A challenge came my way...

... from Nilla, who writes so beautifully on utan punkt. It was a photo "challenge", encouraging me to show the tenth photo in my photographic archive. As so many of my photos are of my children, and the tenth one happened to be of one of my sons, I here take the liberty of showing one of the images just after instead. (I have chosen so far to leave my children out of my blog. This might change one day, but for now, I would like to keep it that way.)

On a hot and sweaty day in July, 2004, my family and I arrived in what would be our exotic, exciting, friendly, memorable, hot, cold, colourful, noisy and amazing home for a year. The man in the house had been offered a job in Ankara, the bustling and dusty capital of Turkey, and our then ten-month-old first-born offspring and yours truly became expats for the first time as a family (both grown-ups had however lived abroad before we met).

Looking through my old photos from this fabulous year, I find myself not only sighing with nostalgia, but hearing the familiar bubbling sound of a blog idea brewing inside... Even if my blog has so far been quite restrictively devoted to my home and its close environment, I think it might just be time for a little road trip one day very soon. Yes, indeed, I think I might just take you on a ride to show you Turkey through my eyes - a country whose natural beauty and wonderful people have left a big, heart-shaped imprint on my global soul.

Would you like to come along?

Photo above of the mosque on the water front in Ortaköy, a lovely area of Istanbul with restaurants, small shops and water views galore.