The wedding was wonderful! Beautiful, fun, sweet… There are of course no words good enough to describe it. At least no words I have mastery of. Cigdem was gorgeous and happy and Jeremy was handsome and so happy! We are so so happy for them; their joy is contagious and I pray for a long loving life for them together.

Cigdem with her Mother and Sister

The dancing before I got pulled in to it!

Over the last few days my cousin Ellen and I were lucky enough to spend time with a lot of Cigdem’s family, and we fell in love. Even though we obviously don’t speak Turkish and most of them don’t speak any English, they are so so sweet and happy and welcoming and fun. Ellen learned how to make Turkish coffee, we got to help in the kitchen, we hung out after the other guests left and they let loose…. Some of our best moments this week were just with the family in their apartment, packed into the sitting room with Turkish tea and an unending amount of snacks, sweets, and smiles everywhere.

I feel so lucky to be welcomed so completely by our new family. We are already hatching a plan to see them again soon.

Nothing is as beautiful or sweet as everything above; but I want to share some of the amazing things we saw and ate the last few days. Thanks to the incredible, unending generosity of our friend Aysin, and accompanied by our friend Susan from California (two absolutely incredible women that I am blessed to know) we have experienced almost everything Istanbul had to offer. The food has been incredible every day. This was just a simple breakfast today, for example:

Here is us tucking in to a dinner spread; fresh cherry juice, roast chicken with peppers, sweet green beans with tomatoes and garlic, cold yogurt soup, spicy barley salad, poached artichokes, mushrooms in cream, fried filo stuffed with parsley and feta, a yogurt and sprout salad, dried sweet peppers stuffed with sweet rice with currants, fresh bread, fresh salad, and then fruit (the fruit here is amazing!), cake, coffee and tea, and chocolate, and more tea….

Today we walked around and went in to at least 5 sweet shops to sample baklava and turkish delight. Aysin is the best tour guide, she knows all the best shops and alleyways! Then we met my brother and Cigdem (my new sister-in-law!) for lunch and walked through the “bazaar” that opens right by their house on Mondays. Imagine the biggest farmer’s market you ever seen multiplied by 40. Literally. We took 45 minutes just walking through it and we barely bought or tasted anything! We had a lot of fun.

Baklava!

Grains

Nuts

Watermelon!

A few other pictures from our wanderings today:

The local bazaar

Sunset from the ferry

And as if all of that isn’t enough, here is how we spent most of the day yesterday, recovering from the wedding festivities; champagne in the pool!

What a life I’m living