Harvest Moon

Taller than the pillars even!  Aika is back for a visit before starting her studies in Germany.  

Moon cakes?  A chinese pastry for the Autumn Festival. A video gives details, but the captions can't cope with Chinese speech...    Each has a whole egg yolk in the middle, like the moon.  Each had a fifth of a cake.  The range of facial expressions and comments was fun! "The egg is too strong", "The filling isn't bad...", reminding me of Prof Winston's BBC program on Taste and Smell.  How much our tastes are culturally conditioned!

A crateful of apples from METU were chopped and packed into 3 large jars: fast when 8 people get down to it...  Cider is on its way. 

METU students need to leave for registration, so we were up at 5.30 in the dark.  Even at 6 when they set off - 7 in one car - the sky beyond the hills was only just beginning to glow lighter.  

  Still, some of us would not miss a fullmoonlit walk, down to the Balaban stream - still trickling under the bridge.  The Monoliths are growing into the environment.  In the day, birds are flying around them 30 40 m up, way beyond the reach of snakes!  Safe nesting for sparrows, and pigeons too.

In the morning, I'm up to see the students off, then onto business: letting the chickens out, feeding them, giving them water.  A detour up to the Dry Lake: how many birds chirping around! Then down through the Canyon.  Whose droppings?  Celal's knowledge of nature and the steppe environment is impressive: a fox (fruits stones, rosehips, plums...), a heldhog (but would it walk down the Canyon?).  So much more to learn!