Australia, Here We Come!

Yes, It's official!!! We're coming to Australia to visit!

Our March travel plans to Australia are finalized, we depart İstanbul on 28th February at 7:10pm and arrive at our final destination, Melbourne, via Dubai, on 2nd March at 6:35am. You may ask if we are masochists? Yes, undoubtedly!

For those of you that may be unaware, my sister Nicky is getting married on 3rd March! Yes, that's two weddings in the Garland clan just inside 6 months. After the wedding, much socializing and dropping my parents at the local mental health and relaxation center, Birnur and I will head to Sydney (Friday 9th March) where we will stay with Jason and his lovely fiancé, Carla.

We'll be back in Melbourne on Monday 12th March before setting off on another masochistic journey back to İstanbul on Wednesday 14 Mar at 10:25pm.

See you in Oz!!!!!

Christmas / New Year / Bayram

Living in Istanbul, a catholic could be forgiven for completely forgetting about Christmas. If it weren't for emails from friends and family reminding us of the festive season back in our native countries, Christmas would come and go in a blink.

In lieu of Christmas we have the Bayram holiday, some of you familiar with my blog will remember my Bayram from last year in Olympos, Southern Turkey (see: Turkish Bayram) Bayram actually means 'Sacrafice' and if you follow my link I provided here, I prepared a sacrafice last year with some villagers, but spared you the images of the whole process. I won't push the topic too much, but I feel that Bayram should in fact translate to 'Butchering', i'm currently in discussions with several translation dictionary suppliers to have this misprint ammended :)

So, no pun intened, let's cut to the chase. Birnur and I are heading to Sharm El Sheik in southern Egypt on 3rd January for 5 days. We're planning on taking some dives in the world famous Red Sea. Keep this page bookmarked, we will be beaming images of our adventure right into your lounge rooms and into the darkest dens around the world as soon as we return.

For the geographically challenged (including myself), you can find a map of our proposed visit site just below. I wish everybody a fantastic Christmas and New Year and I hope that we can all catch up very soon.