We've been in Bodrum for August and Ela has loved swimming in the Aegean!

Elanur's grandparents came from America to visit when she was 3 weeks old. They were a super help! (just about when I was reaching my breaking point from exhaustion!) They had a fantastic time seeing all the sights in Istanbul and also Ephesus and Cappadocia, but most importantly Ela.

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!)

Bobby and Katie got married! The big day was the lucky date 7/7/07. It was a gorgeous wedding and we all had a fantastic time. The happy couple took their honeymoon in Iceland (naturally) and Scotland.

Elanur Rose was born in Istanbul on Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 5:42 AM! We feel so blessed to have such a gorgeous healthy baby (and a complication-free natural birth).

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!

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.

Emre and I with a scarey foaming camel. There were 160 camels there, and all were getting foamy and ready to fight. was scarey to walk around!

Here camel Ozkan has lost. His head is pressed to the ground, but the fight is broken up quickly. The whole fight is only a few minutes and the camels don't get hurt. (Sometimes a camel just runs away before they even start, and they are not forced to fight.)

Emre and I went to Italy for a week in the beginning of November for our "babymoon". (last trip before the baby!) Even though it got pretty cold some days, we still had gelatto at least once a day. a definite highlight. (especially since I had to skip the wine and cheese.)

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.

Us at the Colliseum.

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!

Emre carved his first jack-o-latern. All those years in art school really paid off! ;)

Pumpkins here are actually light green on the outside, but the same inside.

We had a Halloween party last night and was really fun! I was a witch and Emre was a devil, but lost his beard, so looks like a minibus driver!

Turkish Halloween party! Our friend Fusun was a nun and her husband the imam- definitely the hit of the party. (Halloween is apparently only celebrated in the U.S., but everyone got into the spirit here. My sister brought all the decorations and candy from home.)

Joann and Mike came to visit for a week. This is a shot of them in Sirince, a charming old Greek village near Ephesus. They were here during Bayram, a 3-day holiday at the end of Ramadan, so we had a few big family dinners too.

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.

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.)

Cappadocia

We went to Cappadocia for a long weekend in October. Such an amazing place! This is a photo taken at night with the full moon.

We went there with Emre's cousin Asli and her husband Gunner, who were visiting from Germany, and Eda and Heiko. Each day we took a hike through the fantastic canyons. Ancient cities and churches, like this one, are carved into the rock formations and are barely detectable from the outside.

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.

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 went snorkeling at a couple cenotes (fresh water caves) near Cancun. super! Emre went scuba diving there one day and said it was his most interesting dive yet.

Belize City. only 90,000 people and not much going on. We could barely find an open restaurant for dinner. We only spent one evening there and then continued on to Tikal (mayan ruins in Guatemala.) Spent my 31th birthday having a small child throw up on my feet during the bus ride.

We spent two days in Antigua, a super charming colonial city in Guatemala. We were just suprised by the number of tourists! (Italian backpackers everywhere!)

Typical Guatemalan bus (probably left over from a LI school district) painted very dramatically. This is near the market in Antigua.

View of volcanoes and Lake Atilan. It was suprising and interesting to see so many people in traditional clothing in Guatemala.

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!

Emre and I finally made it to Chichen Itza after an overnight bus ride from Palenque. We thought all the ruins were very interesting. Chichen Itza was probably the best restored. We got there very early before the hourdes of tourists arrived, which was good.

We spent a week on Long Island visiting my family in August. My niece Fiona loves swimming in the big waves there more than any other two year-old!

The view of our balcony in Bodrum. We spent three weeks there in June-July. Spent a lot of time fixing up the apartments, but they are looking really good now. (All painted fresh white with new wood floors.)

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.

Another view of the bustling walled city of Rhodes. Loads of tourists from everywhere!

This is me and Emre at Solar Beach, a beach club on the Black Sea at the end of July. It's just outside of Istanbul. Has nice sand and waves, but it is funny to see the huge oil tankers going by. Very fancy club though...

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.

Bobby and Katie got Engaged!

Bobby and Katie were in Turkey and he proposed in the Hagia Sophia on April 9th! They seem very happy and excited.

The four of us in front of the library at Ephesus. We stopped off for a tour on the way from Istanbul to Bodrum.

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...

Hamburg

Eda and Heiko took us on a daytrip to Hamburg. These are the old wharehouses along the river. It was a lovely, wealthy city.

Berlin

The renovated Budenstag building.

Construction

Berlin is one big construction zone... This was my third visit (before in 1996 and 2001) and each time it has looked completely different! A lot of the ugly 1960s buildings are being knocked down and the olders ones are being renovated. There are also loads of super modern glass structures.

The Wall

A short portion was left for artists, but most of the murals were covered by graffiti. This is a pretty desolate area. The wall surrounded West Berlin, so actually the "lucky" West Berliners were really trapped. 17 years after it was knocked down, the whole city is still a construction zone.

Museum Insel

This is a cool view of the S Bahn passing between the striking neoclassical buildings on museum insel.

Museum Insel

This is us on a bridge to Museum Insel (Island) where there are five impressive museums and the Berlin Cathedral. (Two of them are under construction though.)

We also went to see the Jewish Museum in another part of town, which was designed by Daniel Libeskind. Very moving/depressing/interesting...

Doesn't Emre look like the Cesar? This is at the Pergamon Museum where there are loads of statues and buildings from ancient cities in Turkey.

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.