To Turkey and Back

It took us a lot longer than we had planned to make the online video of our trip to Turkey. You can also watch it on a bigger screen at our video blog (http://darcyandmichael.blip.tv). Images from the video doesn't do justice but hopefully it captures a bit of what we saw. We bought a few things with the more expensive items being a carpet (of course), drum, ceramic plates, and silk. We didn't know that apple tea was so popular in Turkey. More so than Turkish coffee, to Darcy's surprise. ;) Trip highlights for me were the Hagia Sophia and the Green Mosque. But we saw many wonderful places.

The big drawback during the trip was that poor Darcy got very sick with the flu the night we departed Abu Dhabi. She had no appetite and was very weak and tired for most of the trip. It was also frustrating for her as she wanted to do a lot of exploring but she didn't feel well. But we did see the important things that we had wanted. We do want to go back and see more. Ideally we'd like to take a trip every spring, summer and fall/winter.

The weather has heated up here daytime highs are approaching the mid 40s centigrade. I got into our car last weekend and took off the windshield visor and the car's temp inside read 51 celcius or about 130 farenheit. The humidity is still quite low - like being in Arizona. But it will get miserable here when the humidity comes. The windows will start crying as the high humidity causes condensation to stream down the windows outside and obscure your view. A small price to pay I guess for living in this part of the world.

We let our Gulf News newspaper subscription lapse a couple of months ago but Darcy signed up on a couple of its news feeds. One municipal story is about our fair city improving its infrastructure. Abu Dhabi will apparently open its newest public beach on Canada Day (July 1). But things that open here seldom mean that they are even partially operational. We've been tracking progress on this beach from our apartment bedroom window and there is a lot of work to be done! Work began in earnst last October with several bulldozers digging up the sand one night. But work soon slowed to a crawl. The photos in the article are showing the most developed beach areas. They show the flatest stretches of "beach" with several unwrapped palm trees. I don't see how it can pass health and safety regulations in seven weeks.

The housing prices continue to escalate in Abu Dhabi. It looks like we arrived here on the cusp of the escalation. A table in this article suggests that we should be paying upwards of 100,000 AED per year for our three bedroom place. The situation seems desperate for many people with lower incomes. There is a sad story about the living conditions for bachelors. Check out photo number 4 from these shots that we submitted by the public. Not much rain fell in Abu Dhabi but it was cloudy last week. We learned that this was the result of cloud seeding!

I'm still taking the Arabic language classes at work. The class has dwindled in size but it is interesting. I hope that I can retain some of what I've learned as the class ends in a month. Ma'Salamaa...

Success at last!

So, booking our hotels in Turkey has been more "interesting" than we anticipated. Our first choice hotel in Istanbul, the Empress Zoe, was already full by the time we tried to get a room there (our travel guide advised to "book well ahead"...with 2 months to go we thought we had enough time but apparently not!). We chose another Istanbul hotel, plus a hotel on the islands and a hotel on the Asian side of the water, and tried to book through their online reservation forms. No confirmation, no reply. We tried calling to follow up, but couldn't get through. We tried emailing the email addresses posted on their websites. No reply. Michael got referrals and information about a travel agent here in Abu Dhabi and one in Turkey, but even they would not respond to our calls and emails!

This afternoon, however, we learned that to dial into Turkey you need not just the country code, area code and phone number, but also an "international dialling code" unique to the country you are calling out of. We've never called a country that required one before, so we hadn't realized we needed it. After looking up that code the phone numbers for all our hotels suddenly worked like magic, so we were finally able to talk to live people and reserve our rooms.

In Istanbul, we will be staying at Turkoman Hotel. This hotel is close to our first-choice location and close to the big attractions like the bazaar, the blue mosque, and Topkapi. Then we will move to the islands for one night, and stay at the Halke Palace Hotel. After that we will ferry over to the Asian side and spend two nights in Bursa at the Efehan Hotel.

We are greatly relieved to have our rooms booked after 2 weeks of trying. We will be in in Turkey over ANZAC day, so even though the main focus is Galipoli we assume it is a high -demand season all over. We were starting to wonder if we were going to have to sleep on the street!

As for the rest of life...we attended a presentation on the ABC's of Carpet Buying hosted by the American Womens' Network this past week. We now have a better idea of some of the things we should be looking for--and watching out for!--when carpet shopping. We also went over to Pat's Antiques Exhibition this week. The woman who owns this business shows her wares a couple of times a year; some are small touristy things that you can find many other places, but many of her things come direct from Oman. We decided to splurge a bit and buy an Omani Mandoos (marriage chest). Pat said she believes this chest is between 80-100 years old. The decoration is done with hammered metal and metal studs and is quite beautiful: