Thursday Travel Tales: Greece & Turkey Part II

Last week I left off in the middle of our Greece and Turkey trip. We had just got off a boat in Turkey and managed to get visas to get into the country. We were in the city of Ayvalik and our plan was to get on the next bus to Istanbul. Unfortunately, there was an issue with getting bus tickets. Figuring out the nature of this issue was incredibility difficult because no one at the bus station knew English, so we had to resort to hand gestures and pointing to Turkish words in our guidebook to communicate. Eventually we managed to figure out the problem: the next few buses leaving for Istanbul did have enough seats for us, but the open seats were next to other men. Per Turkish customs the ladies in our group were only allowed to book seats either next to Zach  or another lady. So the next bus with enough open seats to satisfy this requirement didn’t leave until 8pm that night.

This was a little hiccup in our plan, since we now had to spend the entire day in the small city of Ayvalik, but since there wasn’t really anything we could do about we walked around the town and tried to enjoy ourselves. The town was small and pretty boring, but eventually we made it to 8pm and boarded our night bus to Istanbul which ended up being the strangest, most uncomfortable bus ride of my life. This is why:

1.       Absolutely no one on the bus knew English so every time we stopped (which was often since a lot of the passengers demanded smoke breaks) we were all confused about where we were, why we were stopping, if this was the stop we were supposed to get off at, etc.

2.       This bus ride was about 6 hours long and since it was nighttime, we were supposed to sleep on the bus. The problem was the seats were super uncomfortable and the constant stops kept waking us up.

3.       In the middle of the bus ride the bus boarded a ferry! Then we were in the cargo of some ferry where it was pitch black and very rocky. This was unsettling because it was completely unexpected and we were worried we had been taken for the duration of the boat ride until we saw light again.

By some miracle we survived the bus ride and managed to get off at the correct stop in Istanbul. From there we took a taxi into the city and checked in to our hotel, took a nap, and then started exploring the city.

Istanbul was great – it’s definitely one of my favorite cities. It’s the first (and only) predominately Muslim city I’ve ever visited, so the routine call to prayers and mosques on the skyline were a nice change. On our first day of exploring we met up with one of Eden’s Turkish friends who showed us around the city, brought us to the best restaurants, and translated for us along the way. Funny thing: Sinan (Eden’s Turkish friend) and Kate (the other friend who was with us on this trip) ended up getting married – you wouldn’t have been able to tell on this trip though. Sinan had another girlfriend in Turkey and Kate, Eden, and I spent a lot of time on the trip making fun of the crazy things she said - like how she loves drinking water while showering and also how she got kidnapped once but they let her go because she said her dad was the Vice President of America).

Anyway, the next day we went to the bazaar and had a lot of fun. Zach got yelled out by a few vendors for insulting them during haggling, but other than that we had a good time.

Our flight home was pretty eventful. While taxiing to the runway the plane veered off abruptly which tipped the airline off that something was seriously wrong with the plane. We all had to deplane and wait for a new part to arrive – which wouldn’t be until the next day. The good thing was Delta put everyone up in an insanely nice hotel, so we got to enjoy one more day in the city on Delta with luxury accommodations. Thankfully our next flight out was much less eventful and we made it home safely. Here are some pictures from the trip:

While eating dinner in Ayvalik the waiter offered Zach a sweater because he looked cold.

Here's Zach being silly in the Hagia Sophia.

The ladies had to don head covers before entering the mosques.

Zach and I in front of the Hagia Sophia.

Hookah!

Townhome Tuesday: Closet Converted into Mini Mudroom

After touring through houses on the Salt Lake Parade of Homes I got really jealous of all of the gorgeous mudrooms in each home, but the entryway into our house is way too tiny for a mudroom. I looked online for a lot of ideas for ways to put a mudroom area in the garage, but all of those methods look like they took a lot of work. So instead Zach and I worked on converting our coat closet into a mini mud room (we have another coat closet upstairs, otherwise I would have been more reluctant to give up my coat/jacket storage area).

The first step was to remove the door. I was worried about the holes that would be left behind in the molding - but it turns out that they're not really that noticeable. We also removed the hanger rod that was in there. Then we just put in a ton of mismatched IKEA pieces that luckily ended up fitting in the area perfectly (it actually wasn't luck, Zach and I modeled the closet and pieces up in Google Sketch-up before buying anything). We have two DVD towers on the sides for shoes, a bench in the middle with a homemade cushion, cheap baskets to hold all of our stuff, and two cute picture frames to tie the area together.

Every piece of furniture in here comes from IKEA. The total cost was around $250.

We got two Benno DVD towers from IKEA for shoe storage on either side of the closet. The shoes stick out a little, but I've decided that I'm okay with it, it's still better than what we had before.

These are the Knarra baskets from IKEA. I got the unfinished kind and painted them.

This is the Hemnes shoe storage bench from IKEA.

We made a cushion with fabric, padding, and a thin wood piece at the bottom. We just stapled the fabric to the wood piece to keep it tight over the padding.

These frames were also from IKEA. We used the staple gun to attach the ribbon to the back of the frames (nothing else would hold). Zach attached the knobs to the wall using this tutorial. Then I tied and re-tied the ribbons about 15 times to get them to hang as evenly as possible.

 Since the closet only provided enough storage for my shoes, I got this Stall shoe storage cabinet from IKEA for Zach's shoes. I got the white cabinet and painted the drawer fronts yellow.

 Here's the view from the top of the stairs. The mini mudroom is on the left.

Food Friday: Small Batch of Chocolate Cookies

Sometimes after dinner I want to make something sweet but I don’t want to be left with 2 dozen cookies (because I WILL eat them all). This is a really nifty recipe for a small batch of cookies. These are vegan and don’t have any oil or sugar, so you don’t have to feel too guilty about eating all of them. This recipe makes about 10 cookies – a perfect treat for two people (or one person if you love cookies like me) after dinner.

Chocolate Cookies

makes 10 cookies, vegan, fat-free, sugar-free

Ingredients

4 pitted dates

1 egg replacer (I use 3 Tbsp water + 1 Tbsp Bob Red Mill egg replacer)

1-2 Tbsp non-dairy milk (use more milk is you’re using more cocoa powder)

½ tsp vanilla

1/3 cup whole wheat flour

¼ tsp baking powder

1/8 tsp salt

¼ tsp cinnamon

1-2 Tbsp cocoa powder (use more if you want a strong chocolate taste)

Instructions

1.       Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2.       Blend dates, “egg,” milk, and vanilla in a mini food processor.

3.       Mix date mixture in a bowl with remaining ingredients.

4.       Press dough onto greased cookie sheet and bake 15 minutes. These cookies will not spread during baking, so you need to press them into a cookie shape.

5.       You can eat these right out of the oven, but they’re best after they've cooled for 15 minutes.

This is what my date mixtures looked like in the food processor.

I baked my cookies in a cake pan since I didn't make that many.

This picture makes it look like I ate just one...

Thursday Travel Tales: Greece & Turkey Part I

I miss college. I think I’m generally happier now that I’m out of college because I have much more control over my life, but there are some aspects to college were awesome. The main one was how you could always count on getting 1-2 weeks off between semesters. I wish work was broken up into semesters with week-long breaks between each one – that would be incredible. Anyway, while I was in college and didn’t have to worry about only having two weeks of vacation, Zach, myself, and two friends decided to book a last minute trip to Greece and Turkey during the break between Spring and Summer semesters. My friend Eden had been looking at flights and noticed that a flight into Athens and out of Istanbul was only $600. We booked the tickets about 2-3 weeks before the trip, then we got distracted by finals, and then it was time to pack and go.

We didn’t have much time to plan much for the trip since we booked it during finals time and everyone was busy, but we did manage to reserve some hotels for our time there and come up with a general plan: go to Greece, island hop over into Turkey, make our way up to Istanbul, then fly out.

The flight to Athens went smoothly, and we spent that night enjoying great food and wine. The next day we spent touring the ruins and taking pleasure in how empty the city was. It was the middle of May, so the busy tourism season hadn’t started yet. Outside of the ruins Athens was pretty lame – all of the buildings looked cheap and run-down and were scattered around in no particular order – but the people were great. They were all very laid back, kind, and generous.

  A few dogs joined our group throughout the day. This is the first dog we met, we named him Zeus.

Me, Kate, and Eden with the Parthenon

This is the second dog we befriended, we named him Zeus too.

The next day we started the island hopping part of our trip. Our first stop was Mykonos. We had booked a hotel online but never made plans to get to the hotel once on the island since we assumed the island was small and we’d find a way. Luckily when we arrived someone from the hotel was waiting to drive us to our destination. This further cemented in our minds how nice and accommodating Greek people are.

Mykonos was beautiful. When you see Greece portrayed in movies as a coastline filled with white houses with blue roofs and gorgeous beaches – you are probably seeing Mykonos. I was surprised to see people all over the place putting fresh coats of white paint on their buildings (I guess repainting is easier than cleaning?). Anyway, our hotel was right on the beach so we spent the next two days lounging on the beach, drinking wine, visiting town, and eating all of our meals at the same restaurant where we had made a friend who gave us free dessert.

We were so impressed to find a car service waiting for us upon arrival. How did they know when we were going to get in?

Beautiful beach.

Beautiful coastline.

Drinking wine on the beach out of plastic cups - super classy.

Here's the free dessert I told you about.

The relaxing portion of our trip ended abruptly. I mentioned earlier that we hadn’t really planned out our trip besides booking hotels in Athens, Mykonos, and Istanbul. While we were in Mykonos, Zach got online and realized that there’s really only one way to island hop into Turkey from Mykonos, and that one path started with a boat that left at midnight on our last night in Mykonos. Unfortunately by the time he realized this he had about 30 minutes to get into town to pick up our boat tickets before the office closed for the weekend and we missed our chance of getting to Turkey on time. Luckily Zach was able to get our tickets, and we boarded our midnight boat to the next stop - Lesbos.

The midnight boat was pretty fun, but unfortunately none of us slept very well on the 6 hour ride to our next island. In Lesbos we bought tickets to Turkey and just waited a few hours for the boat to leave. Lesbos wasn’t as nice as Mykonos, so we just hung out at a McDonalds until our boat left – lame, I know.

 Our midnight cruise ship.

We're about to take shots on the deck of the midnight cruise ship. (Everyone inventing reasons to take shots all of the time is something else that makes college awesome).

I’ll continue next week with the Turkey part of this trip.

We can do it! Wednesdays: Maintaining Budgets Using Mint.com

One of our new year’s resolutions was to keep track of our spending and maintain budgets. So since we’re almost half way through the year I thought I’d give an update on this goal. I’m pleased to report that Zach and I are rocking this goal thanks to mint.com.

Note: the rest of this post is going to be a huge advertisement for mint.com

This goal is huge and kind of involved, so I’ve broken it out into steps:

1.       Track spending

So before you can set budgets and keep an eye on spending, first you need to track it. Thankfully these days most purchases are made with a credit or debit card, so it’s easy to track everything electronically. We created a free account with mint.com and linked all of our financial accounts to their system. Mint.com just compiles all of our accounts into one interface so we can track all of our financial activity in one place.

All transactions come in automatically and are divided up by date. The green ones stand for money coming in and the black ones are money going out. You can see the credit card payment above has two transactions, one in black for the money leaving our checking account and one in green for the payment being received by the credit card account.

2.       Categorize Spending

This is where things get a little more difficult. Tracking spending is easy, but in order to make that tracking data valuable, you really need to categorize each transaction. This allows you to keep track of how much you’re spending on home stuff versus clothes, food, eating out, etc.  Luckily mint.com makes this super easy, but you have to pretty vigilant about keeping track of the categorizations, otherwise you’ll get a month behind and then forget what that one thing you bought on Amazon was.

I installed the mint.com app on my phone and I’ve made it a habit to check it daily and categorize any new transactions. Mint actually starts to learn the categories (like gas stations are always gas and Trader Joe’s is always groceries).  I only need to provide a category for things Mint gets confused about, like Target and Amazon (where sometimes I buy cleaning supplies, or groceries, or clothes) and new places Mint doesn’t know about yet.

Mint also has this nifty thing that allows you to split one transaction into multiple categories. Check it out:

The first transaction is one purchase that was split into three categories (pet, home stuff, groceries). I keep track of this by pinning receipts that need splits on the fridge and I don't take them down until I've logged the transaction in mint.

Once you start categorizing everything, you can look at cool charts like this that show you where your money is going.

The only tricky thing to categorize is cash. We rarely use cash, so when we take it out I just categorize that ATM withdraw to what I think we'll spend that cash on (usually a split between entertainment, restaurants, and travel).

3.       Set Budgets

After you’ve been categorizing for awhile (probably 3 months minimum) you’ll have enough data to start setting budgets – it’s good to wait and see how much you’re spending on everything before trying to set budgets, otherwise you might be setting them way too high or low. Zach and I set budgets for the following categories: Entertainment, Groceries, Restaurants, Gifts/Donations, Sports, Furnishings, Home Supplies, Tessa Clothing, Tessa Personal, Zach Clothing, Zach Personal, and Travel. We picked these categories because they are all areas we can control with our day-to-day spending decisions. We don’t bother tracking things like gas or utilities, since those costs are kind of set. Mint.com has an awesome budget tracking tool. You just load in what categories you want to budget for, set a monthly amount, and it keeps track of your budgets for you. Also, you can set the budgets to roll-over, so if you don't spend all of the money in one month, you get more the next month.

Here's a look at our budgets right now. The app does a good job of showing you how you're tracking to your spending goals.

Final Thoughts

If you've been wanting to get your spending on track but have been overwhelmed by the task of tracking stuff and setting budgets, I encourage you to try using mint.com for a few months. At first I was hesitant because it seemed like a lot of work, but with the app on my phone it's easy for me to review stuff every day (also, this is a great way to catch fraudulent charges early). Since Zach and I have been tracking our budgets, our spending has gone way down, but I don't feel like we're deprived of anything. We both have generous personal budgets, entertainment, and travel budgets, so I never feel like there's something I want that I can't have, I just need make sure it's charged against the right category.. No more crazy guilt after buying an expensive top from Lululemon and no more agonizing over whether I should buy new bar stools or not - now I just check the budgets, make the decision, and move on.

Also, mint.com has these awesome charts where you can track your net worth over time, spending by month, year, category, etc. If you are really into charts like Zach and me, you'll love it.

Townhome Tuesday: New Kitchen Bar Stools

When we first got our house we bought cheap bar stools for the kitchen. I just wanted something that would look nice, but I didn't really expect them to be so cheap that they would crap out after only a year (I should have taken the hint when the instructions called for all pieces to be assembled with glue instead of screws or nails). Well after a year they started to break, then for a year after that we just stopped sitting in them, but left them there in their broken state, and now finally I worked up the energy to go to the furniture store and get new ones.

Here are the old bar stools. I like how small they were - they fit easily under the counter.

Major structural issues.

I ended up getting bigger stools to replace these, mainly because I wanted some with a back that would be more comfortable. I got a good deal on the new stools because if you look really closely they are slightly different colors. Also, the upholstery was ugly, so that helped drive the price down. I got a nice fabric and replaced the cushion fabric easily (we have a staple gun, otherwise I don't think it would have been very easy).

New fabric on the left, old fabric on the right. Also, you can see how the right one looks more brown.

The new bar stools are awesome! The color difference isn't very noticeable, and I love not having to fear for my life every time I sit in them.

Food Friday: Perfect Key Lime Pie

For this food Friday I want to share Zach’s special birthday dessert – key lime pie. This recipe is in no way healthy, but we only make it once a year, so I’m okay with it. I like this recipe because it doesn’t require baking ingredients that I don’t stock our house with anymore (like sugar, flour, and butter), it’s easy to make, and according to Zach it’s the most delicious key lime pie he’s ever had.

Perfect Key Lime Pie

Ingredients

·         Large store-bought graham cracker crust

·         1 14 oz can sweetened condensed milk

·         ½ cup key lime juice (I used about 20 key limes and juiced them with a garlic press)

·         1 8 oz pkg cool whip

·         4 egg whites

·         2-3 Tbsp sugar (since I don’t usually stock this in the house, I took sugar packets from Dunkin’ Donuts, those are 1 tsp each)

·         ½ tsp cornstarch

·         1 pinch salt

Instructions

1.       Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2.       In a large bowl mix together lime juice and condensed milk. Fold in cool whip and mix gently until smooth. Pour mixture into pie crust.

3.       In a medium bowl, beat egg whites until peaks form (this works really well if you chill the bowl in the refrigerator beforehand). Beat in sugar, cornstarch, and salt.

4.       Pour egg mixture (meringue) over pie. Using the back of a spoon, form the meringue into small peaks. Bake pie for 20 minutes until meringue browns.

5.       Chill pie in fridge for 2 hours minimum (overnight is best).

I put my pie straight from the oven to the fridge so it has a lot of condensation on the top. You can avoid that by letting it cool completely on the counter before moving it to the fridge.

 The meringue blends into the filling making a super fluffy pie.

The following three pictures capture Zach's first taste of the pie on his birthday:

Thursday Travel Tales: Christmas in Jackson Hole

The theme of today’s post is a recent trip my family took to Jackson Hole. My dad and step mom Angela rented a place for all of us during the week of Christmas a few years ago. I actually don’t have any crazy stories from this trip, so I’ll just share a few pictures and reminisce.

Our lodge was ski-in/ski-out which was awesome! Jackson Hole was way steeper than the resorts I've been to in Salt Lake City, but there was a ton of powder so the steepness was easier to manage.

My dad and Zach at the top of the mountain.

View from the top of the mountain.

Loading up on potassium during a ski break.

Our lodge also had hot tubs which were great after a long day of skiing. However, after soaking in warm water the run through the cold back inside was pretty uncomfortable.

We spent a little bit of time in the town of Jackson and it was actually really cool. The town is really quaint with a lot of fun shops, here are a few pictures:

Zach and I under an antler archway in the middle of town.

Hanging out with bronze Einstein.

On Christmas Eve we went on a sleigh ride to see wild elk. After the sleigh ride we ate enormous steaks in a barn. The whole night felt very rustic.

Check out Zach's steak. Not very vegan friendly...

Zach and Angela at dinner.

My dad's a dork. He thought the butter was too hard, so he melted it on the stove.

Zach had a little too much to drink at dinner. Here he is making snow angels while we wait for our ride home. He was soon joined by my dad and Angela.

Here are a few pictures from Christmas morning:

I left cookies out for Santa and found a note from him in the morning thanking me for the snack. He so polite, but kind of messy.

One of my gifts was a crazy straw.

The last big event of the trip was a snowmobiling tour of Yellowstone National Park. Check it out.

We watch Old Faithful, but it was mainly just a bunch of steam, since it was so cold outside.

Here's me and Angela with some buffalo in the background. Angela was super cold, so she was pretty miserable in this picture.

We checked out some of the volcanic pools, but everything was either covered in snow or all steamy. I want to go back in the summer to check this out again when I think these areas are a lot more colorful and beautiful.

That was our trip to Jackson Hole! It was a great time, but I'm eager to go back and see what the area has to offer in warmer weather.