Hey, Pepper!
Here’s some pics for you from my recent trip. Maybe one day I can take you to Paris! I made some of the places into links so you can check them out more if you want. Pretty interesting stuff. We were in Paris for a week while Chay worked on a movie with friends of ours from Singapore.
You can click on the pictures to enlarge them.
Our hotel is the reddish one on the right. Our room was on the second floor from the top in the middle!
This is from the top of the Centre Pompidou (check out the link), the modern art museum in the Marais district of Paris. It has amazing art in it that I think you would love. And the museum is all glass so you have a great view of Paris from the top. In this pic, you can see Chay’s finger pointing to the Sacre Couer (well, almost!)
On Halloween, we went to Pere Lachaise. (Check out http://www.pere-lachaise.com/perelachaise.php?lang=en. Cool virtual tour of it!) It’s a huge cemetery and I go there almost every time I’m in Paris cuz I love just hanging out there. Tons of famous people buried there. This is me at the grave of Chopin.
This is the grave of Oscar Wilde. For some reason, people put lipstick on and then kiss the gravestone (even tho there’s a sign that says not to!). I also like to check out the graves of Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein, Jim Morrison and Proust, but really it’s just a cool place to hang. It was especially cool to be there on Halloween.
On the Seine river. That’s the Louvre museum on the right.
Turkey
After Paris, we decided to fly to Istanbul in Turkey for a week, cuz Chay always wanted to go shopping at the Grand Bazaar and I always wanted to take a boat up the Bosphorous.
You have to check out this map of Istanbul.
The Bosphorous separates the city into two halves. But the amazing thing is that the half on the left is in Europe, and the half on the right is in Asia!! It’s the point where the two continents come together.
This is the Hagia Sophia. It’s a museum now, but it has been one of the most important churches during Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Maybe you read about it when you were studying Persian art.
Inside of the Hagia Sophia.
Chay at the entrance to the Grand Bazaar. ANYTHING you want is inside.
Me buying saffron at the Spice Market.
Mostly Muslims live in Istanbul. They are TOTALLY cool people, really funny and super nice. There’s a lot of rules when you go inside the mosques. You hafta take off your shoes and women have to put scarves on their heads.
Me eating balik ekmek (fish on bread). They catch it on the Golden Horn river and cook it right there on a boat. It’s total yum.
One day we took a boat up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. It was strange because on the other side (the north side) of the Black Sea from where I was is Ukraine, which is where Grandma was born. This is the bridge across the Bosphorous. The only bridge that takes you from one continent to another (Europe to Asia).
