Ayran

Ayran is a popular drink in Turkey. It's made of yogurt, milk, water and salt!
It's sold everywhere together with coke, 7-up and Fanta, and many people drink it! When I first came to Turkey, after seeing it so much I decided to ive it a try:
Ugh! Terrible! Tastes like Natural yogurt, for me yogurt must have sugar and fruits!
But everyone is drinking it! Some times I try again, for the sake of aculturization!


Ayran

Sacrifice holyday

We are now in Holydays (for those that have a job) here. It's the Kurban Bayram, a religious muslim holyday. From what I've learned it's based on a story that exists both in the Bible and Kuran where Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son and when he was ready to do it God comes back and tells him he just needs to sacrifice a ram.
In Turkey with all the families that follow the tradition, the father of the family takes care of going to the place where they kill the animals and getting an animal for the sacrifice, then the family cooks a meal from it and part of the meat is given to charity.
In the old days the sacrifices were made on the streets, I can only imagine all the blood running through the streets of Istanbul with all these people killing the animals, and the noise! But now this is ilegal and there are places to do it all around the cities.
Unfortunatly I was partying the night before and didn't wake up in time to go watch it...
At the supermarkets charity organizations distribute leaflets asking people to give the skin of the animal to them.

Pachalafaka Online Gaming Event

We play at Social Lounge 4, come everyone!

Pachalafaka Online Gaming Event

Game: Spades
When: 16 January 2005, Sunday, 14:00(PT); 15:00(Central Europe); 16:00(TR)
Invited: All Pachalafaka readers!
Where: Yahoo Games
How:
The meeting place is at MSN Messenger; ICQ; Yahoo messenger or jut send email. If you don't have my contact post a comment on the blog and I'll find you.

• To play you need a Yahoo login, if you have one for YahooMail or any Yahoo site, use it.
• If you need to create one go to http://games.yahoo.com/ and click on "Sign up" on top.
• When you have a login, go to http://games.yahoo.com/sp, I will inform everyone in which room we play.

Don't miss the big event! The best player wins a free tour around Istanbul*!!!!!

* transports not included, meals not included.

New Turkish Lira

2005 started with a brand new coin for Turkey. The Yeni Türk Lirası (YTL).
1 YTL = 1 000 000 TL (1 million turkish liras)
So basically they take 6 zeros out of the prices. It's a good thing because prices were very confusing to read, for example a candy bar costed 1000000TL and now costs 1YTL.
The new money takes time to replace, after 10 days I get 20YTL notes from the ATM but when I pay I allways receive old money for change, except in the big supermarket.
Also I don't see people very excited about the change, everyone still talks in millions and thousands of Liras instead of YTL and kuruş (1 YTL has 100 kuruş). I guess people here got used to see new money come in since there the inflation was very high during the 80's and 90's and new money had to be made with more and more zeros.