The year’s most delicious festival returns to Istanbul
The International Chocolate Festival, which is being sponsored by the Toyota Hybrid this year, will transform the historic Sirkeci Train Station in Istanbul into a chocolate heaven. The festival is taking place until May 6 — aiming to bring professional chocolatiers together with chocolate lovers.
Chocolate is among the foods that people love passionately, and compared to other sweets and candies, it is more of a passion than a desert. Sometimes just thinking about chocolate can put a smile a person’s face, dailysabah.com wrote.
The International Chocolate Festival is a three-day event that is dedicated to this chocolate passion. Throughout the festival, chocolate competitions, workshops and tastings will take place, uniting chocolate lovers.
Sirkeci Train Station was built in 1890 and functioned as terminal for the famous Orient Express. International train services were suspended in 2013 as a result of the opening of the Marmaray station. The historic building is now used as a venue for cultural events.
The role of tourism
Sloths have become a new commodity in the tourism sector. If they are not sold to tourists, they are displayed in cities and ports, where people can pay to hug and feed them.
In Panama, the APPC works to raise awareness among tourists about these harmful practices. Its neighbor and ally, the Gamboa Rainforest Resort, has built facilities for tourists to learn about the process of rehabilitating of sloths, without disturbing the species’ space or routines.
The center includes a stretch of forest where the organization can check if the specimens in the APPC are ready to return to a pleasant life in the treetops.
Some sloths, however, are not able to afford to return to life in the wild, as they have lost the opportunity to learn survival instincts from their mothers. Their docility would make them an easy prey for other species, such as the jaguar.
That is the case of Coquito, a Bradypus variegatus known in the APPC for his meekness. As he can´t go back to the depths of the forest, he now has a new job: To be the image of the organization so that his life story can help humans to change their relationship with wildlife.