The Next Adventure

Our last day in Turkey before we fly home! We left Ankara early, headed to Istanbul. One last stop at a rest area for lunch and for some, shopping. This was a pretty nice stop, there was a decent restaurant with a wide variety of food at a buffet, cafeteria style. The salad section looked so good I had to take a photo of it. Another section was a sit-down restaurant with menus and waiters to take orders. Next to the restaurant was a store that sold mostly food items. There were Turkish breads, different types of olives, jars of preserves and sauces, dried fruit, nuts and more. Lunch and shopping break over, we got on with our journey. We knew we reached Istanbul by the stalled traffic on the roads. Some of us were dropped off near a pier for the scheduled cruise on the Bhosporus. I have done this cruise years before, and thought it may be different. It was not, in fact the cold and cloudy day made picture taking challenging. The condition of the boat was not great eithe...

Our last destination before returning to Istanbul: Ankara, the capital of Turkey. It was a bustling modern city. We drove in from Avanos and stopped at a shopping mall, of all places, for lunch. It was easy to park a big tour bus, plus there was variety in the food court for the entire group. The food court looked very much like one in the US, there were even Subway, McDonald's and Burger King! I walked around twice before deciding on an adana kebab durum, a wrap that came with lentil soup and bread. It was very good and cheap (229 turkish lira or 7 dollars) My friends decided on turkish pizza, one with mashed potatoes and the other with cheese. After lunch, we went to visit the Anıtkabir, i.e. the Mausoleum of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey. There were a lot of people there since it was a weekend. It was a very impressive and symbolic place. I joined the line to go into the Museum where Atatürk's personal's items wer...

We started the day with a visit to a ceramic factory in Avanos. The ceramics are made from red clay found in the region. The clay was kneaded traditionally using the legs to turn a flat wheel (see clay representation of this, 2nd photo below) under the feet. A master crafsman demonstrated how the clay was shaped and molded it to the desired shape, in this case, a traditional Turkish wine flask. He made pieces of it right in front of us, and joined them together to form the final shape. The flask would would then be dried and fired in an oven. After that it would hand painted, with the final product looking like the 3rd photo below. There were so many beautiful intricate pieces in the seemingly endless rooms adjoining the main showroom. Flasks, pitchers, urns and jars, as well as bowls. I love ceramics, and had the opportunity to see different ceramics produced in several countries: Italy, Portugal, Poland and Turkey. I particularly like the more traditional Turkish d...