turkey
We're on the final leg of our Turkey trip. We're currently ensconced at a rather nice hotel on the Mediterranean in Southern Turkey. The hotel offers buffets all day and stunning views of the water, in between which we are doing our web design work.
We finished a two day tour of Cappadocia, an area in central Turkey known for its unusual rock formations and cave dwellings. The scenery was quite fantastic, it's low season since it's cold and often snowy, but snow always lends a magical quality to any scene, and places that are already named after fairies take on an other world feeling. The seemingly carefully eroded Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia take on various shapes, like rabbits, camels and Napolean's hat. We toured cave dwellings used by early Christians as monasteries, dug into the strange rock formations in order to hide and protect them from their persecutors. The Christians were eventually joined by the Muslims and you can see churches side by side with mosques, all dug into the rock and often painted with frescoes of scenes from the Bible (as our tour guide said, the story of Abraham is in the Koran too, it's just different). We also visited an entire underground city that was dug by hand several stories into the earth. Safe from invaders and cold weather, the people slept, cooked and made wine below the surface. Walking around in this underground city was like experiencing a location right out of a fantasy novel. Driving around Cappadocia was like being in another world; many locals still use the caves for storage, work or living. Everywhere you go you can see doors dug into the rock, including the hotel we stayed in.
Our hotel room was a converted cave, made quite comfortable by beds, heat and running water. We enjoyed spectacular breakfasts (the traditional Turkish breakfast is bread, cheese, tomatoes and cucumbers, a far cry from the Korean breakfast of rice and kimchi) and were amazed by the fact that the cave had wireless. The hotel animals were quite friendly. We were joined by a dog one evening as we sat outside playing backgammon, and a fancy white cat was determined that it should be living in our hotel room and made its way under our beds several times, even meowing loudly outside the door to be let in.
Our picture collections are just about finished, so be sure to check them out. The Istanbul set has had many recent additions.
We have some more pictures up. Check them out.
Click on the picture to see more.
Just a mini update to say that Istanbul is indeed a cool city, and we are having a lot of fun here. A few of the highlights so far:
- Eating $1.30 doner kebap on the street (the best shawarma I have ever had) while sipping fresh-squeezed orange-apple-carrot juice.
- Sampling a mixed kebap platter at a nearby cafe, with live Turkish zither music playing in the background.
- Following up the kebap with a game of backgammon, as the locals start singing along to the music.
- Eating all the Turkish Delight we can stomach while watching late-night (9pm) Star Trek.
- Walking the streets in the rain (not like there's another option: it's been raining every day).
- Heading into the grand bazaar with no map and no plan, not caring if we ever make it out or not.
- Being rinsed and scrubbed and massaged with scalding water in a 500 year old Byzantine bath.
- Drinking Turkish Apple Tea while discussing travel and teaching with a recent Teach for America volunteer who's traveling around the world before starting grad school in Michigan.
- Eating our hostel-provided Turkish-style breakfast every day: fresh baguette, cucumbers, tomatoes, cheeses, meats, and olives, with jams and nuttella also available.
- Trying out a few of the famous Turkish Mezes (appetizers) at a famous restaurant in the new downtown.
- Talking with our hostel room-mate, a Malaysian doctor, about his multinational Chinese-Malay heritage.
P.S. Our internet connection is not the fastest here, so we've been having some technical difficulties uploading our photos... if they appear lopsided, or incomplete, or ugly, or they're not there, that's why.
Enjoy this short video, and give a shout out to my Dad and his special skills.
"If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul."
So said Alphonse de Lamartine, French poet and politician, of the city which was then the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Napolean Bonaparte, who had similarly strong feelings about the city, supposedly said that "if the earth were a single state, Istanbul would be its capitol." This from the man who tried to conquer the world for France? (who was, by the way, average height for his day.)
Istanbul is one of those cities that makes you catch your breath before you even arrive there--at least if you're a student of history. The depth and breadth of this city's experience is second to none: at the intersection of two continents and two seas, two hemispheres, and two of the world's great religions, Istanbul is a microcosm of the world itself.
Today was but a glance of the city, but it was a glance that left an impression. In general, most cities that I have ever visited fall into one of three categories: those that one can grow to love, those that will mostly be forgotten, and thost that impress me instantly as being, for lack of a more comprehensive and ellegant word, "cool" 
. Cairo fits into the first category, most cities into the second, and a handfull of cities--Vienna, Quebec, perhaps Istanbul--fall into the third.
We visited Sultanahmet (the Blue Mosque) and Ayasofya today, and took some really cool pictures (to overuse the word). They're still uploading, so you'll have to wait 'till tomorrow to see what we saw.