LA.

i'd originally meant to post about my trip to la before i left (thus the giant lack of posts - sorry!), but the days leading up to the trip were filled with lots of running around making sure i had everything and i ran out of time before i knew what had happened.  i got back last friday, but the ten days previous to that were spent in the city i called home for three and a half years - los angeles.

there was a wedding, there was some crying, pre-empted and followed by lots of eating, some shopping, and lots of meetings of new friends.  oh, and a trip to the desert!  and another engagement!  whew, a lot can happen in ten days, it seems.  it felt nice being back, despite the 105+ degree heat wave that hit la the same time i did - but no humidity!  score.  while there are definitely parts of the city i miss, more than that i miss the people and friends i had while in la.  but good friends and friendships are good like that though - it spans distances, across states, across boundaries.  and on that note - please come visit, west coast friends!

finally, our trip photos (warning: massive photo post).

a man who sells re-purposed salvaged metal in the slums outside istanbul, beautiful peppers at the local market, kids convening on the streets, most impressive display of eggs i have ever seen, mushroom cap fairy chimneys, ruins of a cave dwelling community, open to view from a collapse in the 60s, a (candid!) shot of a spinning toy salesman, a textile shop at the grand bazaar, beans and grains at the egypt bazaar, colorful houses in the slums outside istanbul.

to say this trip was a long time coming is an understatement.  a rather severe understatement.  back when i was a kid i had the fortune of having parents who loved to travel and highly encouraged traveling and learning from new cultures; by the time i was ten i had probably been to nearly as many countries as years that i'd been alive.  as i grew in age, so did the responsibilities and so became fewer and fewer the opportunities i had to travel abroad.  amongst some other recent things that have been striking an emotional chord with me, i really felt the need to travel, to go somewhere new that i hadn't been before, and since this was the first trip abroad with chris (who had only been to europe once before as his sole out-of-country experience), turkey seemed like a good fit for what we were both looking for.

balik ekmek, aka 'fish bread' preparation (on a boat, no less!), spices and tea at the egypt bazaar, a fish stall with that day's catch off the galata bridge, the best examples of the mushroom fairy chimneys.

the country is amazing. ah-ma-zing, seriously.  it's hugely historically significant, its "melting pot" of diversity is visible in every aspect of its culture.  we spent around nine days in and around istanbul, and a day and a half in kapadokya in central turkey.  kapadokya was a trip within a trip that was fairly spur of the moment, but i've never experienced anything like it in my life.  to simply say it was spectacular is a near injustice, it was that good.  i'll spare everyone reading the exact significance of kapadokya, but a primary draw of the region are the 'fairy chimneys' (or cave houses) carved into the mountains by the hittites; many of the cave houses were retrofitted back in the 60s for tourist lodges and hotels, so we got to stay in a real rock cave as our hotel!  how cool is that?  we also did a sunrise hot air balloon ride where we got to witness the most amazing view of the canyons and fairy chimneys, and we snuck in a trip to avanos, the pottery capital of turkey.  there's even video of a pottery usta (turkish for 'master') teaching me how to work a kickwheel while i proceeded to make the world's ugliest bowl (while also wearing the world's ugliest pants - watch the video and you'll see what i mean) - that was pretty amazing.

various shots of goreme/kapadokya, mostly taken from the balloon ride.

i picked a few of my favorites from our trip above, but in case you're interested, the rest of the photos can be found here, and videos of our hot air balloon ride and of me making a dork of myself at the pottery wheel can be found here.  looking through these now, i really, really miss it there.  someday i'll hopefully go back.

a new friend i made, in the most interesting shop of antique/handmade knick knacks in goreme.

back!

beautiful produce in an outdoor market just outside istanbul.

after twelve days of being away, we are officially back!  i missed the pets tremendously while away, and honestly it feels a bit strange and a little difficult to resume life as usual after having spent so much time in such an amazing country.  it feels weird not hearing turkish anymore and understanding what everyone's saying in american english, and i'm still a bit jet-lagged and on turkish time (they're seven hours ahead of EST).  despite the camera mishap, i still have six gigs of photos to edit and hopefully will get around to posting them sometime next week - stay tuned!

the stuff stories are made of.

hello, from turkey!  we're back in our hotel room after day number five of activities, and i just had to share the story of stories that i need to take this minute to unload.  

we've been here for five days.  that's five days worth of photos, five days worth of memories, five days worth of stories or 1.96 gigs of photos, to be exact.  as we walked up to the main dome in hagia sophia and after trying to snap a series of shots to later pin together for a panorama, my camera proceeded to tell me my memory card was full.  no big deal, right?  i sat down, tried to delete what pictures i could, then came up with the grand idea of taking my pictures in a lower res format so as to save disk space.  i went through my settings, found a setting called 'format', then checked the box that said 'lower quality' and hit 'okay'.  with NO warning, a progress bar started to fill and it was at that point that i realized what might be happening; i hit cancel mid-bar, but by then it was already too late.  that's right folks, FIVE DAYS worth of photos, 1.96 GIGS of photos, completely GONE.  ALL GONE.  i looked up from my camera at chris and very nearly started to cry, right there in hagia sophia.  what pains me the most is not the tourist shots that i can probably find a million of from a quick search on flickr, but i had some really great candid portraits of locals, the street "pets" and food snapshots - most of which i can't ever replicate since they were all of-the-moment shots.  my favorites were one of a kid playing with a street cat, two guys standing beside a street cat, one on each side, appearing as though they were all waiting for their lady companions, and a great portrait i snuck today just hours earlier of a local senior sitting across from us when we were on the ferry - all those photos, gone...in a poof.  with no 'are you sure?' warning from my camera, no 'this will delete all photos' - five days worth of memories, five days worth of moments caught and digitized, five days worth of a trip i'll never duplicate in my life...completely gone in that instant.  

it's time to get a new camera.

iyi yolculuklar! güle, güle!

that's the turkish equivalent of 'bon voyage', or so i'm told.  chris and i are headed out to turkey for my first "real" vacation since 2005, and my first international vacation ever without family.  with everything that's happened in recent months (the move, chris' career change/job search, other quarter life crises, etc etc etc) this vacation is quite honestly long overdue. i might update as i can with photo only posts and on instagram (thethingswekeep) as i'm able to, but regular posts won't resume until we're back.  we're gone for 11 days and we leave tomorrow!  i'm running around like a chicken with its head cut off to make sure we've got everything ready before we leave.  see you all in a few weeks!

off the coast of rancho palos verdes. i like it better here than i would have imagined.