The Illustrated Man
This blog is not the only way I have been documenting our travels. I am also using my skin. There’s the first tattoo I got on our voyages, of a traditional Oaxacan floral embroidery motif.…
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…
Hammam: It Ain’t Nuthin’ But A Turkish Bath
I hope you all appreciate the breadth of research I’m willing to engage in to provide you with only the most timely, most topical, most accurate reporting. This is the third installment in my hopefully…
… 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…