Byzantine Baklava

Surprisingly, Turkey is actually the 6^th most visited to country in the world.  Most people are shocked to hear this.  Many have thought to indicate to us other European countries that they think of when they consider “most visited.”   Responding to those critics, we say, technically only a small portion of the country is in Europe, maybe 1/20^th.  Turkey is mostly Asian.  (If you look at this map, the area north of the Sea of Marmara is the European side http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/country/turkey.html).  Questions of how European it is aside, here are the reasons this place is so awesome:

Number 1:  Baklava.  Ok, so we’ve tried baklava at home in all of its flaky, honey, nutty glory, but did you know there is more than one kind?  We went to the flagship store in Istanbul.  It’s been serving homemade baklava for over 150 years.  There are only two things on the menu:  baklava and Turkish coffee.  They offer serious competition with Baskin Robbins for the number of flavours a store can advertise. How does one choose?  Well, of course you have to try a variety, and then run a couple of back-to-back marathons to burn off the calories.  Not an issue after you have had the coffee:  you can almost stand your spoon in it.



Karakoy Gulluoglu Baklava = Nom Nom

Number 2:  The Ceilings.  As a person who has a penchant for decorating, Aislinn has always enjoyed putting together a room.  A lot of effort goes into colours, fabrics, furniture, layout, etc. but never the design of the ceiling.  It’s a good thing, because the Turks have it down to a fine science.  Even the hookah cafes (think caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland) have intricately decorated ceilings.

Suliemaniye Mosque

Topkapi Palace Harem

Hookah Café near Grand Bazaar

The Blue Mosque

Number 3:  The Grand Bazaar.  Think the One of a Kind Craft Show meets Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, only with the insistence of the squeegeers on Spadina.   We’ve never seen such a variety of items for sale:  carpets, pashminas, hookahs, bedazzled hookahs, hookah attachments, chandeliers, mother of pearl inlay boxes, t-shirts, fabrics,  cooking supplies, pottery, coffee, baklava, jewellery, Turkish delight, evil eye amulets, antiques, the list goes on and on.  Here are a few pictures of some of our favourite finds:

 Turkish Lamps

 Turkish Textiles

 Turkish Mother of Pearl Inlay Boxes

Turkish Hookahs

The Grand Bazaar

Please note the decorated ceiling  (see Number 2).

Number 4:  The Food.  We were dropped off by our airport shuttle at a square that is an assault on the senses.  Buses, cars, motorcycles, and vans honk at each other from every angle, as you try not to step on the cats that entwine themselves in your legs, and avoid tripping on the steep cobblestone streets.  En route to our hotel, we started to get worried about the vegetarian food options as we passed the 50^th Doner Kebap stand.  Were we wrong!  Turkey has some of the most delicious vegetarian foods we have tried.  So much so, that Aislinn decided to go to a Turkish cooking class to learn how to make some of these dishes at home:  lentil soup, rose borek with spinach and cheese, leeks in olive oil, split belly eggplant, carrots with garlicky yogurt, purslane salad with pomegranate molasses dressing, and revani (cornbread sugar syrup cakes).   You’re all invited for dinner when we get back.  Adam will need the help.

Turkish Flavours Cooking Class

 Purslane Salad with Pomegranate Molasses Dressing

Lentil Soup 

 Rose Borek with Spinach and Cheese

Number 5:  Incredible mosques.  The 5 a.m. call to prayer is romantic and enticing but very difficult to sleep through.  When you go into the mosques and look at the architecture, you realize after several minutes that your mouth is starting dry from the jaw-dropping.   Then when you realize that the artwork is made out of individual tiles and not painted, you can hear Adam utter his favourite word:  “guffaw”?!? 

Several Famous Istanbul Mosques

The Call to Prayer

Number 6:  The Religious History.  Nothing sums this up better than the Hagia Sofia.  This museum was originally the equivalent of the Vatican for the Eastern Roman Empire (Orthodox Church).  When the Turks took over Constantinople including the Hagia Sofia, it along with the renamed city of Istanbul experienced an Islamic “makeover”.  The new mosque had everything you would expect in a cathedral in terms of layout and architecture, but instead of holy trinity frescoes, there was Arabic calligraphy in its place.  Since then, the mosque has been reclaimed as a museum and many of the Orthodox frescoes have been uncovered and restored side by side with much of the later Islamic art.  It’s quite the juxtaposition to see Arabic writing alongside Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  

 Awesome Juxtaposition

Uncovered Mosaic

Number 7:  The Star Wars Set Landscape.  One of our favourite things to learn while traveling is the myths that have been created by tour guides who are bored of the same old stories trying to ‘spice it up’.  One of those is the fallacy that Cappadocia, although Star Wars-esque in its landscape, was one of the sets from Episode III.  The soft volcanic rock landscape is dotted with ‘fairy chimneys’ which have been carved into churches and homes.  It looks like a settlement on the moon.  If Lucasfilm does do a postquel, this would definitely fit the bill.  We know this because we did some film set reconnaissance work for Mr. Lucas via hot air balloon.

View from our Cave Hotel

Reconnaissance Work for George Lucas 

Snow-Covered Cappadocia

Ballooning Over Cappadocia

Celebratory Champagne Toasting

Number 8:  The Non-Snow Covered Mountain.  As a Canadian who has avoided a full season of winter, the sight of a mountain entirely covered with the white stuff was eerily reassuring.  Upon closer inspection, we saw people walking on this white wonder with their bare feet; like some sort of reverse fire walking exercise.  The white stuff we learned was calcium deposits from the hot springs that were used for many years by the Greeks for their healing properties.  When you reach the summit of this mountain of solid white, you see the remnants of a spa town for the ancient rich and famous, including a massive cemetery for all the unfortunate souls who didn’t recover from the illnesses that brought them there.  Fortunately for tourists they have actually recreated this hot spring spa experience, complete with fallen pillars from the original town…I mean, what else are you going to do with an excess of ancient relics?

Just Swimming Next to an Ancient Pillar

Hard to Believe this is not Snow 

Enjoying the Cold-Looking Hot Springs

The View at the Top

Number 9:  Genuine Fakes.  The amount of products you can purchase in Turkey is mind-boggling.  And, everything is of course ‘genuine’:  "Miss, feel this genuine silk."  "Notice this genuine double-knotted wool."  "Yes, this is genuine Turkish pashmina."  "Sir, this is genuine handmade porcelain," etc.   When we came across a retailer who advertised exactly what he was selling, we felt he deserved to have his honesty commended publicly. 

Tells It Like It Is



Hmmm...

Number 10: One of the original Seven Wonders of the World: Admittedly, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus has seen better days but it was here.  We swear.  Also, the coliseum where the apostle Paul got the ancient equivalent of booed off the stage while preaching to the pagan Ephesians is nearby (See the Bible for more details).  Muslim conquests aside, he probably got the last laugh.  

Extensive Ephesus

The Coliseum at Ephesus

The Library at Ephesus

The Once Wonderful Wonder of the World - The Temple of Artemis

Other favourite photos:

The Basilica Cistern

Market at the Pier of the Golden Horn

 Buying Turkish Carpets

 Fisherman Along the Golden Horn Bridge 

This Man Loved Having His Picture Taken

Recently Discovered Underground City



Switzerland and Austria

A picture is worth a thousand words.  With apologies for our ongoing negligence in posting new material, we hope this is true.  Over the last three months, we have come to realise that though a month seems like a long time in which to complete a single post, every month is composed entirely of moments.  Procrastination is always easy in the moment. 

In an effort to eliminate this problem we have decided to divide our blog into more manageable chunks.  Instead of plentiful writing with a few photos for accents, you will now find plentiful photos with only a small amount of writing for accents.  By accents, we mostly mean context and possibly some of the better anecdotes.

As an added bonus, assuming the math above holds true, each blog entry will now contain something like ten times the material, condensed into only a fraction of the effort to read.  How awesome is that?

Switzerland

(In which we visit with our friends Evgueni and Cybele and their son Alex, with some interloping by Marc)

(Left to Right): Adam, Aislinn, Cybele, Alex, Evgueni, Marc

Evgueni, Marc, and Adam were in the same class during their Engineering studies at Waterloo.  At first meeting Evgueni appears proper, maybe even a bit reserved, with a cutting wit and a clear intellect.  His subtle Russian accent clearly marks him as an evil genius, the kind of person one wouldn’t want to offend by mispronouncing his name.  It was for this reason as much as for convenience that we took to calling him ‘E’ for short.  

E and Cybele moved to Europe a few years ago, arriving in Basel, Switzerland relatively recently after E sold his soul to the man for a job with big pharma.  Having seen the swanky campus where he works, the man pays well.  Cybele in the meantime continues working as a mother and an artist out of their home.  They live together with their young son, Alex, in a small flat in Basel. 

Marc has an afro that is in constant competition with his personality to see which can fill more of the room.  His intellect isn’t so much cutting as it is smothering.  Spend five minutes with Marc and you’ll find yourself enveloped in his world with a whole slew of new perspectives which you had neither anticipated nor with which you are entirely comfortable.  This is the mental equivalent of entering a souvenir shop to be polite after the shopowner kept insisting, “Don’t worry.  You don’t need to buy anything.  Looking is free,” only to find yourself on the way out holding a bag of extraordinary but strange novelties.  

Unsurprisingly, Marc rarely lives longer than six months in the same place.  Though recently his partner Gerid’s done a good job of keeping him more or less in the vicinity of Linz, Austria, most of the time. 

 

E and Cybele kindly offered to host us at their place in Basel for a few days with day trips to Interlaken and Freiburg, Germany along the way. 

Aislinn in Freiberg enjoying seasonal wild Pfifferlinge mushrooms with potato pasta with our stuffed Canadian travelling companions Benjy the Beaver and Smiley the Polar Bear

Evgueni and Alex admire the view while hiking the waterfalls of Interlaken, Swtizerland.

Along the way, we took a few days to ourselves to visit Lugano in Switzerland's only Italian county, Ticino.  Adam had made a point of included a trip here with Aislinn.  The views, food, and ridiculous levels of affluence are all stunning.  Picture Italy with German efficiency and Swiss landscapes and prices. 

Swiss Landscapes: View from near the train station in Lugano

Italian Lifestyle: A leisurely lunch on the piazza in Lugano

Marc arrived on our second-last day in Basel, joining Cybele and us for a day of touring the city including the special pre-Christmas fair and an afternoon visit to Evgueni’s workplace.   

Sunset from Evgueni and Cybele’s apartment

Basel with celebratory Christmas Ferris Wheel

Alex sees the Ferris Wheel

Aislinn and Adam on the Love-Tester at the Fair 

Hopefully it was just the freezing weather and lack of gloves that caused it.  We ranked on the bottom most blue bar.  The label was in German.  There may have been a ‘u’ with two dots over it in there somewhere.

Complimentary visitors cappuccinos on imported Moroccan furnishings at Novartis

In medicine, before any lecture, a doctor has to acknowledge all potential pharma and medical funding he receives that may cause a conflict of interest.  For the record, Novartis gave both my wife and I very very very good free cappuccinos on two separate occasions.  

Visiting E’s workplace, the appeal of working there is obvious.  Every part of the campus has its own theme from the imported Moroccan furnishings and thousand plus year old antiques of the visitors centre to the fake bird nests with hidden speakers broadcasting chirping on the main thoroughfare to the Frank Gehry designed building at the end of the street, and even the outstanding little detail below:

A Real Life Recreation of the Classic Optical Illusion: Is it a bird bath? Or two faces in profile?

Austria

Leaving Switzerland, we travelled with Marc back to Linz to visit with him and his partner, Gerid.  At the train station, Marc and Aislinn decided it would be fun to hide while Adam ran to buy some water five minutes before their train left the station.  Adam had no idea whether to board the train before it left or continue searching the station for them.  There may have been some angry words shared. 

Adam gives Aislinn the stink-eye

Gerid works as an educational coordinator for children’s groups at Ars Electronica in Linz, a museum dedicated to the intersection of science and art.  For an example of one of their more novel display projects check out this link.

Aislinn tries a tail that senses her movements and adapts to counterbalance them

A bite to eat at the Linz pre-Christmas Fare

Delicious Risotto courtesy of Gerid

An Austrian clothing catalogue, open to the “Canadian” page

Marc proves his Canadian origins by modelling for us.  He actually briefly worked as a model.  No, seriously.  If you’re surprised, don’t be. 

Leaving Linz, we travelled to Vienna, a city famous for its culture, in particular the many famous composers who lived and worked there. 

A night of Classical Music

Aislinn poses with her favourite composer Beethoven 

(not pictured but nearby: Brahms, Schubert, and Strauss)

Our Next Installment

Turkey, complete with photos should be ready in about a week.