U2's trip (con't)
Topic: Travel
Once again I'm diverging to my good friends travels, enjoy!

... I saw some restaurant or something called Fifi recently, which of course made me laugh.

I won't be back until the end of July, so no 4th for me. Maybe I'll go to one of the popular "Yankee go home!" rallies instead.

Well, I probably have quite a few stories to tell so far, but I'll tell you about this afternoon. I decided to drive back to Trabzon from Erzurum early in the afternoon, to get over the coastal mountain range that gave me so many problems last week. Well, I was on track, when I picked up a farmer hitchhiker just outside of İspir, who then convinced me to stop and have some tea at his destination, which was no more than two or three kilometers from where I picked him up.

Well, over the next two hours we ate a huge pile of cherries from his trees, ate tomatoes, green peppers and cucumbers, a couple of eggs, bread, all along with a lot of tea. He and one of his sons then picked another few kilograms of cherries for me, and then if that wasn't enough, started shaking mulberries out of one of their trees for me. The only thing that stopped them was a thunderstorm that rolled into the valley. Anyways, he then took me up on my offer to drive him to his village, about two kilometers up the hillside. Just as it seemed I'd be on my way, he again convinced me to have "just one more glass of tea", so I ended up meeting his mother, wife, younger son, and daughter. Of course, the whole time I was grilled over my education, work, parents, their jobs, their parents, marital status, age, and the current ecomomic conditions in Canada. They found the word "okay" to be hilarious, because I apparently use it a lot. Well, with evening approaching, I again headed for the mountains, this time one pass east of the last one I went over. I thought I was homefree, when I came around a bend and saw the wall of fog ahead. This time, though, the road was fine all the way, with a few exceptions, and the biggest problem was looking out for the cows in the mist, trotting up the road out of the fog, then disappearing again into the ether...

I'm back in İstanbul tomorrow, thankfully for my pocketbook. Gas is USD 2 a litre here; did I mention that before? That explains the lack of cars on the highways here.