Turkey Holiday Guide!

Turkey is an awesome place for holidays! It is a Eurasian country straddling Asia & Europe. It is a country that fundamentally combines the ancient with the modern. Natural sites struggle with the joys of modern cities for tourist attention. As one of the cradles of civilization in the world, Turkey is filled with ancient history & archaeological sites. It also offers a great nightlife & world-class restaurants & outdoor fun, including sailing, paragliding, scuba diving & balloon rides. The shoreline of Turkey is 6500 km long. Turkey is surrounded on two sides by the sea!


At the crossroads of Europe & Asia, Turkey is a country of acquisition of cultural influences. Thirteen matchless civilizations have occupied Turkey since ancient times. Turkey is a fascinating mixture of all these cultures & the contrasts between modern civilization & the civilizations of antiquity. Turkey is the place to a matchless to enjoy blend of Eastern & Western culture.



Turkey is time of year, but the peak visiting months are from April to October. Besides cooling on a warm & sunny beaches of Turkey, the tourists need to participate in the Turkish kitchen. Perhaps a meze-style meal, small plates, with a bunch of red or white wines serfour of Turkey & then followed by one of these delicious desserts country will stimulate your appetite. The truth is that the cuisine of Turkey so diverse that you must visit the country to taste the flavors of the Tur istSchlüssel.



In the event that you think you will only Muslim culture in Turkey, think again. Tarsus in Turkey was the birthplace of the Christian Saint Paul. You can still get in St. Pauls footsteps, as they preached Christianity in Turkey. While in Turkey, purchasing some time at a quantity of over museums & historical sites. In the event you are in the Aegean area, you may must visit the Archaeological Museum near Konak Square to pay. It is widely known for his statues of Poseidon & Demeter to announce that it was time in the Agora. The Archaeological Museum in Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey is known for its artifacts from Neolithic, Hittite & Roman times.



Visit to Turkey to enjoy the sights & sounds & tastes of this ancient land straddling two continents & thousands of years of cultural heritage!

Fethiye Turkey Slideshow

Fethiye

Turkey's For Life First Birthday - Part 2

Well, I know the first anniversary of Turkey's For Life was a couple of days ago but the post was getting too long...and then I didn't post yesterday...and so here's a slightly later than planned Part 2. 



As it's the start of a whole new 'blogging about Turkey' year for us, we thought we should take this opportunity to point out some of last year's achievements and one of the changes we made to the blog to make it more useful to you in the future. 



The change...

New search boxes

To make it easier for you to find what you are looking for in Turkey's For Life, we have changed the search box again. In the past, if you typed a word into the box, you would have been shown all posts containing that word and you had to scroll through them all to find what you needed. A tad laborious if the post you were looking for was way down the page. Also, if we had used Turkish letters and you used English letters, the post would not appear. 



Hooray! All that has now changed! We've changed the search box to 'Custom Google Search' and there is one at the top and bottom of every page in the left hand column. So now, if you type in a word or words, you will be shown a list (exactly like Google search results) of all our posts containing that word. You can do a quick scan for the post you're looking for. 



For example, if you type in 'kayakoy cin bal', any post containing those words will show in the search results. Posts containing kayakoy or cin bal in the title will be displayed first, and kayakoy and cin bal will be in bold lettering. And, Google being Google, if you mistype a word or use English instead of Turkish letters (or vice versa), it's very good at working out what you are looking for, so the search results should still be accurate.

Fethiye - Our beautiful Turkey blogging base

Some Achievements

In our first blogging year, we...

• Took action to actually start Turkey's For Life and fortunately, you decided to read it.


• Set up a Twitter account; created a Facebook page; joined the food bloggers' site, Foodbuzz; joined the travel bloggers' site TBEX; joined the expat bloggers' site Expat Blog; set up a Flickr account and created a Turkey's For Life Flickr group, and as a result, communicated with countless people and ended up very busy on the laptop! (There are others but we'll be here all day...)

Achievements in themselves, but we are also very proud of...

• Our 'Lonely Planet Featured Blogger' badge. Some of you may have noticed that this has only recently appeared on the blog (it's half way down, on the left if you haven't seen it.) It should have been there since April but, well, it's there now. We applied to the Lonely Planet Blog Sherpa Programme in April and were really pleased to be accepted. Occasionally, we submit a post that we feel would be useful to people who are looking for information about Fethiye and other places in Turkey. Through Blog Sherpa, our post about Kayaköy was selected as a 'favourite' and featured on the front page of the BBC World website. Not bad!


• To top our first blogging year off nicely, we were voted into the daily Top 9 by other Foodbuzz users for my attempt at a Turkish dish; spicy cheese and spinach börek.

And for this year and years to come?

• Well hopefully, we will be able to keep posting and Turkey's For Life will keep improving and growing...inşallah!

Fethiye Festive Season - Photo Story

A Turkish family enjoying a Sunday barbecue in the mountains around Nif

I love this photo and as we've just woken up to the second day of Advent and the UK and much of northern Europe is covered in snow, I've taken the opportunity to use it. I'm hoping it will help us to feel more wintery and festive in a still very mild Fethiye.



I took the photo when we were part of the Fethiye mass exodus to Nif one day, two years ago. Pleasant, sunny days are not the only barbecue days in this part of Turkey. Any day is a barbecue day; especially if that day is a Sunday. The weather is completely irrelevant. The day we went to Nif (one of my best days out ever!), people built snowmen, sledged down mountainsides, threw snowballs, got very cold, very wet and then ate köfte and drank tea, grilled and heated by their roadside barbecue. 



We have to keep reminding ourselves that it's December. We should be getting organised for the festive season. Christmas cards need to be posted to friends and family. We ought to be deciding what we're doing for Christmas Day. What are we cooking? Who do we need to buy presents for? Hopefully, this snowy photo will work its magic and get the ball rolling...

Photographing The Greek Island of Meis / Kastellorizo

I don't claim to be a photographer of any description but I do love taking photographs. The Greek island of Meis (Kastellorizo) is a photographer's dream; especially at this time of year when the winter sunlight provides clear, distant scenery and more vibrant colours. 



Neither of us could begin to hazard a guess as to how many times we've chosen Meis as our Greek island visa destination. It's a tiny island but we always manage to while away the hours as we wait for the boat to take us back to Kaş on the Turkish mainland. We explore back streets, climb hills, sit on the harbour, eat pork, drink Greek Mythos beer. Whatever the activity, I take photo after photo after photo.



Today was a beautiful sunny day, the air was clear, the sea was (thankfully) calm. We were given 2 hours to spend on Meis before we had to get back on the boat - just enough time for a few photos, barbecued Greek pork sausage with home made chips and a Mythos, a quick dash into duty free and then homeward bound to Turkey. These are a few of the winter photos I took today: 

Greek Island Visit - Kastellorizo

From the top deck of the Meis Express boat in Kaş harbour, it's possible to see across to Meis

Winter sunlight on Meis means colours are more visible

Back on Turkish soil - the boat glides back into the harbour in Kaş

I've probably taken over a thousand photos of Meis over the last couple of years and they all sit idly in my laptop. I've created a Meis set on my Flickr profile and uploaded around twenty of the best ones if you would like to see more of this lovely Greek island. You don't need to be a Flickr member to view them. 

If you are a Flickr member: Don't forget, we have a Turkey's For Life Flickr group. Why not join the group and you can add photos from anywhere in Turkey? All photos will be displayed on our Turkey Flickr Photos page via a slideshow and your name and photo description will also appear if the viewer clicks the 'info' tab.

Turkish Treats

And it's another new addition to our growing blog. If you cast your eyes towards the far right tab underneath the Turkey's for Life title banner, you'll see there's a new tab called 'Turkey Books, Turkish Music & Film'. When you click on this tab, you'll see a Turkey's For Life Amazon store where you can buy loads of Turkey related goodies.

Turkey's Lycian coastline

We've been thinking about this for a long time - and putting it together for quite a long time - and we hope it complements all that we write about in our posts about Fethiye and Turkey. We've scanned and scoured the pages of Amazon for Turkish books, Turkish films and Turkish music that we like - and we'll be making more additions to the 'store' as and when new items become available.



Clicking on any of the individual Turkish books, CDs or films will give you loads more details and, in many cases, customer reviews. Hope you like it. Let us know what you think! 



If you can think of anything which Amazon offer that we've missed from our Turkish store then let us know and we'll add it in there.