Thanks to the dedication and hard work of our videographer, Kevin Land, we have a three-minute promotion for Seoul’s Han River. Check it out, and let us know what you think in the comments!

We got an email this afternoon from a traveler named Christopher, who found our sticker while walking through one of the most unlikely areas of suburban Kanagawa. I placed the sticker during one of my trademark Kanagawa Constitutionals, at a particularly low point in my experience in Japan. I was horribly unhappy that day, and walked for about an hour to an unimportant overpass in an unknown and unloved part of Kawasaki City, where I placed the sticker to commemorate that particularly bad time.

Eight months later, Chris found my sticker.

More amazing still, as I sat in Jen’s office in Sultanahmet today, his email arrived in my inbox. I was telling Jen the story when I followed a link to his website to find his most recent entry about visiting Calgary, Alberta (Jen’s hometown).

Even more amazing than that: one of the pictures in the frontpage photo array is an image of Jen’s office building.

Yeah. Seriously.

So to Chris– thanks for tracking us down, and whether you wanted to or not, you’ve shared a very personal moment in my story.

Unlike Seoul, where exotic street food was varied, abundant, and cheep, Istanbul has been a bit more conservative on the food side of things. Yes, there’s great Turkish food all around us, but for whatever reason (usually price or convenience) we’ve been eating a lot less of it than I’d like. When we’re not cooking pasta or beans at home to save money, our diet consists largely of kebaps, soft serve ice cream, and ‘fiesta’ pizzas from Pizza Pizza. Yesterday I was introduced to a strangely familiar Turkish street food: Kumpir.

Yes, it’s a baked potato Turkish style! In addition to the standard butter and cheese, they top them with a variety of things including: black and green olives, pickles, sausage bits, Russian salad, corn, chili paste, mayonnaise, and/or ketchup. Despite the fact that there’s not a bacon bit to be had, they’re still pretty delicious and filling. We got these in Ortaköy, near the Bosphorus Bridge, which seems to be home to at least 20 different yet entirely identical Kumpir stands, so you should have no trouble tracking one down.

It seems as though every person we’ve met here is fascinated by Americans and really not fascinated AT ALL by Canadians. Whenever we’re asked where we’re from, and the boys reply America and I reply Canada, it is immediately followed by ‘Where in America are you from??” Then our new found friends will continue to ask a million questions about the states. Then they’ll look over at me and say…..”Canada? Oh…..”

There is a sandwich place in our neighbourhood that we really enjoy and the guy that works there actually doesn’t even know what Canada is. He just looked at me really confused. Canada? What’s that? Oh, it’s the second biggest country in the world….. no? Never heard of it? Ok.  I guess I’ve been completely unaware of how unaware people are of my home.

Here’s a quick geography lesson.  Canada is a big ass country located North of the US.  We have 35 million people in the country and it’s a great place that everyone should visit.  We’re nice people, I swear.

I now leave you with pictures of my beautiful country.

Yesterday, I had to kill 30 minutes while waiting for a bus, so I stopped into the only nearby restaurant for lunch… McDonald’s. Now, we’re no strangers to McDonalds… we’ve probably eaten 100 of their ice cream cones a piece, but it’s very rare when we actually order food there. Every time I do, I try to get something unique to the country we’re in, so that I pack in a little bit of culture along with the calories.

The McTurco seems to be the McDonalds answer to the Turkish Kebab… some form of flat-bread, shredded lettuce, a tomato slice, and… beer coasters? What are those things?? They look like a very large, very flat Chicken McNugget… and even those probably contain only 1% real chicken. After taking a bite I looked at what I had just eaten… there were little air bubbles throughout what looked like bleached wood pulp! Ugh… I think I’ll be sticking with real kebabs from now on!

We have the crankiest neighbor I’ve ever had the misfortune of living next to– he complains about everything. So last night, when Nick made the puzzling decision to use the vacuum cleaner at 2 AM (while the rest of the house slept), of course, he comes knocking– or tweeting rather (or doorbell sounds like a songbird with his testicles in a wringer). I woke up around the fourth tweet, naked in bed wondering why no one was answering the door. By the time I got to the door, the man had been jamming on the bell for a full five minutes and Nick was busying himself in the fridge.

So, at 2 in the morning, shirtless and confused, I had to listen to our crotchety old neighbor shouting at me “What time is it? I am sleeping! What time is it? I am sleeping!” and on, for five full minutes.

Weeee.

I am often asked what Turkish television is like, here is a brief preview.

It’s really amazing to me that you can live in the middle of a city hit by major flooding, caused by “the worst rain in 80 years”, and have no idea until friends from the states email you asking if you’re ok. We’re up on a pretty huge hill, so if our neighborhood was to flood, it would likely be the Apocalypse anyway. Still, I take the metro bus (like the green bus covered in water from all the pictures) every day to work and pass right through the area that was hit by flooding and I still barely noticed it. This morning there was a large area of low lying land that looked more like a lake than usual, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the roads. It wasn’t until my trip home when I saw that most of the water had cleared away leaving lots of rubbish and a few passengers pointed and chattered, though what they said I don’t know. Looking at the pictures online, you’d think the whole of Istanbul had been leveled under flood waters, which just goes to show that a photo doesn’t always tell the whole story.