Travels around the world.

In September we made a trip to Eastern Europe.  Our first stop was Szklarka National Park in the southern Polish mountains near the border between Poland and the Czech republic.  I went for a couple hikes there. Those pictures can be found on this web page. From there we got a ride into Prague and spent two days there.  Prague pictures And then we flew 8 more hours to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where we spent one day and then flew up to Ust Kamenogorsk, where we spent 3 more days. In Kazakhstan I saw lots of beautiful textiles, embroidered wall hangings and cushions,  felted carpets, woven braids and more.  I saw two yurts in museums that were filled with beautifully decorated objects.  You can find some of those pictures here . This amazingly decorated, wooden cathedral is in Almaty.

I did get my Taiwan photos organized finally.  It was fun having my son show me around Taiwan.  We went into Taipei on the high speed rail, which took 32 minutes and left exactly on time every time. We visited two national parks, several temples, lots of restaurants, which I mentioned in the previous post, one family home museum, a seaside historic town, and much more.  There are 3 pages of photos, which link to each other, but I'll give all 3 links here:   Taipei Around Taipei Taroko Gorge   I'm going to be lazy and not add any photos to this post.  Go visit those pages for the photos. I'm leaving in 2 weeks for Poland, Prague and Kazakhstan-yikes!

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...