The Apartment
We did it. We finished the apartment. Renovations have been completed, walls have been painted, and art has been distributed. This is our safe haven, our sanctuary, our respite from travel. Now, when we’re on…
DTour To AgriCulture
Chicago’s most obvious benefits are Chicago-centric: museums, galleries, restaurants, neighborhoods… The less obvious benefits are regional. Chicago is hard by a ton of really interesting places and beautiful sights. The Indiana Dunes are an hour…
The Old City, And How It Got Its Name
The Old City is home to many of Istanbul’s greatest hits: Topkapi Palace, the Hagia Sophia, The Blue Mosque, and the Grand Bazaar. The problem is that every one of these locations is on the…
Kapadokya: Land Of Fairies
Or, as it’s Anglicized and better known, Cappadocia. Ground Zero for Instagrammable hot air balloons. If you know us you’ll be unsurprised that we didn’t go aloft. What may surprise you, and certainly surprised us,…
Strapping On The Bible Belt
Turkey has some serious Christian history. Constantine, who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity in 312, established Constantinople as the Roman capital in 330. That attracted a lot of Christians to Turkey, but there was…
Ethnosports
It’s weird to have a multicultural experience and not know which culture you’re experiencing. But that was Istanbul’s Ethnosports competition. I’ve since homeworked my way to a general idea of the origins of each of the…
… Not Constantinople
We keep going on about how the places we’ve been visiting are so old. “Ooh, Guanajuato dates to the 1500s!” “Holy shit, Marrakech was founded in 1070.” “Wait a minute, the Phoenicians lost Carthage in…
We’re Not The Only Ruins Here
Hard as it is to believe, there are ruins here we haven’t seen yet. Perhaps more surprisingly, we’re still interested in visiting them. In this case, there are a pair of locations, Dougga and Bulla…
Tunisian Arts & Crafts
Tunisia’s richest crafts traditions, in my opinion, are ceramics and carpet weaving, which I’ve covered in the posts on Nabeul and Kairouan, respectively. But that’s not all that’s going on here, so let’s take a…
Amazigh Grace: Getting A Berber Tattoo
When does enough become too much? Prior to Tunisia we’d been to Mexico, Cuba, and Morocco, and I’d gotten tattoos in two of those three locations. Worse, a lapse in judgement had the Mexican tattoo…