Blogs from Middle East - page 880

Hello from Istanbul! What a city! We are leaving tomorrow morning, but we have had 2 very busy days here filled with kebaps, Turkish delight, and a whole lot of bargaining. Its an absolutely beautiful city, packed full of mosques! needless to say, it was all a little bit overwhelming, the men are quite interested in all of us girls, snapping pictures of us from behind, but everyone is really nice and the Turkish people are very hospitable. Doing my duty as a good Jew, I trekked all the way to probably the only synagugue in Istanbul (Turkey is 99.8% muslim). It was very non-descript on a side street and was unfortunately closed cuz I would have liked very much to see the inside, but i took a few pictures of the outside. We visited the ... read more

Sophie and I were invited to a cousins wedding on Sat the 5th. Weddings around here are very elaborate both for the bridal party as well as the guests. Sophie and I went to a hair salon close to the village of Kharhoura to get our hair done. How wonderful to have one person shampoo your hair, another blow dry it until almost dry and the head stylist uses the round brushes to style it while the other girl holds the blow dryer for him! All this for $5 American dollars! Afterwards we went back to the village to get ready. The bride was from the village so she was busy getting pictures taken in the gardens around the village. It was very hot and she had a very beautiful elaborate dress on but she continued ... read more

We crossed the small channel between the Greek island Samos and Turkey Asia Minor in a short time but waiting a long time to get things situated (İ'm using a Turkish keyboard and typing, slowly, with my mouth open. The biggest difference, the i which, apparently İ use a lot...} we crammed on with a large Italian tour group and were ushered off and into an ultra modern port burger king starbucks gummy bears so much to buy we couldn't find the exit but we did and walked to our hotel a re-vamped strong-hold/hotel for merchants on the silk road think extraordinarily large steps and thick walls to ward off ınvaders we eat breakfast ın the courtyard entertaıned by the kıttıes pouncıng behınd the expensıve turkısh carpets and scalıng ancıent trees after turtle doves (last prayer ... read more

Last night we had a nice Shabbat meal of fish and vegetables bought at the local market. The fish was a red trout from Gallilee and a sea breem from Eliat, near Egypt, both wild caught. Susan went for a walk and found she could easily walk to the Jaffa gate in only 15 minutes from the apt., she went by herself, I stayed home and took a nap before starting dinner. Our visit to the Shrine of the Book was interesting. They have an ancient portion of the book of Isaiah on display as well as artifacts dating back to the temple period. Today we are resting according to the tradition of Shabbat or Sabbath which is observed from sundown on Fridays to sundown on Saturday. Since almost no public transportation or private cars operate ... read more

Ok, have some time to sit and write. Well obviously on Saturday the 20th of June I got on the plane in Brisbane, then a 7 hour flight to Singapore, then a futher 7 hours to Abu Dhabi. At this point in time (plus time differences) I had no idea what day or time it was, but Chris and I arrived at Abu Dhabi and were picked up by his father who lives in Dubai. We drove to Dubai and went to sleep as it was early hours of the morning, then woke up only 3 hours later to get some sightseeing done of Dubai before heading off to the airport again to fly into Amman (Jordan). Unfortunately it was really dusty and sandy, so the sights weren't THAT amazing, but still pretty damn cool!!! I ... read more