Mosques and menemen, parks and a palace, electricity outages and water shutoffs, meeting a friend of a friend on the Asia side…Below are pics from the past nine days (but not the utility outages since a non-running faucet and total darkness don’t make for terribly compelling photos). No photography is allowed inside the palace, a…
We arrived here Wednesday afternoon and walked one kilometer from Dolmabahçe Palace, where the taxi (from the airport) dropped us off, to our apartment. There wasn’t a normal address for the apartment, and the website information said to have the taxi driver call to get directions. I looked at a map and figured we could…
Charlie sings and chants throughout the day, many phrases or expressions we use reminding him of a song which he then parodies. Coming home from one of our tours a couple weeks ago, he was singing, “Sweet Home Kusadasi” which Tugrul then sang with him. Tugrul is more familiar with American music, politics, and history…
We visited three, Ancient Greek cities with Tuğrul again Tuesday. He and Mario, the driver, picked us up at 8:45 am and returned us to our apartment at 6:30 pm. The humidity was probably near 100%, but it was worth it. The sites are amazing, especially with Tuğrul’s explanations. The photo below has nothing to do with…
A few days ago Mom wanted milk in her tea. She wanted to see how the milk smelled. She smelled the milk. It didn’t smell bad. She poured the milk in a glass, and it was chunky. She thought the fridge was too cold and that the milk was frozen. She takes a little drink…
The tour of Ephesus with Tuğrul (“TOO-rule” – The ğ is silent. It just elongates the preceding vowel.) today was very informative, but I think we enjoyed the next tours even more. Tuğrul tries to bring attention to local artisans who he says generally go unnoticed and unappreciated. At the rug maker’s facility, we watched…
This morning we took a taxi to beautiful Dilek Peninsula National Park, about 50 minutes south of our Kusadasi apartment. It’s a wooded peninsula with four beaches – one dirt, three pebble. The island in the distance (in the Charlie photo) is the Greek island of Samos. I’d like to take the ferry there, but…
We arrived Friday late morning in this booming, beautiful, seaside, resort town. Mel, whose wife Jan listed the apartment on Airbnb, picked us up (for a fee) in their van from our Izmir airport hotel at 10 am and drove us an hour south to Kusadasi. Mel said when he moved here from Istanbul in…
I’m typing this on my phone in our cave suite; we received a free room upgrade a couple days ago. It’s larger, but the 5 am call to prayer is much easier to hear here, and Laurel can’t get back to sleep. The wifi signal is also nearly non-existent from this location. Oh well. On…
When my alarm went off at 4:15 this morning, I tried to keep in mind that what the kids and I were about to do was something we’d been looking forward to for two years. The Kapadokya Balloon company sent a van to our hotel at 4:45 and drove a Columbian couple and us to…
Travels with Charlie and Laurel 