Two Curious Souls

 Upon arrival in Amsterdam, we spent what was left of the day recovering from jet lag. We have to admit it gets harder to do these long overnight flights accompanied by an eight-hour time change. Our circadian clocks were beating us up, so we slowed down to let it catch up.  Our first full day, Sunday, was spent learning how to use the public transportation and learning to cross a street and walk on a sidewalk again. Amsterdam is an expensive city to live in. Because of this, most people don’t have cars. Public transportation is excellent with numerous trams, buses, subways and trains. But to really navigate the inner city, you need a bike. Everyone has a bike, and that’s where the re-learning came in for us. It seemed everyone was on their bike at high-speed heading straight into the space where we were. As we’ve noted in other countries, the space between the pedestrians and moving vehicles is very small and the bicycles only added another dimension to the puzzle of intera...

  We’ve done this a thousand times. Push back, roll-out, lift-off, wheels up, climbing through 10,000 feet there’s an announcement that you can bring out your computers… It never stops amazing me that we can go up in the sky in a big old aluminum tube pushed around by exploding gas molecules. On top of that you travel to destinations thousands of miles away in less than a day. Every time is the same, yet every time is different. Sitting next to each other. Holding hands like teenagers in love. Just maybe we are! One of the beauties of traveling is that you never know what’s ahead. You are getting out of your comfort zone. You just know your horizons will grow. Your understanding of people different than you will grow. It’s all part of a process of finding ourselves that we’ve worked on for over 70 years. As we start another journey, we want to share it with you. Blogging our last trip to Greece and Turkey we set out two goals. One was to stay in the present. Be here; not ther...

 Stay tuned for another exciting adventure from the Two Curious Souls as we head out again on April 21st 2023 for Amsterdam and Norway.     

Istanbul in deed, a fitting capstone to our journey. The word of the day is alive! The official population is 15.5 million for the metropolitan area, but several times we heard larger numbers such as 17 or 20 million after adjusting to reflect all the people who come for work and including the immigrants from Syria and other war-torn areas. The population is a fluid number and people tend to be transient as they move about.   Comparison to other cities is just not fair since Istanbul has a personality of its own and is truly alive.   Istanbul is where Europe meets Asia.   Asia Minor to be precise.   Originally it was colonized by the Greeks in the 7 th century BC and known as Byzantium.   It was under the control of the Romans for centuries.   In 334 AD, Constantine the Great, relocated the capital of the Roman Empire to the city and renamed it to Constantinople.   It remained the capital of the Roman Empire for about 65 years and of the Eas...