Thursday, August 30, 2007
Ela and her cousin Charlotte chomping on their fingers at the beach on Long Island with Grandmother. We spent nearly a month there and had a great time. We also drove to Pennsylvania for Charlotte's christening. Ela loved all the attention from her grandparents! and watching all her big cousins run around.
(Having a baby was a lot more work than I imagined, so I haven't posted in a few months!)
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Tuesday, April 03, 2007

We haven't had much winter this year in Istanbul. Yesterday was 60 and sunny so we decided to walk around my favorite Bosphorous village- Kuzguncuk. There's a fantastic plant nursery there right by a string of restored homes.
Baby is due in 5 days! Can't believe how big I look in this photo. Actually, I do feel huge too. I read first babies are an average of 8 days late, so I should be prepared for a bit more waiting!
Saturday, January 27, 2007

Emre and I went to Bodrum for the first week of January and were lucky enough to come across a Deve Gureshe festival. Camel wrestling has been popular for hndreds of years, but it is pretty rare now. (Emre had never seen it before either.) The camels are all tied up near each other and then a female is walked around. The male camels all get aggitated, foamy and ready to fight.

The Trevi Fountain. Emre really LOVED Rome- his favorite city. We spent 4 days there and saw all the highlights, including St Paul's and the Vatican. Then we rented a car and drove to see Pompeii for a day. (After seeing Ephesus so many times, it was great to see. Less impressive buildings, but extremely well preserved.) That night we slept in Cortona (mentioned in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), a super charming small walled city in Tuscany. We had 2 days in Florence and got to see the highlights in the Uffizi.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006

This year I cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner. (It's a much nicer holiday when someone else does all the work!) I cooked for 11 hours and made: waldorf salad, roasted root vegetables (which are mysteriously different than the ones in the US), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes with marshmellow (had to get some Americana kitsch in there- especially since my sister imported marshmellows for me), brussel sprouts, stuffing, cranberry sauce (also imported- no cranberries here), and of course turkey. Emre's mom was suprised to hear that it's the American man's job to carve the turkey (it's the least he could do!) and Emre did do a great job. Actually, he was in charge of roasting the turkey, which was pretty easy in one of those roasting bags. I also made pumpkin pie, apple pie and rice crispie treats. I was relieved that everything actually came out pretty good.
We celebrated with our dutch friends Helen and Pieter, english friends Pami and Julian, also Eda, Heiko and Emre's mom. This was also the first week I actually started to look pregnant and feel the baby too!
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Sunday, October 29, 2006

My sister and I at Ephesus. (2 pregnant ladies!) We had a crazy two-day tour of Troy, Assos, Ayvalik, Sirince, Ephesus, the house of mother Mary and St. John's basilica. It was great! Emre and I were so amazed by the new museum that just opened inside Efes where you can see the ancient mansions with gorgeous intact mosaics.
Friday, October 20, 2006

I got a new car! It's a 2005 Toyota Yaris- tiptronic with a 1 liter engine. TINY! It's great for driving in Istanbul. I like it because it feels pretty spacious inside and is a bit high up, but still easy to park. The hills and crazy traffic here are still challenging for me, but I'm getting used to it. Will be much easier to get around with the baby in the car, rather than the dolmus. (I'm not really showing much yet, but did have to buy some maternity pants to fit my belly.)

Anna came to visit in September and we went to dinner at 360, the most glamorous place we could find! It has amzing views of the Istanbul skyline. Our dutch friends Helen and Pieter are sitting across from me. We got the very cool round table! Brian and Maurice also came in September and we went to 360 with each of them.
Friday, September 08, 2006

Mexico, Belize and Guatemala
Emre and I flew to Cancun and went travelling for 2 1/2 weeks in August.
Tony and Ashley came with us for the first 4 days. We rented a car and drove all around- found great snorkle sites! Amazing that everyone crowds in Cancun when you can find perfect empty beaches 40 minutes away. We spent a few nights in Tulum and saw the Mayan ruins there.
Afterwards Emre and I took the bus to Belize City and then to Tikal (more ruins) in Guatemala. We spent a day in Flores, which was very charming, but touristy. Emre did a day trip to (more ruins) Ceibal, which I skipped. (he said too many mosquitoes and not much to see anyway.)
Then we went to Antigua and to Lake Panajachel. We crossed back into Mexico and spent a couple days in San Cristobal (similar to Antigua- charming colonial city) then saw the ruins at Palenque and Chichen Itza.
After I got Turkish off my mind, I realized my Spanish has gotten really good! I guess I learned a lot more at my job in NY than I realized. Overall, we had a fantastic time. Guatemala was especially interesting. Emre says Antigua was his favorite.

We took a boat tour from Panajachel on Lake Atilan that stopped in a few other small villages. In one town, people there made a shrine to Maximon, which is apparently some combination of Catholic saints and pre-Christian religious figures. People pay to enter and give offerings of cigarettes, rum or beer and then pray to Maximon. crazy!
Wednesday, August 30, 2006

At the end of June we took the hydrofoil from Bodrum to Rhodes. (was only 2 hours). Rhodes is a beautiful island with an amazing old walled city that was under Ottoman control for a few hundred years before Italy took over at the beginning of the 2oth century. (now part of Greece.) We spent 2 days there and then 2 more on Kos, which is just across from Bodrum. (We can see the cars driving on Kos from our balcony in Bodrum.) We had a great time exploring the old town and driving around the island to see the ancient city ruins.
Monday, August 28, 2006

I haven't posted in so long! This photo is from mid July when Ariane came to visit. We had a fantastic time together. She first arrived in Bodrum, where we spent 2 days. We drove back to Istanbul, stopping in Bursa. Then 3 days touring the sites of Istanbul with perfect weather. Also had a fantastic boat tour and swam in the Bosphorous. This is us at Rumeli Hisari, the first fortress built by the Ottomans in 1452 as they prepared to capture Constantinople. That is the second bridge behind us.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Germany
Picture of me and Emre in Bremen.We just got back from a 9 day trip to Germany. We spent 4 days with Emre's sister Eda and her husband Heiko in Bremen, a charming small city of 500,000 people in the north. They were fantastic hosts and introduced us to the morning cocktail "fruhshop" and their favorite game, bluff, which we also got addicted to.
We had 4 1/2 days in Berlin, which was really amazing. Compared to Istanbul, the public transportation is AMAZING (Although people openly drinking beer on the U-bahn was a bit suprising. It was definitely a bit sketchy at night, and there is graffitti EVERYWHERE.)
Bremen Bahnhof
Eda and Emre saying goodbye in Bremen.We ended up renting a car and driving from Berlin to Bremen because the train was 250 euro. normally it would be 90 euro round trip, but you have to buy it 3 days in advance (a German custom we never could get the hang of!) I had always imagined the "autobahn" to be a scary superhighway, but really it is just two lanes in each direction- like a local road on eastern Long Island. But the Germans DO drive extremely fast- no speed limit. We saw a horrible accident in the other direction, including dead bodies. awful. I will stick to the trains...
Brandenburger Tor (an old city gate) is a very impressive ending to Unter der Linden Avenue which has lots of neoclassical buildings. Next to the gate, the new American embassy is being built. There's also a Starbucks across the square (even here!). The gate was in East Berlin and the wall was just past it.
































