Blogs from Middle East - page 1071

The flight to Istanbul could have been better. I fell sleep before we even took off from JFK, but then woke up during the actual take-off. About an hour or so later they woke me up for dinner, which I'm glad they did, and from then until breakfast about 6 or 7 hours later, I was trying to sleep and not having the best luck at it. My right leg kept falling asleep and it was driving me nuts. I couldn't quite get comfortable. The flight was half full, and my original seat was 25G, an aisle seat in the 4-seat middle section. The only other guy in the row with me moved to a window seat, so I could have had 4 seats to myself to lay down. At the time though, I thought ... read more

Travelling to New York was nothing special. However... I did get to experience a Detla ammenity random wittnessed.... personal TV screens in which I could play trivia and poker with other occupants of the plane. That was something new to me. I won both poker and trivia by the way, followed by Will and then the parents. The Wyoming clan put everybody else in their place! That was great and fun, and then we got to NY! My previous examples of overseas flight can be summed up by one scenario. Me... in the middle...stuck between the wall and a very obese...and very foreign indiviudal (usually male). In which case the very large foreign individual commemces to either talk, snore, or fart the entire way across the Atlantic Ocean. Hence, causing me to feel uncomfortable, not hungry, ... read more

This is how it goes.. Life in this city is quite plain...the thing that makes it so special is it's brilliant colour. While walking on the strees you can never see the same colour in ever building. There are blue, pink, green, red, yellow, purple, orange..and so on and so forth. Streets are clean, poeple are young and smiling, everywhere the shops are calling you to taste their goodies, restaurants, chocolate shops, icecream corners...mmmmm.... One of my students once told me "If Eskisehir had a sea, it would be the perfect place to live in." and that's true. I can say that the only bad thing was the lack of a beach, a swimming pool or a sea. Besides that, it was very nice: no need to travel by car/tram/bus every day, because you can as ... read more

Turkish Delight Middle East » Turkey » Istanbul By libverApril 9th 2007Lib and Ver From Egypt, Alison, Adrian and I made our way to Turkey for 6 days of mosques, bazaars, whirling dervishes and copious amounts of apple tea. We stayed on the European side of Istanbul in Beyazit, probably a little too close to the sprawling Grand Bazaar as we kept returning to haggle over carpets, jewellery and funny hats. We spent our days eating all different variations of turkish delight (allegedly an aphrodisiac), catching the ferry down the Bosphorous, wandering through Topkapi Palace and learning about the inner workings of the palace harem, and sitting in the sunny co... read more

Well, well - who would have thought that I would end up back in Cyprus with my Egyptian husband? After the harrowing adventure in Cairo to get Ahmed his first ever visa to a European country, we were off on a shaky EgyptAir flight to the lovely island of Cyprus. There are certain places in the world that I feel are truly just great hangout spots (Alexandria, Venice, that cool restaurant on the Nile in Luxor where I eat at), and Cyprus is certainly in this category, too. Not one particular place - just the whole island itself. We started out staying in Larnaka for a couple of nights (by the way, if you're looking for a nice apartment hotel, stay at Petrou Bros. Apartments - lousy parking, but great location overall). From this city, ... read more