Tag Archives: Turkey

Turkey: Land of Home Furnishings.

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I don’t shop for shoes, I rarely shop for clothes, but I love shopping for my house. I’ve always been quite focused on one day having my dream home and Turkey is where I’ll come when I win the lottery. The shops here are like Aladdin’s Cave. Everything glows, sparkles or looks soft and touchable. It’s all in either bright, rainbow colours, like the lamps or deep earthy reds and browns, like the carpets. God, just writing about it makes me want to grab my credit cards and get out there.

Not only that but it’s so *easy*. You like this lamp? Sure it looks huge but we’ll ship it for you! DHL! FedEx! Straight to your door! The more you buy, the cheaper it gets… come on lady, this would look great in your house! Now have some apple tea, sit down and we’ll show you everything we have.

The last few days of our tour have involved trips to bazaars, lamp shops, carpet factories, pottery warehouses with beautiful plates… it is a soul wrenching experience for me to say no to something that I think would add to the vision I have for my place.

Carpets galore!

Some things are easier to say no to than others – like the 20,000 euro rugs that we watched being hand woven (some had over 1000 silk knots per square centimetre).

Look at that detail!

Bug to rug!

Apart from my few trinkets I think the main thing I’ll be adding to my lifestyle once I get home is Turkish tea. I’ve never really enjoyed tea and only briefly drank coffee but Turkish tea is right up my alley. Tiny little glasses of what is essentially hot apple juice but made from a powder. This is something I could get on board with.

Apart from breaking all kinds of biblical laws about coveting Turkish people’s handicrafts, we took it somewhat easy on our last day in Cappadocia. I’d show you photos of that but I’m pretty sure you can imagine what 3 people surfing the net for 8 hours looks like. So instead here’s a crappy photo of our hotel, taken form a bus rather than, say, me getting out on foot and taking a decent one from the road.

Don’t worry, with years of practice you too can take photos this awesome. Never forget – a light post adds to ambiance.  Our room was in that cone of rock.

Here’s a bunch of loosely-related photos that I want to show you from our three nights in Cappadocia.

Alien landscape.

So many cats in Turkey.

All the epic views!

On a 30+ day I want to sit at a table in a stream.

Our tour guide looked like our friend Leah and had the same beautiful smile and bouncy attitude.

Evil eye tree!

Turkey: Cappadocia, Pt 1

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Firstly, let me begin by saying it’s Cap-ah-doe-kee-ya. I hate reading words and not knowing how to say them. Like the town we’re staying in – Goreme. Which I’ve only just worked out is ‘Gor-eh-meh’, not Gore-eem or Gor-eh-may. Urgh. Turkish is not so easy. Fortunately, language aside, the country seems to be about as well set up for ignorant tourists as Thailand and people here speak many languages. Like our hotel manager who speaks Turkish, English and Japanese (and that’s just what I’ve heard) and our tour guide who spoke Korean as well as English and Turkish. Being monolingual overseas is always a bit embarrassing… I think I’ll start telling people I speak a bit of Swahili – they’ll never be able to test me!

But back to Cappadocia. I wanted to come because our friend, the delightful Ms Muppet, recommended it so highly and she was right – this place is like some kind  ‘Labrynth meets fairyland in the desert’ landscape. The photos will tell it best.

Pigeon Valley at sunset.

Unfortunately Luke has now come down with the same sickness I had and spent the day on the bus suffering greatly. I felt a bit sorry for everyone else.. there’s nothing like being forced into a confined space with people who are coughing and spluttering (I’m still a bit sick too) while you’re on holidays and really not wanting to get ill. I tried to save my great, honking, nose blowing for outside the bus but… well, it wasn’t pretty.

What else wasn’t pretty was me having a panic attack at our very first stop.

We were scheduled to visit an underground city and I didn’t really have any qualms. We lined up, went down a narrow flight of stairs, turned a corner and some part of my brain screamed ‘GET OUT OF HERE’ and I muttered ‘I can’t do this’ to Luke, back up and raced out towards the light, adrenalin racing, almost bursting into tears.

I have no idea where this comes from – I’ve never really enjoyed confined spaces or caves but I think the super-narrowness, and knowing we’d be going down 8 floors just triggered something primal and I could barely hold it together to get out. At least I know to avoid those situations in future! I spent half an hour sitting on some grass, patting a dog that, apart from being white rather than black, was the spitting image of my dog, and generally cursing myself for being a wuss.

Everything else we did was fine though. We went for a walk down and along a canyon, had a nice lunch by a river, climbed to some fairy chimneys and saw the landscape that inspired Tatooine in the first Star Wars movie (scenes eventually filmed in Tunisia because the Turkish government at the time was monumentally short-sighted and didn’t give them permission), saw some epic views over landscapes that have barely changed in centuries and just generally soaked up the foreign-ness of it all.

Near the place that inspired Tatooine.

When we got back to the hotel Luke fell into bed and Lucas and I stayed up blogging, got some dinner and were serenaded by the sound of dozens of cars honking their horns because a wedding party arrived here and then left. We told the hotel owner that people only honk their horns in Australia when they’re angry and he laughed. “Cultural differences!” – yes, and thank god we live in a place where if you’re happy and you know it you don’t make a huge amount of noise. Apparently there are many weddings here on the weekends – it’d drive me mad!

The wedding car.

Speaking of our hotel, we’re staying in a fairy chimney – our room was carved out of a cone-shaped spire of rock. Pretty neat! This is what the hotel looks like. I think the first room photo that comes up on their header is our room. We had a big terrace in front of our room and one morning I counted 25 balloons in the sky. sometimes there’s over 60!

Turkey: Istanbul

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After six weeks in Africa on what I came to think of as the ‘plague truck’ and not getting ill, I was most dismayed to develop a cold and cough a couple of days into our stay in Istanbul. I didn’t really get the most out of the city, particularly since we stayed an extra two nights after Nikki and Leigh left, just to see more stuff. Still, we did make it to a few notable sights and the place certainly made a good impression.

The view from our first apartment.

The weather was pretty good – a trifle hot but it was August after all, and the nights were cooler. Our first apartment had 70 steps to climb (and me with 20kgs of luggage), so I was very happy that our second place was on the ground floor. We chose the ‘Cheers Hostel’, very close to the Aya Sofya and the Blue Mosque. Mosques in Istanbul were much quieter than Dar Es Salaam and provided more of a nice touch of  distant foreign flavour rather than a blare of tinny screeching at 4am.

In the ‘old city’ where we stayed at Cheers, there were some really beautiful buildings. Turkish people know how to go to town with colour and I’ve been totally inspired with regards to home furnishings and craft projects for when I get home.

If unicorns became architects they’d design houses like this.

At night all the lamp shops and bars with lamps and just general abundance of lamps made the place look magical. I may have even bought a few lamps myself, but about 97 less that I actually wanted.

Lucas, Luke and I decided to buy a ticket for a ‘hop on hop off’ bus to see more of the city. It was a bit rubbish, to be honest. The buses seemed to run in different directions each time we got on so there was some back tracking and the recorded commentary was dreadful. For a city with three thousand years of history you’d think there’d be something interesting to say but I can remember almost none of it – and usually trivia sticks in my mind. Heck, with an hour on the internet *I* could’ve done a better tour.

Every time I saw the Istanbul horizon I thought of football because of the pairs of minarets, which is ludicrous because I don’t even think about football when I see people playing football.

However the tour, for a small extra cost, came with a boat trip that we took in the evening. Despite looking like we were going to be crammed aboard a boat like sardines into a can (although that’s a bad simile, because if the can sank the sardines would’ve been fine, unlike us) it turned out that there were multiple boats and the view was great and the guide was ok too. Although I was feeling rather sorry for myself by this point and fell asleep for part of it, the boat did go under a bridge that was huge and did fantastic light displays every half hour with a huge number of LEDs. We’d seen it from our Taksim apartment but getting to get right up close to it was excellent.

This photo does it no justice at all.

Apart from that I basically slept most of the days away or dragged myself around like a snot-producing zombie. One of the things I did quite like was the Basilica Cistern, a huge cavern underneath the middle of Istanbul which was, as the name suggests, a water storage area.

About 1500 years old, it shows how we really don’t make things like we used to. Plus there were big fat fish swimming in the metre or so of water under the walkways. They were a bit creepy. Apparently the place was used in ‘From Russia With Love’, many years ago.

Apart from that Istanbul was notable for the vast number of cats everywhere, the fact that everyone’s brother/cousin/uncle’s-father’s-former-roomate-in-college had a carpet shop we should definitely visit, and the foooooooood. Turkish food is great – and dramatic. They do this thing called a ‘testes kebab’ (yes, I know what you’re thinking, but no!) which is a casserole cooked in a clay pot and then the pot is broken when served. We have also been loving the turkish delight and baklava. I’ve always thought baklava seemed like a good idea but never really had much of it. Until now!

On the topic of food, but only just, Lucas and Luke became addicted to something I dubbed the ‘squishy burger’. These were sold at street side kebab and sandwich vendors and would be stacked, pre-made in a bain-marie. They looked … well, you can see for yourself.

Bun, meat and tomato sauce, left to sit in a glass cabinet all day. It’s hard to believe nothing went wrong.

Not exactly appetising. But they were super cheap (the equivalent of $1 each I think) and I’m ashamed to say that I, too, thought they tasted alright. I limited myself to a single one but the boys had at least one a day, by my reckoning.

I’d like to assure all the parents out there reading this that we ate this kind of thing more frequently:


Farewell drinks with Nikki and Leigh.

Next stop: Cappadocia!

Turkey: Istanbul

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Although I’ve got a bunch of things left to write about Africa, here’s a few first impressions of Istanbul and a little of what we’ve done so far so our parents are up to date.

We caught the red-eye from Nairobi airport, which partially, and quite spectacularly, burned down a few weeks ago.

Photo courtesy of euronews.

Unlike everything else in Africa, authorities managed to get it up and running again within days and so our flights were on time and everything ran smoothly. We did get there several hours early, but due to the wonders of technology we had plenty of entertainment watching David Attenborough Africa doco’s. If you haven’t seen ‘Savannah’ and the rest in the series I highly recommend them.

All five of us slept through pretty much the whole flight and missed the evening meal, which is almost unheard of for me. When we landed I felt almost normal. We arrived in Istanbul at 10am but couldn’t check in until 2 so we perused duty free,  I drank an iced chocolate from Starbucks that was as big as my head and we used the internet until it was time to get a cab.

Everything was so quick and painless and as the scenery slid by we marvelled at how clean and modern this place is. Cities on hills always have a special charm and Istanbul, or at least the part we’re in, seems to be nothing but hills.

We found our accommodation without a hitch, and apart from the 70 steps to get to our top floor apartment, it’s pretty cool with a small kitchen and a stunning view over the Bosphorus to Asia.

We unpacked a few things then walked up the hill through little alleys lined with cafes and shops to a main road that runs to Taksim Square. It’s Istanbul’s equivalent of Trafalgar Square, I suppose. A big open paved area where tourists and birds gather, people sell food on sticks and there’s not much shade. The boys marvelled at the variety of kebabs on offer and then we walked back, stopping along the way to get bits and pieces of food to snack on later.  We’ve all been looking forward to the food here – having all the food cooked for us on the tour was great but it was all the kind of food you can cook easily in large quantities. I’m so happy to be able to buy small, tasty snacks like borek, olives and cheese. We’ve also bought some fruit that isn’t bananas or pineapple – hooray!

View from our balcony.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to head to the Grand Bazaar and whatever else I can fit in. There’s also a pile of belongings to be sent home so my pack doesn’t weigh as much as a baby elephant.