Buket took me to the main mosque in the center of Bursa. This was my first time in a predominantly Muslim country so many of the routines and traditions were interesting and fun to see since it is so foreign to my own culture. The call to prayer goes out over the city five times a day and is quite a site to watch people mobilize to head to their mosque and pray and go through the washing ritual in the fountains outside before entering. The whole thing is carpeted so when you enter, they give you a little plastic bag for your shoes. The patterns of carpet and tiles reflected amazing craftsmanship.

The main mosques are used to tourists so before you can go in, they provide you with a skirt to cover your legs, and a scarf to cover your hair and shoulders. Ergo, we look like weirdos:

We went to Bursa’s famous silk market and then stopped in its plaza for a taste of super strong Turkish coffee. I just thought espresso was strong.

Cool little hipster coffee shop in the city center. As a friend recently commented about a different scenario, but still applies here, “It felt like you put on Instagram lenses when you walked in.”

Wow, look at this type! Not sure what it says, but I think it might be a monument Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal), the man to lead Turkey into modernity by defeating the Ottomans and declaring it a republic. He even made them all switch from writing in their traditional script to the Roman letters we use. I can’t imagine the response Americans would have if we were all of a sudden made to adopt a new alphabet by mandate. But they did, and have fully made their way into the modern world of commerce and industry. A great book about modern Turkish history is Birds Without Wings if you’re looking for a savory novel.

Seafood district in Bursa:

Awesome market in the city center:

The vendors were nice and let me sample stuff. There were foods I had never tried nor seen. Below are some dates (I guess we have them in America, but I’ve never eaten a fresh one not in a fruit cake or something).

I’ve sung a song about going around the mulberry bush since I was a child, but I’ve never actually seen one. They were tasty little things, kind of like a raspberry, only softer, sweeter, and a lighter taste.

There were artichoke hearts floating in parsley water at many of the stands. And super cheap! They looked delicious.

Buket’s favorite kebab restaurant with their unique style kebabs:

(those should be Turkish i’s with no dots on them in the title)…
The first place Buket took me to in Bursa (I was really impressed with her ability to drive in Turkey–traffic is insanity), was Cumalikizik, an Ottoman village from the 1300′s. The unique thing about this place is that it has been inhabited since then in the same buildings. Of course other cities are just as old, but stuff is usually torn down to build new development. These have been lived in for 700 years! The streets were narrow cobblestone corridors, hard enough to walk on, much less pull these horse/donkey-drawn carts up and down them like I watched an older man maneuver. When we entered the village there were a few tables set up with the locals selling some jewelry, honey, and other food products. In that sense it was there for tourists, but it didn’t feel like a tourist trap destination. People were just going about their daily lives. One little girl did stop to offer us a well-rehearsed rattle-off-her-tongue history of the village in exchange for Buket’s lira or two.

We stopped in a restaurant that the owner was very proud to show off. He showed us the upper rooms and insisted we take pictures of every corner.

Every house in Turkey had one of these solar-powered water heaters on the roof:

Buket’s sweet-talked this lady at her door into letting us peek inside her courtyard so that she could show me the traditional setup of these houses. They all have a courtyard in the bottom where some of the living and working is done, but all of the rooms and actual living space is upstairs above this. I loved how it was built right into the rock on the ground.

After a day of the beach and Ephesus, we hopped on an overnight bus for Bursa, Buket’s hometown. Right before boarding the bus at the station, Buket and I went around back to the public restrooms. As I exited, a man in a low-lit side room politely reminded me it was one lira for bathroom access. I paid him a lira then turned to leave. He said, “Sorry,…” and I thought, “What does he want now?!” When I turned around, I saw he was pointing to my dress and the fact it was tucked in my underwear. There I was in a country where some value conservativeness in your dressing so much so as to cover all but their eyes, and I’m walking around with my thigh hanging out of my dress. #Embarrassing.

Buses in Turkey are a real treat. I was anticipating the normal, mundane, no-leg-room routine, but was in for a surprise when I came to see that they are nicer than the mainstream airlines. They were spacious, clean, and organized. Each seat had it’s own touch screen in front of it with a slue of movie and music options. They periodically came down the isle serving tea and cookies. We got on the bus about 9:00 pm and around 1:00 am stopped at a mega-gas station with a cafeteria. At that point we’re in the middle of nowhere and the first thing I hear getting off the bus is John Denver’s “Country Roads Take Me Home” sounding from the radio outside. Simple flickers of home hints are always sweet. We arrived to Buket’s home around 3:00 am and her mom was already prepared with a fresh bowl of fruit for us, the first of much generous hospitality.

The next morning her mom made one of the most incredible breakfasts I have ever seen. I LOVE breakfast and always missed them in Spain. Breakfast is not a very big meal of the day there, maybe just a few cookies, bread, or cereal. This one in Turkey was like a Thanksgiving style breakfast, and what made it even more special was that her family’s business is fruit farming so they have miles of orchards that provided the fresh cherries and various fruits we ate. In the schmorgesborg were flaky bread pastries wrapped around spinach and feta, the traditional Turkish sarma of grape leaves wrapped around rice and minced meat, boiled eggs, tomatoes, cinnamon role-esque things with fresh clotted cream,  various cheeses, olives, and baklava…yum, yuM, YUM! Obviously I was hurting afterwards. It was even more fun to sit at the table with her family, including uncle and grandmother, a neighbor, and a friend. I think Turkey is the country whose food I have enjoyed the most. Obviously the others in Europe throughout the year had really good meals I enjoyed, but I liked EVERYTHING I ate in Turkey, from the tree sap ice cream to the many kebabs. I think I am just always drawn to a diet with lots of cheese, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and spices.

A brief break from posting summer travel blog catch-ups to share this sweet necklace I just got from Faunhouse, newly opened boutique in Auburn, whose logo I designed you can see here. It was made by Mississippi designers called B & G.

Four years ago while in school, I met a dear friend from Turkey, Buket (Turkish for bouquet). We’ve kept in touch all these years and realized that this year she would be home for a visit while I was looking for something to do in between my brother leaving and my parents arriving. I flew from Stuttgart to Izmir and arrived around 10:30 at night only to find that my phone didn’t work as I had hoped it would, and there were two terminals at the airport and I didn’t know to which one she was coming to pick me up. After an hour of running around and arriving close to a breakdown I found her! Kuşadası is a coastal town so we headed straight for the waterfront to grab a late dinner. Hands-down, Turkey has the best food of any country I’ve been to. Every last thing I tasted was amazing. This night we had lamb kufta, with much more lamb to come on the trip…yum!

Buket and her friend had been at this resort on the Mediterranean for a few days and I showed up for one night. One huge perk in Turkey was that everything was really cheap, so this place was a deal and included free drinks and huge buffet meals.

More deliciousness with lamb meat.

I found it very interesting that the trees in the cemeteries in Turkey are painted white a high as you can reach and they are left to be grown over, not well kept like in America. Not a bad thing, just an intriguing cultural difference.

They had rented a car which was very handy as it allowed us to be on our own schedule. However, her friend who drove has lived in England the last seven years and we had to keep reminding her to get on the right side of the road. Made it out narrowly with my life. After a quick morning of sun tanning, we packed it up and drove about 45 minutes out to historical Ephesus. It’s really hard to explain what it’s like to walk around a place so ancient. Yes, it’s in ruins, but from what’s left you can tell it had to have been a spectacular city. The architecture and details were simply stunning. And the fact that it’s up a long tree-lined road in the mountains with a view of the sea makes it all the more majestic. As it was June, I spent a lot of my time focusing on not passing out from the heat, but the rest was spent marveling at the ingenuity in building and planning, and trying to imagine the people who lived here 2,000 years ago.

This is the amphitheater where Paul gave a speech in Acts 19. I stood on the stage trying so hard to conjure the emotion of what it would have been like to see him speak. But alas, as in a lot of travel, sometimes that understanding and grasping can be a bit elusive.

Me, Sibel (Buket’s childhood friend), and Buket. Why we’re bending over like weirdos, I don’t know. Sibel has lived in Englad for the last seven years and commented that I was the first person she had heard speaking English enthusiastically. I think it’s an American thing-other people commented throughout the year that Katie and I were very expressive and enthusiastic and that they just weren’t used to people showing so much emotion. Granted, Katie and I are pretty easily excited about things, but we concluded that it was even more over the top in Spain because we were afraid people wouldn’t understand us/our excitement/our appreciation of something, so we over-expressed those emotions in hopes that they would get the point.

The famous library in Ephesus:

Public toilets from back in the day. The rich people used to send their servants down to sit on it to start heating up the seat.

Just outside of Ephesus is the house where Mary came to live out the rest of her life after Jesus ascended. I’m not sure how they know this, but nevertheless, it was cool to see.

Stuttgart was another car-themed leg of the trip so my brother could head to the Mercedes Museum — his main request when we were planning the trip. Sadly, the rain put a damper on a lot of our time in Stuttgart, but we still saw most of the city. I went to the art museum while he made his museum trip. It was under some exhibit shifting so there wasn’t much. On the way out I asked the front desk lady if she knew of anywhere I could see some Bauhaus architecture (obviously I slacked in the research before getting there). She sent me to a jack pot! I took the metro to the outskirts; we actually went above ground for a while through the woods, which felt strange in a city. Constructed for the 1926-7 Stuttgart Werkbund Exhibition, the Weissenhofsiedlung (I’m glad this is a blog post because if I were actually talking about it, I would have no clue where to start on that word) was a complex of buildings that was the first one of its type to then be subsequently used as fully functional buildings on a long-term basis. Architects, many from the Bauhaus, were brought into work their magic. There was a fantastic explanation of everything in the Le Courbusier designed house, now museum. One part of the exhibit explained: “After WWI, during a period of exceptional economic and political insecurity, culture underwent a rapid upswing. The times were characterized by radicalism and avant-garde experiments.” (Does this mean we’ll see this in this politically and economically insecure time?! How exciting! Send thoughts my way if you see evidence).

I always love learning about Bauhaus era design and have found much inspiration from their firm dedication to their ideologies and how they opened up design to a whole new world of possibilities. I appreciate that my design education was immensely based on the curriculum setup by Bauhaus educators. Their graphic design and industrial design are things of beauty. And while it was cool to finally go in a Bauhaus style structure, I didn’t love it like I expected to. I “get” that they were going for functionality and the ability to mass produce housing, but the house felt cold, stark, and in no way livable. Breaking with tradition is fantastic and cool to observe, but I think I much prefer to actually live in something a little cozier. Can modern be cozy?

From Modena we took 7 trains and 13 hours to get to Wengen, Switzerland and arrived in extreme fog and cold. It was quite the adventure keeping up with changing platforms and a few involved some running. Our last train was one on cogs that went straight up the mountain to Wengen, our destination village. Coming into town in the cold and fog felt like this leg of the trip was maybe a mistake and I feared it wouldn’t be as great as a few years ago when I went to nearby Gimmelwald. However, the next morning after a delicious breakfast in our fantastic ski lodge hotel, we walked outside to a wonderful view of huge mountains. When my brother, who doesn’t show much outward excitement, stopped and said, “Wow, that’s a big mountain,” I knew it was going to be good. The first day we hiked almost four hours up the mountains to Kleine Scheidegg (don’t hurt yourself saying that one–we had fun trying to even get close to the pronunciation of words around town!). Because I had to pack versatile items so that I could only have the carry-on, it meant I was hiking on snowy paths in Chaco’s and short sleeves with layers. I was worried I was going to have to break down and buy a ridiculously over-priced coat from one of the two stores, but thankfully once we got moving, it got quite warm. The views have you pinching yourself to make sure you’re in reality. You just can’t keep your jaw up awing at the beauty.

View from our hotel

The soundtrack of the hills is (aside from hikers humming Sound of Music tunes) cow bells and distant waterfalls!

A simple reflection of Swiss perfection. That’s why they make such great designers.

One photo, and then five minutes later:

Kleine Scheidegg. I cannot tell you how overjoyed my lactic acid-filled legs were to finally see it atop the hill. Needless to say, the next day we only took a short hike downhill and then trained back up.

All of the gardens were immaculate.

The valley below with Lauterbrunnen.

The Jungfrau, highest point in Europe.

We trained from Milan to Modena so that Jordan could see the Farrari museum in Marinello (and I could sit in the café while I waited). I miss train travel so much. If only it actually worked in the Southeastern United States, or most of the rest of it for that matter. I get my best thinking done on trains, watching the world go by. Modena was a cute little city, with bike sidewalks all the way around it and a visitors center with free bike rentals…score! Nothing really noteworthy, just some quintessential buildings with beautiful textures and colors.

After I finished my school year in Galicia, Spain, I traveled for the month kicking it off with a very cold night spent on an airport floor in Bergamo, Italy. It was the only cheap RyanAir flight I could find and when I booked it sounded like a great money saver idea. When the reality of staking out a spot on a tile floor in a tiny airport where all the seats were taken, and the door kept opening letting in cold breezes. I took the morning bus out of there to Milan and met up with my brother for two weeks of wonderful adventure.

One of the nice things about the trip was that I only had a 15 pound backpack with me. I wasn’t about to pay for luggage on that many flights and also wanted to be able to travel super light. It’s amazing to realize how little we actually need to live on, and how liberating it actually is to only have with you exactly what you need. I just learned to do sink laundry in the hotels and it worked like a charm.

We started in Milan, Italy so we could catch the last day of the Giro d’Italia bike race. The course that day was a time trial which meant there were biers to watch trickle in all afternoon, but it also meant there was no dramatic sprinting going on. We staked out a spot near the cathedral right where the riders came out of a turn. The pro to this is that they had to slow down enough so you got a better look at them/the bikes, but the con is that they were just flying at top speed.

Some good ‘ol American dorkiness.

The perfect caffeine shot.

Pizza: most definitely on my top-three list for my death-row meal.

Unabashedly still putting catch-up posts up from this past year.

Continued from trip with Amanda to southern Spain during my Easter week vacations from teaching in Galicia…
After Granada we trained to the lovely, pristine Sevilla. Granada had the mountain, rugged, hippi vibes, but Sevilla felt like the uppity J.Crew city of southern Spain. The architecture was daintier, with more of a sense of being “planned.” There were several points of interest around the city connected with America because it is the city from where Columbus set sail for the New World. There was a whole garden dedicated to the fauna brought back over with plants there being hundreds of years old. Because it was Semana Santa (the week before Easter) everyone had the whole week as holidays and were attending events all week. There were people everywhere dressed to the nines in suits and dresses off to parties. We found a breakfast spot that had the quintessential barista who was a hyper-energetic middle aged man who had the shift working like a well oiled machine. You come in and order and they slap in down in seconds. The coffee was rico and the toast with tomato perfect. They had a bowl of the biggest olives I’ve ever seen on the counter. Both mornings he gave us a sampler plate. The best olives I’ve ever partaken. However, I can’t recommend the coffee + olive combination.

One of the coolest things about being in Andalucia in Semana Santa was getting to see the Easter parades. They were unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I guess being a southerner I’ve only seen football-centered parades, or at least celebration themed parades. These were solemn processions of certain groups. The way I understood it was that each neighborhood or local church organizes their group to walk in the parade, they hire a band from a small town or nearby, and march with a saint or Christ statue from their church through the town, sometimes through the cathedral, and then back to its home church. Sometimes these processions take ten hours! Each parade starts a certain time so they are staggered continuously throughout the week. The people under the statue floats (I’m sorry, I know that conveys a homecoming float with crepe paper, but I can’t think of another word) switch out throughout the day to relieve the tired marchers. They were these turban-esque things to protect their heads. The bands play this soul-penetratingly solemn music. The women marching with them carry candles and some kids run up trying to get them to drop wax on these little foil balls. The streets look really cool the next day with little wax droplets all over them. My favorite moment was when we went up to the roof terrace of our hostel to get a better view of the parade (Zacchaeus style?) and met a Danish girl and her mother who offered to share their dinner with us. Eventually an Israeli guy living in London joined us as well. The conversations were captivating, especially with the Danish mom continually asserting that she’s a socialist and told us stories about how she had driven a van from Denmark to India four times and back spreading socialist values.

Lots of food in Spain had roquefort cheese…I found a new love!