Every city has its monuments, its churches and palaces, its prominent squares and avenues—and every visitor can easily learn how to find them. That’s true, too, for the most famous or most tourist-oriented restaurants as well. But...
Near the entrance of Istanbul's Topkapi Palace, once the home of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, we found the residence of another "royal family," the cats that are to be found throughout the city. The inscription on the side translates to...
Our visit to Topkapi continued after our lunch on a terrace overlooking the Sea of Marmara and more of the palace grounds. We had, in fact, reached the point of beginning to return to the beginning...partly because we had reached the innermost...
A visit to fabled Topkapi, imperial and administrative center of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years
On our first day in Istanbul, after arriving at 4:30 on a Sunday morning and heading straight to a nap we went for a walk to reconnoiter the neighborhood. What a neighborhood! Within 5 to 10 minutes easy walk we passed the Topkapi Palace, the massive...
Two Swedish airports have found a new way to relieve departing travelers of their unneeded local currency. A bank of videogames, set up at Stockholm's Arlanda and Goteborg's Landvetter airports have been set up to accept any currency at all to play...
Last summer in Paris, we visited an exhibit at the Institute du Monde Arabe, featuring cars and artifacts of the Orient Express and its mystique. A significant part of the exhibit, given the venue, focused on the exotic spell it had for Europeans...
One of the classics for visitors to Istanbul—and for quite a few Istanbulis as well—is a cruise up the Bosphorus, the 19-mile strait that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, and ultimately the Mediterranean. The Bosphorus is more...
The best-known active mosque in Istanbul, the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, popularly known as the Blue Mosque, stands next door to Hagia Sophia, which it replaced as the mosque of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire. It was built in the early 17th century, on...
Hagia Sophia is surely one of the most widely-recognized buildings on Earth, which is amazing considering that the world is so populated with other buildings modeled on it or even directly copied from it. Built as a Byzantine church, it became the...
The February President's Week break in New York schools is one of our regular travel times, and a welcome escape from bad weather...usually. We've given up on the idea of only traveling to warm places, but we did think that Istanbul, based on weather...
I've had these shoes for over 3 years and they've served me well. Comfort beyond my expectations. We've walked the east coast of the US, around Europe, Turkey and climbed mountains in Wales - together ! The crumbling pathways of Cuba and soaked...
This was our third trip to Istanbul, and we had already covered all the major “must do” tourist locations and several of the minor ones. Yes, Istanbul has some great restaurants, but it’s time to relax and pay some attention to...
Avanos is a small town in historic Cappadocia in Central Turkey with a population of about 35,000 people. Despite being small, this town has been famous for its making of earthenware pottery since the time of the Hittites in the...
Puzzle #69 was solved by MAD Travel Diaries and Roderick Simpson; PortMoresby recognized that the picture was taken from a balloon! These photos are from central Turkey, an area known as Cappadokia, near the city of Goreme. The geology is almost...