Turkish Holiday

It’s been a long time since Katherine or I have posted to this blog. So long that I wonder if anyone is still out there. I guess that’s what you get when you wait a full 3 months between postings. But, time flies when you’re thawing out.

We have been quite busy in sunny Moscow lately. And we have a lot of news. We’ll do this chronologically and slowly work our way back to the present. Back in May, we finally took our 7-month belated honeymoon. We took two weeks off and shot down to Turkey and Greece to enjoy the non-Russianness of the South. Our trajectory, in a nutshell, was as follows:

Bodrum (coastal party town) 2 days- Great B&B owned by Italian/Belgian couple
Isle of Rhodes (old Greek town) 3 days-Beautiful old town, bought icon, saw ruins
Kas (remote coastal town) 3 days-Unbelievable scenery, great breakfasts
Antalya (large coastal city) 1 night-Not that remarkable
Istanbul 4 days-Too much to put in this space

Some of the highlights of our trip were:

-Our afternoon in Kekova where we floated over a sunken city from sometime B.C. in a hired boat before buying a 200 year old Turkish rug in a little fishing village.

-Walking along the beach at Olimpos and then through the ruins of an entire city from sometime B.C.

-Our three days in Kas. This is where we contemplated buying property on the peninsula looking out on a nearby Greek island. We stayed at a beautiful resort called Hotel Villa Tamara: great staff, great food, great location.

-Taking a ferry up the Bosphorus in Istanbul and then walking over a bridge from Asia to Europe.

-Touring the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sofia.

-Exploring the area between Galata Tower and Taksim Square on the European side of Istanbul.

Interestingly, on our first day in Istanbul, we took shelter from the relentless street rug-hawkers in a rather classy looking art store near one of the main tourist markets. Inside we found a tasteful, subdued store owned by an interesting couple from Istanbul. Their store is called Sofa and it so happens that they are friends of the Deputy Chief of Mission at Embassy Moscow, who is a great lover of Turkish art. Because of this connection we were treated very warmly and we returned several times to chat. They made restaurant reservations for us and gave us some very good advice.

We left Turkey after 2 weeks there, marking it high on our list of possible future posts.