Day 2

On Day 2 we awoke and enjoyed our Mediterranean breakfast. Mediterranean breakfasts are somewhat different than our sweet American ones. They consist of a lot of olives, cheeses, sandwich meat, fruit, and eggs and bacon. Not many sweet donuts and baked goods. 

 Our view of Istanbul from breakfast

 Our tour didn't start till evening so we decided to explore the spice bazaar. You can see a whole variety of different things in Turkish bazaars

 Dried fruit

 Spices and teas

 Beans

 Soap

 Muffin cups

 Not sure what this is...

 Fresh pure pomegranate juice

 Sea thingys. 

 Sea sponges

Adorable little turtles. For the record these were for pets not food. 

 Fish

 Or baklava. Turks love to put pistachios in anything, baklava, in salads, on meat, in oatmeal, in ice cream, you name it. 

For lunch we enjoyed gyros, which have french fries in them strangely enough. 

Istanbul is the only city in the world to be on two continents, Asia and Europe. Our hotel was on the Europe side so we took a ferry over to the Asia side for the afternoon. 

 That evening (Friday) our tour officially began with a banquet at the hotel. 

day 1

So a couple of weeks ago I went on another adventure, this time on a cruise to Turkey and Greece. We were traveling with Vision Forum on a wonderful tour that followed the footsteps of Paul on his missionary journeys. In actuality we studied 3000 years of history. We studied the Mycenaean culture, we studied Alexander the Great, Constantine, the Crusades, even World War 1 and the Battle of Gallipoli. Throughout the tour we had the blessing of listening to many wonderful talks by Bill Potter, who, as Doug Phillips says, is one of the great untapped resources of the Christian community.

We arrived at our first stop, Istanbul, in the afternoon. Since we arrived the day before the tour officially started, we had some time to explore the city on our own, apart from the larger tourist attractions that we saw later with the group. This turned out to be a great experience, giving us the opportunity to see the city in a way that many visitors don't have the time to.

I don't really care for the JFK airport because of how crowded it is, but at least on this visit we enjoyed a lovely sunset.

My favorite layovers are ones in countries I've never visited so I can add another country to my list of "visited" countries. Some people wouldn't count this since I never exited the airport but I do. 

The Netherlands, check. 

Turkey isn't the prettiest of countries. Every part I saw was dry and brown. 

Landing in Istanbul

Modern day Turkey

Olden days of Turkey in the modern days

The view from our dinner table, a rooftop restaurant overlooking the busy harbor.

I had fun with this picture because I shot this picture through glass so I got what was in front of me but also the reflection of what was behind me. 

The menu 

Our dinner. 

Three of us ordered "fish for three" and from our understanding the waiter said in broken English it would be fish and chips. Either he confused his words or he meant the fish would be cut into chip-like pieces. Needless to say we couldn't finish all the fish. The meat was cut off and put into the bowl but the skeleton was fried and left to "decorate" the platter. 
 

Turkish Delight in Turkey. Personally, I like American Turkish Delight better. In Turkey it wasn't very sweet and a lot chewier than I'm used to.  It was readily available in all sorts of flavors.

Muskoka in Summer