Turkey-Istanbul

We arrived in Istanbul at 4:00 am plump with airplane food and full of anticipation knowing that in just a few short hours we will be roaming and weaving around the streets of the greatest ancient city in the world….The city where the great Christian/Islam crossroad met taking no hostages. The city where a small strip of land probably changed the world as we know it.

Our hotel, little B&B, was just walking minutes from the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia. Imagine us as we turned the block and there Hagia Sophia sat since the 5th /6th Century.The architectural magnificence clutched us as we struggled to remember all those Byzantine stories and their sequence of events in world history classes of so many years ago. I thought fondly of my ninth grade teacher Sister Mary Thomas as she patiently taught me the love of history when all that really mattered was that very cute Mark Timmons who sat in the row to the right of me. Nevertheless, I must have grasped something she was teaching because I have a great love for history.

We loved little sardine like fish that are fried and prepared fresh. In Spain they are called Bocarones or something like that. We could never figure out what the Turks called them, but we sure were delighted to find them. But as you can see, they fish fresh for them every day, all day long. Nanci had a go at it off the Galata Bridge. Here in the resturant photo we put their little heads on our fingers like they were puppets and had a little fun over dinner. This was our 109th consecutive dinner in a restaurant. What is amazing is that we are never short of dinner conversation. I suppose when you can sit across from each other at dinner and never say a word, it is time to take a little break...not our case so far. However, we have digressed a time or two. Jejejejejje all in fun

Fishing with the boys!

Nice catch Nan......the best ever!!!

Peace is with me.

Just another same-o, same o market day

It is 3:00 am in chilly Cappadocia, and I am sitting on the toilet, using it as a familiar seat where I often retreat to on my irregular sleep nights which are not often, but they come at least once or twice a week. The sink becomes my work top desk. The hard part of this traveling “and I am not complaining” is my infrequent ability to sleep through the night. Years and years of waking up at 3 am or 4 am to talk with the UK or Europe when I was in business have ruined any chance of sleeping in for the most part. Old habits do die hard as I ring my hands in frustration, while Nanci sleeps undisturbed like a bear in winter. We have tried to ameliorate the situation by booking suites with a little separate room every now and then, but in these parts a suite is just one big open room with no lightening at the end of it.

So on to my story telling to write in stone our memories for those years in which we have the time to look back. Will we ever have the time to look back and will we even want to?

In our modest digs in Istanbul, the team there was so lovely and it seemed to me that they could not do enough to take care of us. The owner was a fatherly man giving us protective warnings, ideas on what do, and at every turn he went out of his way to make sure we were comfortable. It was a humble place, but it was home and they were family for week. With that in mind, we had an incident in language misunderstandings that confirms that world peace will never be possible. I have challenges managing my weight and I try to make some mindful choices during this trip such as no bread in the morning so I can make room for Turkish delights and rich coffees in the afternoon. A fair compromise it seems. The first few mornings a ton of freshly baked bread would arrive along with a typical Turkish breakfast of butters and honeys, feta, delicious little black olives, cucumbers, tomatoes and some processed mystery meat. And every morning, half the bread went uneaten…such a waste. So I explained to the waiter and then I wrote a little note which said, “For my plate no cheese, no meat and half the bread will be adequate.” The next morning, Nanci’s portion of bread , plus a half of loaf of fresh uncut bread arrived too. We laughed so hard that we had to take a picture. We thought it was so cute.