Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Derinkuyu Underground City

This is one of many undergound cities in the Cappadocia region. It dates back to the 7th - 8th century BC. The early Christians used these cities to escape from persecution from the Roman Empire. This city was 8 stories deep and contained a baptismal, a school, a meeting hall, kitchen, winery, stables and venilation shafts. All I can say is that the people must have been really small back then.





Cappadocia

In April we visited a truly amazing place, Cappadocia. This area of Turkey has the most unique and truly awesome land formations in the world. We were lucky enough to have the Wilson's take us their for our first, but definitely not the last, time.




This is a fresco we found in one of the churches carved into the mountainside.



A carpet shop in Goreme. We spent a lot of time here learning about all the different kinds of carpets and drinking our Apple Chai and Hassan fed us Turkish pizza and baklava.
This is a seven storied fairy chimney that is still a working cafe. If you look closely you can see the kids peeking out the windows in the different levels of the cave.




We stayed in an actual cave hotel when we were in Goreme, or was it Bedrock? I guess we are a modern stone-age family after all!









It really does look like a huge fairy tale land where we are the Gnomes






This is the Hair Museum. The girls all got to cut off alock of our hair and hang it in the museum. It is in the Guiness Book of World Records
.
All the kids got to make pottery in the cave shop which had the Hair Museum in it. We can go back to shop on another visit to pick up our pieces. Avanos is known for its beautiful Turkish ceramics.


Here it goes...

How exciting! We finally got a family blog started. It only took us a year to get it up and running. I hope it doesn't take that long to put up each post. We wanted to start this blog for two main reasons. One to keep friends and family in the loop and show them little snippets of our lives. And two, to keep a running journal of our adventures so we do not forget all the wonderful things we are experiencing in our lives.