the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

There they are all standing in a row / Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head!

OK. Bigger. Check it.

Foreshortening aside, they're still medium boulders

I only bought one: the smallest, and it's already in my backpack at this point.

Sunday, Turks have a massive produce market everywhere. I climbed up the hill here to our local one instead of tripping down the hill to the mind-blowing one in the kameralti. The one up a ways may be smaller with less selection, but it has some advantages. To wit: it isn't as packed, people are friendlier, it doesn't reek of fish and other fresh meats, and perhaps most importantly, it's closer and when I'm laden with goodies, I walk downhill to my apartment.

Here's what the average local market might look like on Sunday:

I suddenly have the urge to juggle for some reason

Fresh olive oil there in the foreground. One of those peaches would feed two of me--if I could eat fresh peaches, I mean.

I picked up some salad stuff--everything but lettuce, which is out of season, I suppose. I also went with some apples (one of the few fruits I can and will eat fresh). I'd requested a yarım kilo (half a kilo, so about 1.1 pounds) of apples, and it was slightly underweight, so the fruit guy tossed in a plum to even it perfectly.

A comment on fruit eating: I love fruit, but rarely can I deal with fresh fruit. It's either too sweet, or too tangy, or the texture makes me gag. I don't know why. I've always been this way. I was the weird kid who would eat all the broccoli and Brussel sprouts you put in front of me, but wouldn't touch fresh strawberries with cream and sugar. I was the perfect crop picker for fruits--blackberries, figs, strawberries, peaches, plums--because I had no urge to pop them in my mouth. I'd tried them and simply couldn't eat them.* I understood other people liked them. Indeed, I did, if they were turned into jelly or jam. But fresh? I couldn't take them. I kept trying, but I just couldn't make myself like them.

But I'll try the plum. Maybe my preferences have changed.

* This is the only food that, when I rejected it, Mother would say, "Fine. More for me." Why didn't she do this with okra and liver and butterbeans, which she insisted she loved? Just another of life's little mysteries.

I stopped at another stand and bought some green onions with a small bundle of dill weed. When I paid and tucked these into my backpack, the proprietor smiled and added a pomegranate.(How do you eat a pomegranate?)

Here's one more thing you might see in the produce market:

These are not future pets.

OK. The chickens, maybe.

And so it was that I bought a little more than I wanted to carry, even downhill. At the last stand, a strange man walked over and helped me arrange the last items in my backpack before bidding me good day (iyi gunler).

I got home with this:

Yep. I emptied all the bags to make an artistic arrangement just for this blog. You special people you.

This smorgasbord--beautiful, isn't it?--cost me 16TL. That's $10.

That's a kalim I put the spread on, by the way. Bahar threw it in as a gift when I bought some carpets from her.

d