Istanbul

Josh just asked, "If you could change anything about the trip, what would it be?" 

I honestly can't think of anything that I would have changed.

Not one thing.

Well, maybe skipping the Anne Frank House, but I will deny it if you ever tell anyone, and besides, one cannot go to Amsterdam without seeing it, or so I am told. One thing that we are both extremely glad that we did was take our little weekend trip to Istanbul with Lamar and Melanie.

View of Istanbul from Topkapi palace

It started out at this little gem. Josh and Lamar standing in front of the Sapphire Hotel (Hotel Safir) and our little $80 per night room. Thanks Lamar and Melanie for slumming it with the common folk!

View from our room

We toured the Blue Mosque

Josh standing in the courtyard at the Blue Mosque

and just a few more photos of the Blue Mosque that I couldn't leave out. Sure wish that I had the picture of both Melanie and Dixie in their headscarves.....moving on...Wow! Aren't  the arches and ceiling paints incredible!?!

We enjoyed touring the Dolmabahce Palace. It was built in the 19th century (1856) in an epic move to keep up with the European Joneses. Seriously. That's basically what our bus driver--I mean tour guide-- told us. Photos of the interior are "forbidden", but a little birdie was able to find a few to share.

Thanks, little birdie!

The second picture on the right shows the crystal bannisters on the staircase. The locals may be starving, but royalty has crystal stair bannisters. Sort of sounds like some of our royalty, whoops, I mean elected government leaders.

It was enormous, containing 285 rooms, 46 halls, 6 baths, and 68 toilets. Sure wish we could've got a few pictures of those. It also was covered with inlaid gold and carpeted with only the best in Turkish carpets, which are never called rugs.

Speaking of all things "forbidden", taking photos with the local cops was high on the "let's see if we can get away with it" list

But where were we? Oh yeah, the keeping up with the Joneses bit....

This was the original sultan's palace. It was designed to be less ostentatious as a way to show the sultan's piety. The Ottoman sultans lived here from 1465-1856. 

No, this isn't Disney Istanbul. It's Dixie standing in front of the main gate to Topkapi Palace.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that Sultan Mehmed II had this built? I think that Josh secretly idolizes the Sultan, also known as Mehmed the Conquerer. Mehmed was an interesting and brutal man. You can click here to read more about him.

more from Topkapi Palace. Definitely a humble, beautiful home.

We stayed in the old part of Istanbul that was once the Byzantine city of Constantinople. Constantinople's original walls were built in the 8th century BC in a set of interconnected walls separated by ditches and moats. You can see one of the inner walls next to the street we are standing on. We're not sure when this particular stretch of wall was built, but it's interesting to note that Constantinople's walls were only breached two times since they were built. 

We walked on this street several times. It was only a block or so from our hotel. 

The sites of Istanbul were amazing. We thought it couldn't get any better until we saw saw Harrison Ford touring the city.

Oh, wait. That's uncle Lamar.

My bad.

We loved looking at old buildings

and visiting Asia for the first time

Josh, Dixie, Lamar and Melanie overlooking the Bosphorous Strait from the Asian side of Istanbul

Dixie enjoyed shopping in the Grand Bazaar. Bet you didn't know that it's actually an Olympic sport. Just imagine a combination of combat shopping while performing algebraic equations and you will about have it. 

Wait? How many liras equals a dollar?

Advice from a World Travler aka Lamar:

"Josh, if you spend all of your time worrying about the cost of things, it will ruin the trip. 

Just RE-LAX."

Lamp shop in the Grand Bazaar

Turks are amazing sells people. This probably qualifies as the best quote from our Turkish shopping experience:

"You're gorgeous. Are you for real?" 

Okay, so maybe you had to be there, but it was hilarious. For some reason, the guys in the spice market thought that pick up phrases = sales. Sorry guys, hate to disappoint your sales figures, but they were good for a laugh! 

Dixie did buy pepper and chocolates at Hazer Baba's in the spice market. Can you see her in the crowd?  This collage also shows the entrance to the Grand Bazaar and the covered walkway between the stalls. It was hard not to get completely lost in the place!

and at the risk of beheading, we couldn't help but break out into a bit of silliness.  Of course, one would have to prove it first. I have to admit that it was with a sigh of relief that we landed back in the Netherlands with our heads still attached and no sign of Turkish prison in sight.

Istanbul's Hagia Sophia

Some of the sites in Istanbul are just too amazing to lump into a single post, and the Hagia Sophia (also known as the Ayasofya in Turkish) definitely was one of those. It literally took our breath away, but not at first. Sure the building from the outside was cool, and old, but the facade did not prepare us for what we would find inside. 

The Hagia Sophia was dedicated in 360 AD. The current structure was re-built in 532 and for 900 years served as the center for Orthodox Christianity until 1453 when the Ottomans took over the city and turned it into a mosque. Notice the minaret, the slender tower in the back. A muezzin, or Islamic religious leader, would call followers to prayer from that minaret.  The Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum in 1943.

 This originally had 12 sheep on it, representing the 12 apostles.

We walked into an enormous vestibule and were greeted by these doors. Notice how worn the marble foot plate is? We wondered how many thousands of people have walked across this threshold.

 Standing in front of the doorway. The room behind us is epic in size.

Main area. Byzantine Emperors were coronated in this very room.

view from the second floor

Christian mosaics plastered the walls and ceilings except where they had been literally covered over by a thick layer of plaster when the Islamic Ottomans took over the region. This is a sample of several of the mosaics that were created between the 10th and 12th centuries.

 Dixie standing near the mosaics on the second floor.

Melanie walking up the stair well's sloping floor to the second floor.

Josh found this little gem almost by accident. The rest of us had walked right by and out the doors  without noticing the art on the ceiling.

Istanbul's Basilica Cistern

We were in awe by the Basilica Cistern. It was built in 532 AD during the reign of Emperor Justinianus. 336 marble columns hold up the domed roof. The walls are made of a special brick and mortar mix that is waterproof.

If you look closely, you can see several large fish swimming in the water. I would guess that they were at least 20 plus inches long.

 Proof that we were indeed here and that we didn't just steal the images from the web
...or did we? 

 Medusa's upside down head on the bottom of one of the columns.

Simonis & the North Sea

Simonis is a sea food restaurant that came highly recommended. (Thanks Court!) It is a little restaurant on the shore of the North Sea in the town of Scheveningen, Netherlands.

 We realized, too late, that we didn't take a pic of our food. So you get to see the leftovers. 

Man, It. Was. Good.

I'm actually craving the grilled tuna and whatever the name is for the amazing dipping sauce...

Thanks, Lamar for bringing us!!

It's probably kind of silly, but one of the things on my bucket list for this trip, was to get wet in the North Sea. Now, by saying "get wet", I don't mean to imply swimming. I started out by trying to stick my finger in the water, but the camera and waves weren't cooperating. 

So off with the shoes and into the water I went after reminding Josh and Lamar that my expensive cell phone was zipped into my pocket. My own little insurance policy. Lamar said that cell phones are easy to replace. Drat.

Brr it was cold. Notice the little snowflakes falling in the air???

these are a few of my favorite things

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels

Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles

Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings

These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes

Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes

Silver white winters that melt into springs

These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites

When the bee stings

When I'm feeling sad

I simply remember my favorite things

And then I don't feel so bad.

Sorry about breaking into song, but I just couldn't get Julie Andrews voice out of my head as I thought of this next post. In fact, I'm singing the words right now to the song "My Favorite Things" (hope that makes you smile, Mom!) But, why, oh why didn't we get more pictures of those simple little things that we loved about Holland?? Here a few of my favorite things about our trip to the Netherlands.

Having fun with Lamar and Melanie 

Nieuwe Kerk "New Church" bell tower, Delft

 riding bikes to do shopping on the Langstraat

 sunrise from our bedroom

 the moist, cloudy days (my hair is still freaking out and is a static mess now that we're home!) and the green

garden wall on the Langstraat

shopping for groceries in Dutch

Leiden, Netherlands

Day 2 of our Holland adventure started out with Uncle Lamar graciously offering to take us to the town of Leiden. Our first stop was at Molen De Valk. "Molen" is the Dutch word for windmill, and "De Valk" is falcon. 

There were once 19 windmills built on the city walls of Leiden, but De Valk is the only one standing today. It was built in 1743 after replacing it's wooden predecessors that had been built in 1611 and 1667.

It was built to mill grains. The miller actually lived here with his family in the bottom two floors. 

It was briefly used as an observation post by the Dutch military in 1940, and still has bullet holes in some of the walls.

After visiting the windmill, we decided to head into old town Leiden. First stop, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities).  It actually houses the Egyptian temple, the Temple of Taffeh, which was taken apart in Egypt and reconstructed in the museum. The Temple of Taffeh was built in the 1st century AD and was given as a gift from Egypt. 

The museum also had collections from ancient Greece, Rome and prehistoric, Roman and medieval Netherlands. 

We also took a little stroll through town, crossing over a beautiful canal. We parked next to this little canal, twice. The first time was on purpose, the second time was due to a GPS error. (We drove around town and back to where we started. Thanks GPS!)

We toured the Pilgrim's Museum. The Pilgrim Museum was particularly interesting because it was a home that was built somewhere between 1365-1370. A lot of the homes on the street were built at that same time. The street looked a lot like the picture above (minus the canal). It boggled my mind to think that this building has been standing for almost 650 years. 

The museum tells the stories of the founders of New England. I had forgotten that many pilgrims had fled to the Netherlands for a time, and I'm sure that if I would have had the time, I could have found information about some of our ancestors here. It you want to read more, click here. 

So that I don't bore you further with any more details, here's a collage of some of the highlights from our day in Leiden, which is code for "pictures that mostly turned out".

pannekoek anyone?

I like food. That's not a surprise to anyone that knows me. But, I had seriously low expectations about the food that I would find in the Netherlands. I guess I was thinking something along the lines of bland British food. 

Now Turkey? My expectations were high. Everyone says Turkish food is amazing. So you can imagine my chagrin when I became utterly sick of kabobs and started craving my favorite Dutch food, pannekoek (or pancakes). Everywhere we went in Istanbul, vendors and restaurant owners would shout out "Kabobs! Kabobs! You want!"

It isn't that the kabobs are bad. Well, mostly. I would recommend avoiding the beef, which was more like ground up left over beef bits including some crunchy parts that I would like to forget about. However, the chicken was actually really good. It was just that after 3 days, I was ready for a change.

Here's a typical chicken "kabob" style meal with rice, grilled veggies, and pita bread and mini-coke

If food boredom wasn't bad enough, the liquids held a problem all of their own. I think that this little 7 ounce bottle of water cost somewhere around 5 euros. And refills definitely are not free. This ushered in a period of water rationing that left us craving American dining.

But things really weren't all bad. Belgium waffles, Dutch stroopwafels (a wafer-like waffle that is filled with caramel) and chocolate were all plentiful. Shopping for chocolate never got old.

Dixie shopping for chocolate in Belgium.

And of course, the Dutch make great cheese. Their gouda (pronounced how-dah) was yummy. I especially liked the pesto and truffle varieties. And, NO, truffles are not chocolate. They are a mushroom. 

Josh sampling gouda in Delft, Netherlands

But, my all time favorite? Well, second to the Belgium waffles, stroopwafels and chocolate, but that goes without saying, was the Dutch pancakes, called pannekoek. They are thin, more crepe-like than pancake-like. They serve them with everything from chocolate, fruit, and/or whip cream, to eggs, bacon and cheeses.  They also eat them all during the day. This was our lunch in Leiden, Netherlands:

Notice the meat on Lamar's plate? And this was my lunch in Delft. Gouda, tomatoes and who knows what else. It was YUM!

Melanie and Dixie eating lunch

So just in case you are interested, here's a recipe for pannekoek for you to try.

Dutch Pancakes (Pannekoek)

1 c flour
2 eggs
1 1/2 c milk
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp sugar

1. Combine all ingredients together in electric blender and blend at high speed for 30 seconds, or until batter is smooth.

2. Allow batter to rest at room temperature for 30 minutes before using.

3. In heavy skillet, melt 1-2 tbsp butter over moderate heat to coat entire bottom of pan, and pour in batter, tipping pan gently from side to side to evenly coat the bottom of the pan. Too much batter will make the pannekoek too thick, too little batter will make for irregular shaped pannekoek.

4. If desired, add thin slices of cooked bacon, thin sliced gouda, or apple slices. Cook for 3-4 minutes until the top of the pancake is dry and the bottom is golden brown. Carefully flip over and cook remaining side.

5. Serve warm. 

Topping ideas:
-currents, raisins, apple slices
-cooked bacon, thin sliced gouda, sliced tomatoes
-hazelnut spread, chocolate sprinkles, apple butter or jam
-syrup