my love/hate relationship with vacation

I loved our little vacay. It was grand. There was sun, gelato, and picture taking for everyone.

Unfortunately, it's back to reality which means laundry, cooking dinners, and dog walking. ::sigh::

We also returned to crap weather which has resulted in hanging up my flip flops and breaking out the umbrella. It's not right for May.... even in Stuttgart.

Anyways, I took a lot of pictures. I just move pretty darn slow these days and sleep usually always wins out over blogging. Hence the delay. But here we go...

(typically I would start in order with Venice and Croatia but iphoto has different plans so we'll come back to that in the future...)

So we'll begin with Izmir, Turkey where we visited Ephesus (one of the seven 'Antique Wonders of the World' you see) and the House of Virgin Mary. We also bought a Turkish rug... but that's an entirely different blog in of itself. Moving on.

For those of you historically challenged people like myself, Ephesus is an ancient Greek city in Asia Minor. During the Roman period it was the second largest city in the Roman Empire, with only 15 % being excavated at this time.

Ephesus was one of the seven churches of Asia and is mentioned in the book of Revelations (courtesy of Wikipedia... because I was too hot to listen to the tour guide).

In it's hay day, it was quite a happening city. With this large population it was one of the biggest cities in the World... and now it looks like this:

They've done a remarkable job excavating this place... even preserving the latrines (or odd shaped hole in rocky surface... cozy). I would also like to mention that I was about to pull my pants down and put these to good use... it took all my will power and clenching to hold my now useless bladder.

After Ephesus and a fabulous Turkish lunch, we stopped to see how Turkish carpets are made. You wouldn't want that job... trust me.

There's worms in there... in case you didn't know. Silk worms of course.

After our Turkish carpet purchase... we visited the House of the Virgin Mary. Many believe that this is the home where Mary lived out her final days. Apparently it is known that John the Apostle was at Ephesus and Jesus asked John to take care of Mary after his death and so it makes sense that if John was somewhere, Mary would be near. Also, a German nun had revelations about Mary's house and described it perfectly as it is situated today. The nun had never been outside the country but could describe this home in great detail. And so it has become the House of the Virgin Mary.

Until next blog...

T