Cue Harry Lime Theme
The Valens Aquaduct: Goodbye Istanbul. IST to VIE, TK1885: We were checked out of the hotel at 8:30 without breakfast. It was sunny and steaming up but the city doesn’t really come alive before noon. We had booked a comfortable…
Now It’s Istanbul Not Constantinople…
Why did Constantinople get the works? That’s nobody’s business but the Turks. Of course I’ve been waiting a week to write that. Above: Christ healing the paralytic at Capernaum. What parable is that? A shout out to Jarome for recommending…
Don’t Miss This Splendid Tour
An inscription which means “I am the city of learning and Ali is its gate.” Part of an exceptional collection of Islamic scripts we saw in the afternoon. The one above, a long elegant scroll, painfully detailed, is simply a…
Courtyard of Favorites
June 1 already! Feral cats are to Istanbul what vending machines are to Tokyo. Today after breakfast we returned to Sultanahmet to the Topkapi Palace, the royal residence of sultans for over 400 years from the mid-1400s to the mid…
Warning Explicit Beauty
It was very hot in the sun, 27 plus, but lovely in the shade, with an uplifting sea breeze. After breakfast at the hotel we navigated transit (not without difficulty), taking the tram to the tourist zone of Sultanahmet. Here…
East is East
Why are we flying Montréal Istanbul, a five hour flight and a nine hour flight with a four hour layover? The cryptic rules concerning how additional costs are levied. The sweetest part is that two biz class tickets on points…
Weekend in Banff, June 2015
On the afternoon we arrived in Banff there wasn’t a lot of time until dinner so we climbed Tunnel Mountain, a sort of local “Grouse grind” in the late day heat; 4.8 kms but only 260 meters. Gorgeous views and…
Words Fail Jake Gyllenhaal
Or so says the NYT. We found he handled them quite well. As for the four day weekend, I could get used to this. In 1927 the entire cast (all 57) of the Mae West production The Pleasure Man was…
A Delicate Balance on The Twentieth Century
Happy Valentine’s Day! Pier-ing across to Jersey We scheduled four sessions of sitting for today so first thing we headed out to the High Line, the re-purposed elevated spur of an old railway, now a 2.5 km park, for…
A Helluva Town
Helluva, used on Broadway, was changed to “wonderful” for the movie as Comden and Green’s lyric was too racy for Hollywood. New York is many spectacular and awe-inspiring things, but, truthfully, wonderful “honk honk” isn’t one of them. Still, where…