Istanbul, small fish and strange packages

A relaxing day in Istanbul started with borek, simit--which is kind of like a big sesame covered bagel, honey and kaymak for breakfast. With tea, of course. Not enough tea however. Mina hasn't been sleeping well--shes waking very frequently, like every half hour, 40 min all night for the last 2 nights. I felt like someone was sitting on my eyelids all day.
We went to meet k's friend, who suggested we meet at Starbucks. Granted it is an especially beautiful and well placed starbucks, right on the water. Turkish people love Starbucks--it's very upscale and fashionable here, that and some other American place called Gloria jeans. We met some fabulous Korean flight attendants who took many photos of themselves posing with Mina-hilarious. Mina is a big hit.
After a delicious lunch of grilled hemsi we headed back to pick up the package sent from k's parents in the village. First we went to the package pickup place where I was amazed at the things people were shipping; shopping bags taped together, mysterious bundles. Then we went home to meet the delivery--it was a plastic basket stacked with pomegranates with a piece of blanket tied on top(!), 2 metal cans full of liquid fruit syrup and a sack of other stuff including 10-15lbs of dried figs. I couldn't believe you could ship things like this. K says it's normal.
Before dinner I whipped together a cheesecake using a recipe off the Internet and some creative ingredient sourcing. Hopefully its delicious, our host was interested in cheesecake--is this another thing Turkish people love? It's one of the only things k requests that I make him.
Mina was playful and stayed up past her mothers bedtime until 10pm so no blog posts were written until this morning.