The annual meeting with Lydia and Georg, a time in June, which we have been using for years for collecting strawberries, has almost become a tradition.

Once again, we were surprised by our hosts presenting a deliciously cool dessert, which is so simple to make, that it hardly needs any description, just the number of lemons used is characterized by personal taste.

Although there are some gray clouds in the sky above the Neckar, the last few days have been splendidly summery.

After crossing the Turkey / Greece border, we were once again caught in a heavy, but very short rain shower at Alexandroupolis, causing the water to evaporate rapidly under partial fogging on the still warm asphalt.

Anatolia is the centre of Turkish wine production, which actually goes back about 5.000 years. There have been times when production of wine has been restricted by laws during the Osmanian periods. When the Republic of Turkey was established by Atatürk in 1923 all these restrictions were lifted.

What appears rather insignificant and trivial in the title picture, in reality, is an increasingly important source of income for the Zasavica Nature Park near Sremska Mitrovica and its animal world living in the park, especially the Balkans Donkey.

It all started when Monica, a librarian friend of mine from Houston, Texas, told me that she would be attending a librarian conference organized by a Turkish university.  We decided to spend some time together during her stay in Istanbul, and I promised to show her some historical but not touristic parts of my city.

Eating out in Turkey is always something very special for the gourmet: a very old and traditional cuisine complete with the aroma of fresh additions of herbs and spices.

Just as in some regions in Europe, the procedure of drinking tea plays an important role in Turkish daily life. Whenever there is an opportunity to have a tea, they will take it. What is different to Europe is the way of doing it. In Turkey you will get the tea served in tiny little glasses with two pieces of sugar on a small tray.

The influence of different traditions, habits and customs of the Mediterranean on the Turkish life style have created another face of Turkish culture-a huge variety of different tastes in Turkish cuisine.

The fish restaurants of the Turkish coast offer lots of unusual meze dishes -specialities based on recipes which were originally brought from Greece by returning Turkish people.

If you have left yourself enough appetite after the starters, then the main meat course will follow. The traditional dish is Meatballs, which consists of a huge number of grilled burgers of different sizes, prepared with different spices and other additional ingredients, for example with cheese and with vegetable.

As we were picking up the leader of Goethe Institute from Konya bus station for a visit to Karaman and Mut we had a very interesting meeting.

Considering your taste, you can make changes in the numbers and amounts of the ingredients.

There will be adventure in this weekend at the Manavgat-Adventure Park! The groups, who want to participate in trekking on Saturday and Sunday, are going to spend an amazing weekend in the Taurus Mountains. The ones who want to stay in the park, will jump from one thing to the other to the climbing section and probably consume quite a lot of energy.

With Linda and Franc we had started from Shkodra in the direction of "Han i Hotit" to the north east of Lake Shkodra shortly before the border crossing to Montenegro, then followed the road to Kelmend, which is now newly asphalted and expanded until Tamara.

The discoloration of the leaves on the trees and other typical signs of approaching autumn slowly appear - unfortunately this often is accompanied by the first colds together with infection.

Various dates and private visits were the reason for one more stay in Kitzingen, which once more should lead to an experience with regional culture, in this case with a kind of sweet pastries made of yeast dough, the designated kind of donuts and offered in a special variety at carnival time.

After our meeting with Nikos at the local petrol station of Rapsani we were going up towards the center, where the female "Harvesting Team" from the United States was already waiting for us in the chestnut plantation.

After visiting the castle, we had an appointment with Nikos on his farm area right next to the ecological vineyards, where some members of the group for later grappa distillation had already gathered.