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Photo Friday – Spice Market in Jerusalem

22 Jun

The spice stall

Local markets are probably my favorite place to spend time in a new city.  You can learn an incredible amount about local culture by wandering around the market and seeing what’s for sale, which usually includes everything from local produce to local fashion.  Jerusalem’s old city has an extensive market.   Parts of it are geared nearly completely to tourism and you’ll find stall after stall of t-shirts, rugs and trinkets, BUT, if you wander off a bit down the side streets you’ll encounter the local market stalls.  We passed this vendor selling spices, clearly still close to the tourist center as the labels are in English, and the smells were intoxicating.  I want to bottle it up and be able to take it with me…perhaps a new flavor of scratch-and-sniff is in order?

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Photo Friday – Produce in Turkey

15 Jun

This week I don’t have the most spectacular or artistic of photos, but it’s something that’s been very representative of our time in Turkey.  Turkey is the only country in the world that produces enough fruits and vegetables to feed its entire population.  The only one!  I am pretty amazed by that, and it certainly explains both the quantity and quality of fruits and veggies we’ve encountered here.  You can get a kilo (that’s more than 2 pounds!) of cherries or apricots for about 1.75…it’s unreal.  Breakfasts consist of tomato, cucumber, cheese, olives, bread, honey and in some places we also get huge slices of watermelon.

I’ve never seen tomatoes this consistently magnificent anywhere else in the world.  I kid you not, every veggie stand we pass has crates and crates of the most perfectly ripe tomatoes.  They don’t ever seem to be bruised, or picked too early, or worm infested.  I buy them sometimes just to eat whole, like an apple.  Mmmmmm.

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Salt Pans in Peru

8 Jun

These salt pans are just a few hours outside of Cuzco in Peru near a tiny village called Moras.  An underground spring pours saltwater down the hills into the “pans” that locals have created.  As the water evaporates, huge salt crystals remain.  This particular area provides Peru with nearly 80% of its salt!  The pools are all at different levels of evaporation, which accounts for the patchwork of colors.  There’s no real perspective in this photo, but the area is huge!

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Photo Friday – Mt. Nemrut, Turkey

1 Jun

Giant stone heads at Mt. Nemrut

We were incredibly bummed to not be able to pull off a trip to Easter Island while we were in South America, so when we heard that there we a different type of giant stone heads that date back to around 62 BC in Turkey, we were determined to see them.  It’s in the middle of nowhere on the eastern side of Turkey, and to see the sunrise on the heads you need to drag yourself from sleep at around 2:45 in the morning (give or take, depending on the season) in order to get to the mountain and climb up to the top.  While it’s no Easter Island, it’s definitely lovely and we’re glad to have made the journey.

As an aside, if you do end up going, try to remember that you aren’t the only one who got up before dawn to see this site.  The jackasses below insisted on taking all their group photos RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE HEADS as the sun was rising, thus preventing everyone else from getting a clean shot of the ruins with the pink morning light.  A number of us asked them to please move for a few moments so we could all get a picture, but they refused.  The obliviousness/obnoxiousness/self-righteousness of certain types of tourists really wore on our nerves throughout this little side trip, and reminded us why we generally avoid group tours.

Don’t be a jerk, remember other people want to take photos of that big famous monument as well.  Snap your picture and move out of the way.

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Blue Mosque – Istanbul, Turkey

25 May

Blue Mosque main interior dome – Istanbul, Turkey

Istanbul has so many things to see, we could easily spend months here and never be finished.  One of the first must-see items on our list was the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, which is more famously known as the Blue Mosque.  The nickname comes from the multitude of blue tiles that adorn the inner pillars and domes.  It’s one of the most beautiful buildings we’ve seen on this trip, and we walked out with dozens of photos of the interior mosaics.

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Photo Friday – Family Pictures in Buenos Aires

18 May

Buenos Aires has a fantastic Sunday antiques market, the Mercado San Telmo.  We spent an afternoon wandering around among the stalls and we came across this box of old family photos.  When we find relics like these I’m forced to wonder, “Who were these people?  Why have their photos ended up here, selling for 5 cents a piece to strangers who know nothing about them?”  I am both fascinated and saddened by this because I think of my own family, and wonder what could have happened that all these family photos have ended up for sale here.  There are years of memories, vacations and celebrations jammed into this box, their stories lost somehow and leaving us only to wonder what might have been.

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Photo Friday – Love in Peru

11 May

Bridesmaids sprinkle flowers, and well wishes, on the head of the bride and groom.

Today we are attending the wedding of two of our most dear friends (congratulations Julie and James!) so I thought it only fitting that the photo be wedding related.  When we first started our journey we were blessed with the opportunity to attend a wedding in Ollantaytambo, Peru.  It was an incredible experience, one that we will definitely never forget!

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Photo Friday – Hornocal Mountains in Northern Argentina

4 May

Way more than 7 colors….click on the photo to view it in a bigger size

In March we embarked on a whirlwind road trip through northern Argentina with our friends Kristin and Bryan from Happy To Be Homeless.  Purmamarca has it’s share of fame for the ‘7 Colored Mountains’, but I had heard rumors of a more spectacular hillside located somewhere outside of Humahuaca.  We set off with nothing more than a hand-drawn map the owner of our hostel made us, and a few hours (and a few breakdowns in our beater of a car…) later we made it!  The mountains were just as stunning as I had hoped, and completely devoid of other tourists, except for one truck whose occupants looked at our tiny rental car as if we were insane to be driving such a little tin-can up the side of a mountain with…less than ideal road conditions.   You’ll need your own car, preferably a 4-wheel drive.

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Photo Friday – Fishy Business in Punta del Diabolo, Uruguay

27 Apr

Fresh fish, salted and drying in the sun.

After our trip to Antarctica back in February, we felt the need to thaw out a bit, and we decided there was no better place than the small beach town of Punta del Diabolo in Uruguay.  We spent ten fantastic days lazing around, and eating fish empanadas every chance we could get.  There are four separate beaches in the area around Punta del Diabolo, one of which is known for the fish shacks that run along its edge.  As such, there are a few days a week where you can see, and smell, the most recent catch out salting in the sun.

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Photo Friday – Tilt-Shift Machu Picchu

20 Apr

We absolutely loved Machu Picchu and were lucky to be there on a day with beautiful weather despite that it was technically the rainy season.  If you’ve been there, you probably have this same classic shot.   We decided to put a little twist on it with a technique we recently discovered called ’tilt-shift’.  By blurring out the top and bottom of a photo, you can make it appear to be a highly detailed miniature version of itself.  These kinds of photos work best when you have a wide shot with a lot of details.  There are plenty of tutorials online about how to achieve these results, and even some websites that help alter photos you have already taken, which is what we did here.

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