Turkey – by Gunnar

We arrived in Turkey after a seven hour flight from Africa.  Our hotel was next to many famous churches and mosques including Haia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.

While exploring in Istanbul one day we got poured on.  It was raining so hard, the streets were flooded with huge streams of water and we bought some umbrellas from a street vendor J  finally it stopped raining and we went to dinner.  On the way back, we stopped at ice cream shop where they used a very long stick to scoop the ice cream.  With the stick, they would do lots of tricks and would tease the customers waiting for their cones.  It was very entertaining.

One day we met up with Ishan, the World’s Best Taxi Driver (add link) for a tour around the city.  Ishan is kind of famous as he has his own TED Talk and was Anthony Bourdain’s driver while he was in Istanbul and is featured in Bourdain’s episode on Istanbul called “No Reservations.”  Our neighbor Shannon spent 10 days with Ishan many years before he was famous and gave us his contact information. Ishan is hilarious. He also calls himself a great housewife J and invited us to his house and cooked us a delicious lunch.  On our day with Ishan we got to see parts of the city that most tourists don’t see.

One of the amazing things about Istanbul that blew my mind for sure is that the city is located in two continents, Europe and Asia!

We ate many delicious types of food in Turkey, but our favorite were the lamb doners and kebabs. The meat for the doners is cooked on a long stick with layers of meat and fat slowly heated. Both of these dishes are very traditional and we sometimes ate them twice a day! Yum.

After leaving Istanbul we spent one day in Ankara where we went to a very cool museum, The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations.  Some of the Bronze Age human models were so life like it was creepy – one of the men who was smelting metal in the display actually had sweat on his forehead!

After Ankara, we went to Goreme in the Cappadocia region.  Goreme was truly amazing.  For thousands of years, people built homes and churches out of the soft rocks in the area and build large underground cities.   The rock formations themselves were astounding. Years of erosion has created tall spikes called ‘fairy chimneys’. Hiking through the rocks valleys and exploring the empty cave dwellings was awesome!

We were lucky enough to do a hot air balloon ride one morning to see the sunrise.  It was super awesome. It was something I will never forget.

Our flight leaving Cappadocia to Izmir was three hours delayed and we didn’t get in the air until nearly 1am.  There were many crying babies the whole two hour flight, by far the worst flight of the entire trip. We stayed at a nice hotel in Izmir though and we slept in late and had a delicious breakfast.

From Izmir we went to the ruins at Ephesus.  I was really excited to go but it was a little disappointing.  It was such an amazing city at its peak, but there is almost nothing left.  The Temple of Artemis, one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World was there, but today only one column stands.  It was sad.

Overall, we were all very glad we went to Turkey.  It was one of my favorite countries to visit and I would recommend to travel there if you are looking for a family friendly vacation, definitely consider Turkey!