because we can't be sure I won't have to go through the crazy screening. This is just how I live my life, something I have come to accept as a trade-off for living in a country with other freedoms I consider to be more important.

I have an obsessive protocol about flying. Where TSA might let a bland white American get away with thinking stick deodorant is a solid (it says "solid" right on it, after all), they inform me that anything that conforms to the shape of its container is a liquid and take it, so now deodorant goes in the plastic bag (or Noel carries it, which lets it sail right through). I don't wear underwire bras, I pack any jewelry with pins in checked luggage if I bring any at all. I don't even bother trying to bring knitting needles on the flight, because while anybody else could easily get away with it, I've replaced too much stuff that seemed innocuous and was explicitly allowed to bother. My in-flight entertainment of choice is a book, because they can search that pretty thoroughly without destroying it. But don't bring too many or they wonder what you are up to. (The ebook reader seems to be just fine, and doesn't trigger questions about why I need more than three books for an eleven-hour flight.)

As I wait my turn for my pat-down, I sit there to the side of the security line with other women who are -- strictly coincidentally, I am informed -- much like me: small, modestly dressed (which is to say not wearing a skin-tight jump suit that leaves nothing to the imagination), with Middle Eastern names. Noel, my blond, blue-eyed husband, gathers our luggage and waits for me at the end of the line. He's only gotten to share in the extra searching when we are in foreign airports, where they don't rely so heavily on stereotypes.

As I wait, I can see them pick people out of the line for enhanced search. Women with head-scarves are certain to be picked. West Asian features, check. A blonde woman wearing a long loose skirt sails through unimpeded, but any woman with brown hair and a skirt is pulled to the side so that a TSA agent can feel the area around her legs, where you can conceal a bomb. Small girls with brown skin stand with their mothers, waiting to be patted down.

I appreciate the outrage over the new scanning procedures. I really do. But the outrage is way too late. It was all fine and well when it only happened to "terror suspects" like me. As soon as the TSA realized that unequally applied security is a huge risk and started searching white babies for bombs as carefully as it searches brown babies, everybody exploded in outrage. It's too intrusive, they say. The government is literally putting its hands on my body! How can they do this to us! They should be more targeted in their approach!

Hey. I'm an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. I was born and raised in this country, and I love it above all others. Given the choice to live here or abroad, I live here. I've served my country as a civil servant, and my brother serves in the armed forces. Three generations of my family have served in the US military during wartime (OK, fine, my grandfather was in the band, but you don't waste a fine trombonist on the battlefield). In every way that really should count, I am "us." And "they" have been doing this to "us" for a really long time. So cry me a fricking river that the rest of you are going to have to learn to live with the kind of intimate contact with the fears of your fellow Americans that I've put up with for a long time.

The pat-downs are really not so bad. If I were you I'd choose them over the scans (nobody at TSA has ever offered me a medical risk assessment for the machines, so I opt out when I am allowed to). After a dozen years or so, you get used to having to submit your body to the touch of a stranger to get on a plane. It starts seeming totally normal. The idea of arriving at the airport only an hour before your flight seems laughable and unrealistic. Now you're about ready to try flying out of the Middle East, which is a whole new level of intrusive. Welcome to the real world, fellow Americans.

The thing is, the economy is changing. We're getting a lot of jobs that require more than just a college education -- biotech, computer science, advanced materials science, that sort of thing. We're also getting jobs that are, frankly, menial, like gardeners and cooks and child care, which those high-end wage earners need because America worships "productivity" rather than wealth or happiness (which means people stay at work longer hours and don't have time to do things like clean their own home or cook their own meals).

Where the jobs are disappearing is in the middle. What kind of job can you get with a high school education? Not much of one, but one place where you can get a job is from the government. And it's a stable job, so people with minimal education can stay employed rather than constantly being on welfare or unemployment. Which is where the conservative values come in.

See, conservatives are really behind this idea of work-for-welfare. They don't want anybody to get a free handout, which is fair enough -- I think anybody who went to kindergarten would like life to be fair. But for some reason they also don't want to provide jobs for those people. (By the way, the problem with work-for-welfare is and has always been exactly what work those welfare recipients would do, and who would pay them to do it.)

I don't think anybody would argue that it is better to have an entire (and large) class of people be unemployed and unemployable than it is to have them in stable employment that pays them enough that they can pay rent, buy groceries, buy large-screen televisions (this is a fundamental American value, folks), and buy gas for their cars. But nobody seems to know who is going to employ these people who are not the brightest and best the country has to offer. I think any conservative would agree that if the options are to have this person get public assistance for the rest of their life for sitting on their butt doing nothing, or to have them go to work every day and sort mail or monitor traffic cameras, the better of the two options is the one where they are out of the house and a marginally productive member of society.

Unless, of course, by conservative you mean somebody who wants to drive down the cost of labour. And in this country, that is what conservatives do. They want to make it harder to leave your job and start your own business (by tying health care to employment), they want to shove thousands of underskilled labourers into the workforce (by reducing the size of the government), they want to create more underskilled labourers (by gutting the public education system), they want to make people desperate (by cutting off government aid to those in need), and they want to drive down the effective wage (by demanding higher and higher productivity, so the actual wage paid per dollar earned for the corporation falls). We're already competing with what amounts to slave labour in the manufacturing sector. If conservatives in America had their way, we'd have slave labour wages all over the country. If unemployment gets high enough, you will see people clamouring to lower the minimum wage, and that would make employers very happy, indeed.

I can only chalk it up to the inadequate economics and logical reasoning education that the average American gets that this agenda is very popular among the very people it harms the most (just like tax cuts for the richest seem to be very popular with people who cannot ever hope to make that enough to benefit from them). Why else would you consistently vote for politicians who are stealing the future from your children?

But if you're really a fiscal conservative, you would think it would be better to have more people employed and paying taxes, rather than having lots of people who live off the work of others for no reason other than that that is more convenient for businesses that want to make more profits. A fiscal conservative should want economic stability, not a feudal corporate system that has no job security and lots of boom and bust years that are terrific for exploiting for profit, but terrible for long-term planning and social order. Large government, government that employs lots of otherwise unemployable people and gets economic value out of them, is a conservative government.

The reason for this is that certain things are plentiful and cheap in Istanbul, and among those things are counterfeit designer goods. The markets are filled with storefronts with what would be $5000 handbags if they were actually the real thing. Since I am singularly uninterested in wearing anybody's logo all over myself, much less in paying to do so, no matter how little I pay, this sort of thing had no appeal to me, but it had a lot of appeal to pretty much every other tourist.

Now you also find store after store with clothing that is not counterfeit, but is not big-name designer. And to be fair, most of the tourists staying in our hotel were going to those stores; decent clothing is quite inexpensive in Istanbul compared to other parts of Europe, and everybody raved to us about how easy it was to find inexpensive, well-made shoes there.

Pretty much every larger city has a covered market. This one is the Kapalı Çarşı -- literally "covered market" but in English known as the Grand Bazaar-- in Istanbul. The shops are tiny, little storefronts that can be as small as five feet wide and are rarely more than fifteen feet deep. But they use the space to full effect, hanging merchandise from every surface.

You can buy a lot of stuff in there: there are gold and silver merchants who sell jewelry by the gram based on the commodity price, there are stores that sell mostly souvenirs, scarf shops, pottery sellers, candy and spice shops, rug dealers, watch shops, sporting clothing shops, fabric stores, linen shops, and it just goes on. You won't find stationery (find that at a kirtasiye), or drugs (eczane), or even a book store (kitabevi), but for picking up presents to bring back home, this is your place.

Because this market in particular is filled with tourists, there aren't any really good bargains in there. I found this display with a pile of old rug beaters -- these are handmade tools for beating the weft on knotted pile rugs. The salesman wanted 80TL for them. I might have been willing to pay 20TL and felt like I'd overpaid, because these are not antiques (they could not have been more than 20 years old) nor are they particularly rare. Nor, I should note, were any of them in actually usable condition. But I'm sure enough people come through and want an "authentic" souvenir, and they can sell as many of these as they need to at that price. We didn't ask about the broken fabric printing blocks next to them; I knew those would be overpriced, as well.

The other thing you should understand is that you cannot be certain of the validity of a brand (well, sometimes you can be sure it's counterfeit), the country of origin of a piece (even when it is printed on the item), or what materials are in a piece (unless it's from the gold and silver merchants). Sellers will tell you what they think you want to hear. Or they may not have enough English to tell you anything at all.

Some of the stalls are outdoors, like pet foods and garden supplies. And unlike US stores where you buy packages of fixed size, these shops open up large sacks and sell by the kilo, so you can get just as much bird seed or cat food as you need (or can reasonably carry).

And sometimes the open bins are a little less than appealing. This is a display of sticky sweets -- Turkish Delight and similar things with sugar and nuts. It is right on the open corridor of the market, so dust and dirt and sneezes can get all over it.

And if you want your merchandise to be untouched by cats, good luck. I've mentioned how all Turks seem to be totally PWN3D by cats, and I am not kidding.

Also, you can find single-item vendors on the streets. I mentioned previously that you can buy tissue packets and bottled water from unlicensed vendors. But they are opportunists. So when the rain came down in sheets on our last day in Istanbul, the umbrella vendors were out selling cheap plastic umbrellas for 4-5TL each (and we bought one, because I had brought neither rain coat nor umbrella with me).

The actual shopping experience is a social one. You see an item. If you are interested, you may ask the price or a question about the material or origin (but take it with a grain of salt; you should know how to identify what you're looking for, or not care). The vendor may take the item down for you to examine more closely. You begin negotiating on price -- can I get a deal if I buy more than one, that sort of thing. If you can't come to an agreement on the price, you move on. If you can, you may have a painful conversation that reaches the edges of your limits of Turkish. The price is tallied, and often rounded down -- or the vendor may throw an extra item in the package as a gift to you. You say your thanks, and go through the elaborate leaving process. We went shopping on our last day in the Grand Bazaar, and went through this process several times, for everything from fabric to little tourist trinkets. Apart from grocery stores and the big bookstores, we had no "choose an item and buy it" shopping experiences.

This may make you worried about not knowing Turkish. Which is legitimate. We had my father along to help with translation and negotiations. But for the most part, vendors know a good amount of English. Numbers, materials, a few choice phrases. The only time it gets weird is when you need an obscure item, in which case a small travel dictionary and a willingness to take some time will get you what you need. Shopkeepers seem to be exceptionally bored in Turkey, because they will devote as much time as required to figuring out that you want a darker red fez in size 4 even though the sale is for a ridiculously small amount.

It turns out that in Turkey, prescription medications are all available over the counter in any corner eczane (ej-zah-neh, or drugstore). And in tourist areas you will find rows of eczane with big ads for all those drugs they sell through spam. I wasn't in the market for male performance enhancers, but it was comforting to know that if I ran out of my usual prescriptions I could just buy them, usually for much less than the cost of the prescription in the US.

Unlike the mini-department stores we have in the US, drug stores in Turkey pretty much only sell actual drugs and beauty supplies. No notebooks, no pens, no candy. Like most places, the clerks could usually do some very simple commercial English and understand the names of drugs, with one exception, which is that in Turkey, as in every other place in the world except America, acetaminophen is called paracetamol.

You can often buy small packets of tissues (and bottles of water, and other items) on the street. The people who sell them (for 0.50TL or 1TL or so) are basically beggars. Begging is illegal, and in theory so is vending without a license, but the police will turn a blind eye to that for the most part. For the most part the money they make that way is their sole support, so we bought the occasional bottle of water that way.

The word for hospital in Turkish is "hastanesi," the emergency room is "acil servis." I hope you don't need those. However, since hospitals are often indicated on maps, whereas just about nothing else including many roads is guaranteed to be, knowing the words can be an important wayfinding device.

Some days there would be börek -- an example of börek that more Americans would have experienced is spanakopita (which in Turkish is ıspanak börek), though usually in the morning it would be sigara börek, rolled into cigar shapes with just white cheese and maybe a few spices inside. Fancier hotels might have a selection of pastries and cakes.

I'm perfectly happy to eat a hard-boiled egg every day, so I did. That, plus a handful of olives, some tomatoes and cucumbers, and a scoop of yogurt with honey on top make a pretty good breakfast to start your day. There was always hot çay (very dark tea) in a dispenser, usually one that also dispensed hot water so you could lighten the çay as much as you liked. Sometimes there was a Nescafe machine so you could get something removely like coffee, but I have it on good authority that the stuff is terrible. Often there was a dispenser of something rather like a less-sweet Tang, which was acceptable. I'm not really a hot beverages kind of person, so most mornings I had the Tang stuff or water.

The rhythm of the day revolves around snacking. Breakfast, do some stuff (for us this was a one and a half hour trip across Istanbul), then a cup of çay. Lunch, which would usually be something fairly simple like döner (meat on a spit cooked with a gas flame, then sliced off either to make a plated meal or to put in a pide, which is the Turkish word for pita) or a piece of börek. Then midafternoon another çay. Then dinner (more elaborate), followed by more çay.

One afternoon my cousin Erdinç picked us up and drove us to some more inaccessible sights. We ended up here, at Pierre Loti, a lovely cafe that looks out over the city. It's perfectly natural to go to a cafe and just order a çay, which costs usually 1.5TL (about a dollar) and then sit at the table for an hour or more. The waiter doesn't glare at you or try to encourage you to move on.

After that cafe, we went to Erdinç's house, where his amazing wife had made a delicious dinner for us:

This is a pretty typical fancy but not elaborate dinner for guests. We had a shepherd's salad (chopped cucumber, chopped tomato, chopped onion, dressed with oil and vinegar and maybe parsley). The soup is yoğurt-based, it is made from a dried cake prepared in advance by mixing yogurt plus spices and drying it; you can then powder the cake and reconstitute it with hot water for a quick soup. There's also homemade spinach börek, chilled canned red peppers in yoğurt, and a simple stew, plus we had whole wheat and white bread. (Noel got a special little dish of peppers that you can see in the front; all my relatives were amazed by his ability to eat very spicy foods.) We had sour cherry juice to drink (my cousin is both a devout muslim and a vegetarian, so no alcohol and no meat). For dessert we'd stopped and bought some baklava and a very sweet melon on the way to his house, plus Erdinç's wife made little cooked rice pudding cakes soaked in sugar water.

A typical restaurant meal would be a little less elaborate. We'd usually start with a shepherd's salad (lettuce or greens-based salads were not usually available outside of tourist areas), plus various breads. Then a dinner plate with either an entire small fish (çupra, or sea bream, was a pretty nice choice) or köfte (lamb meatballs) or cooked meat (and meat pretty much always meant lamb cooked within an inch of being charcoal), plus a little dab of pilaf, plus a vegetable or two. I pretty much grew up on pilaf, and it's what I always think of as default starch with dinner (well, rice of some sort). I was surprised how much bread figured in, until my mother explained that when my father was young, there had been a flour shortage, so bread was only for holidays. In the 40-some years since he left, that's obviously changed, and now people throw bread all over the table like it's going out of style.

The other thing is, as in the cafes, we were never hustled out of our table in a restaurant. When you arrived for dinner, they seated you and you owned that table for as long as you wanted to stay. In some cases this could be hours. Some people came and went while we ate our meals, and sometimes we arrived after a particular party and left well before them. Whether this was good or bad for business I don't know, but September is supposed to be the big tourist month in Istanbul and we were always able to find a table; there are a lot of restaurants.

On a practical note, in Turkey restaurants add a 10% service charge to the bill, and then you can add more for better service. We always did, though several people told me Turks often do not.

On the last night of our Turkish classes, those of us who were physically able (one member of the class was disabled enough to not be able to navigate the streets in Istanbul) went to a restaurant in Taksim. We ordered the mixed grill platter for the table to share. This is the platter arriving at the table: a large tray piled with assorted types of grilled meats and meatballs, with vegetable salads in the corners, bulgar and pilaf on the ends, and flatbreads laid over the top.

We made a valiant effort to finish the platter, but in the end there was still quite a bit of food left.

You can also see, in the photos, that despite the fact that the vast majority of people in Turkey are muslim, it is still a secular country in many ways, one of which is the ready availability of beer. The local brand is Efes (which you may note is the Turkish name for Ephesus). It's not the greatest beer, just a light lager that borders on having enough flavour, but it's not bad. We also sampled Turkish wines while visiting my father's college friend, who is a vintner, and they were not half bad. The typical Turkish hard liquor is rakı, which is like pretty much every other anise-based liquor I've ever had. It's not bad diluted heavily with water, but not a first choice if you want to taste anything but anise.

Here are my parents plus my dad's friend from school, Aydin, and his wife. We had an amazing meal in this hotel in Aksaray (the city, not the neighborhood in Istanbul), and at this point we were on the cheese course. Turkey has a wide variety of very interesting cheeses.

I'd be remiss if I did not at some point mention street food. But honestly, we didn't eat very much street food. Throughout Istanbul you'll find signs for balık ekmek -- fish bread -- which is a grilled fish sandwich.

You pretty much won't find fish at any real distance from the water, but Istanbul, being right on the water, is crazy with fish. It's not always cheap -- the fish we got in restaurants near our hotel was between 15TL and 20TL a plate, and went upwards if you wanted something fancier -- but street food is usually smaller portions and less fancy, and thus cheaper.

The other thing you'd see around Istanbul, more in areas where there were fewer tourist, was kumpir. Which is basically mixed pickled things on a baked potato.

I never expected the pickles. Just about every Turkish sandwich has pickles in it, and you can buy pickles everywhere, and at restaurants you get pickles as if they were refills of water (which you do not get).

And the best kind of street food: little corner markets with fresh fruits and vegetables. This is my dad standing by what I jokingly referred to as the ancestral greengrocer's stand: his grandfather had a fruit stand on this corner when my dad was a kid. Maybe that is why every time we passed a fruit seller, he had to stop and buy fresh figs (in Turkey they are enormous, easily four times the size of a fig in California) and other kinds of fresh fruit. And the fruit is terrific. Turkey doesn't have the same homogenized produce system as we have in the US, and fall is a great time for fresh fruit in a Mediterranean climate, so stands were piled with interesting apples, sweet grapes (almost all with seeds), fresh figs, tomatoes, and so on. Dates were just starting to come in, as well, so you could get fresh dates and dates that had been allowed to shrivel and sweeten but hadn't yet gotten dry. You can get those in the US, but only with careful searching and luck (being in an area where date palms grow, for example).

The next time we go to Turkey we want to rent an apartment (we tried to do it this time but had a language barrier) and do more of our own cooking and shopping. You can live quite cheaply off fruit stands and the other markets, and the food is really very good.