Travels around the world.

My son, Patrick is in Taiwan for nine weeks. So, of course I went to visit him there. This was my chance to sample Asian food, and I took a lot of pictures of our meals and other food and restaurants, so here goes: We tried lots of things from street food to elegant restaurants. This is our first course at a fancy Chinese Restaurant in Hsinchu. (for those of you who read Pinyin: Xinzhu) This place was quite elegant, but we were there after dark and the pictures I tried to take just don't show it very well. Patrick getting started on the first course. On our last day together we went to Danshui, a resort town on the coast. Here we tried some street food starting with these fried pork rolls on a stick. See the picture at the top of the stand. That evening we ate at a dumpling restaurant. The dishes here came one at a time, so this is the first two. These dumplings were a bit tricky to eat, but delicious. This was our first lunch in Taipei. Patrick ordered some fried...

This post is way overdue, but last year got busy.   So here are links to the pages I did last year with pictures of our trip to Ghana in October, 2009 And some pages for Ankara, Turkey . From this page you can link to the photos of Beypazari , a lovely town in the hills west of Ankara. Happy New Year!!!   and Happy and safe Traveling in 2010!!

We ate at a restaurant/museum on top of one of the hills of Ankara. We were taken here by two wonderful Turkish women, sisters.  You enter the restaurant and go through some rooms that are really a museum devoted to the traditional home in Turkey and food preparation in the traditional way. The door to the restaurant is just below those flags. Here are some dolls set in an interior. Here we are crossing another room. We climbed two flights of stairs, I think to get to the dining room.   This is another display in one of the rooms we went through. Here a woman is rolling out some dough into a flat pancake. We got to try this. It looked like a quesadilla with cheese between layers of phillo dough. Yummm.   Here's what one looked like just after being grilled. This is taken looking out a window. That balcony is used for seating when it's nicer out. And finally here we are at our table. We had a view overlooking Ankara. At times we saw cats...

I did get a page of pictures put together for our one-week trip to Rome. This is the trip I described in the previous post.   Looking back at the pictures I feel I'd like to go back, but then I remember when we were there we felt we didn't need to return to Rome. I would not go again in the summer. It was just too hot and crowded. I would guess Rome is usually crowded, but in winter might be less so. The other thing I didn't like was the traffic. There were vehicles everywhere!!  They need to institute a city driving tax to try to reduce the number of vehicles. There isn't enough room for them to park, so they park in the pedestrian crosswalks and intersections. Crossing the streets was difficult. The motor cycles are more annoying than the cars--noisier and in the way of pedestrians more. Unfortunately their subway/underground system isn't that great either. We did ride the two lines that go under the city and that worked out for us some of the time. One line s...

I have been traveling again and have lots of photos, but have not had the time to sort them and put them together in any coherent way, so I thought I'd just do a quick update and hope to get to the photos still before another trip.   In May we flew to Frankfurt, Germany, spent a night then flew to Wrocław, Poland , where we spent 2 1/2 days, then back to Frankfurt and from there to Rome , for a week. It was our first trip to Rome and we tried to do it all. But our real mission there was to see as many paintings by Caravaggio as we could. We were pretty successful there. We did see 24, which is almost all that are on view to the public.  One or two were on tour, so we missed those and there is a ceiling he painted, which is in a house that is only open one day a month. I couldn't find out this information before we left home. It turns out the house was open on the day we arrived, but we didn't know it then. When we got there the next day we found out we had missed it. W...

We visited Venice in October 2008. It's now January 2009, but I didn't get around to posting about our trip here until now.   We got to see Venice while it was still dry, at least part of the time. When we arrived in the afternoon we took a vaporetto to get to St. Mark's Square (San Marco) which was close to our hotel. We had a very nice evening, but wondered what the funny-looking platforms we saw in the square were used for. The next morning we found out. The square was flooded that morning, but was dry again in the afternoon. So we got to see both aspects of the city. This is the square with St. Mark's and the campanile tower.                 Unfortunately the bridge of Sighs was undergoing renovation and was mostly boarded up. This is all we could see of it. In case it's not clear, the bridge is right in the middle of this photo with everything around it boarded up. For more of my pictures and the rest of t...

Would you like to spend 55 sleepless hours traveling, most of them cramped in a crowded airplane and the rest in airports in order to spend 4 days in South Korea? Why not? Actually if that's how he had asked me I might have said "no thanks." But he didn't mention that we would only be there for 4 days.     I'm awfully glad I went though. It was a great trip. It was a little different from most of the traveling we've done in that we had a local guide most of the time. A south Korean (who has lived in Minneapolis for 25 years) arranged the trip and traveled with us for most of it. He arranged for his nephew to drive us around Seoul and also hired a guide to show us the sights of Seoul on the weekend. The first thing we saw was the changing of the guard ceremony at the Royal Palace. It's a museum now, so this is a show just for tourists.         Near the palace we also visited the National Folk Museum of Korea , where we le...