Springtime

Spring is my overall favorite season!  

The Bosphorus

The Golden Horn

I love winter and snow, but as soon as January is over I start waiting for spring to come.  When March is the headline on the calendar, I am already looking for signs of sprouting buds, and checking if the wind maybe feels a little bit milder than the previous day.  Every year it seems like winter is dragging its feet, and doesn't want to leave, but then all of a sudden one day it's over, and spring has definitely won once again.  I am always overwhelmed by the beauty of spring, the intensity of the new colors and the delicacy of the new life.

I think this is a kind of Sycamore tree, I just love these "Christmas balls".

There are still dwellers living among all the apartment buildings in Istanbul.

I was told that it is difficult to get insurance on wooden buildings in Istanbul,
so unfortunately many beautiful, old houses are falling apart.

A year ago there seemed to be some kind of sculpture competition in the valley below our house. But now it seems like they just left them there when the first artist said he was finished.

This was the only sculpture that looked completed.

Spring is especially wonderful in Istanbul because the city and its people seem to love flowers.  There are flowers everywhere, and they are well taken care of.  When you live in this city you spend a lot of time in traffic, or stuck in traffic, so maybe the hope is that people will find it less painful when there is something beautiful to look at.

Even on the concrete ramps there are flowers planted.

This spring we went to Norway for a week, and the west coast of my childhood country was exactly how I envision early spring: green fields with brownish-grey accessories, ghostly, grey trees with a halo of purple (due to the buds of leaves), the bluest ocean you can imagine, and mountains in the distance still capped in white.

 We arrived back in Istanbul late at night, and when I opened the curtains next morning, I was blown away by how green the trees were, how purple the flowers were, and how warm the sunlight was.  I just stood there and let the view re-charge my batteries.