Even before the pandemic, many people, particularly US citizens, have been looking to move somewhere that offered a better quality of life. One of the main criteria is it must be safe, and on the surface Portugal appears to be a good option. Nobody gets killed at school by rampaging…

In April 2020 I wrote a list of must try Turkish foods for CNN Travel. My aim in putting it together was to let people know there’s more to Turkish cuisine than kebab and baklava. I made a conscious decision not to include a famous dish called Adana Kebab because…

In an effort to improve my Turkish and learn what’s going on in my neighbourhood, I regularly check out the Kadikoy Council website. That’s how I discovered their latest initiative, Dükkan (Turkish for Shop), Kadikoy Council Waste Free Shop. It opened around three months ago and sells products and foods…

Embracing uncertainty and community in the time of Coronavirus Turkey officially announced its first recorded case of Coronavirus late on March 10. The next day the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. From the beginning many countries, their politicians and their media have framed the pandemic in combative terms…

For women who travel a lot or live overseas, one of the biggest challenges is finding a good hairdresser. They need to speak your language so English is essential. That’s the only way to guarantee you’ll get a perfect cut, or is it? After several years travelling in different countries…

Realization I spent 15 months living in other people’s ideas of ‘fully-furnished’ apartments and learned that no universal standards apply. It’s a definition that varies enormously from country-to-country, across age groups, regional areas and traveller experiences. When it comes to long term travel it’s important to know. I might not…

Starting out as a freelance writer can be hard going. It isn’t easy to secure assignments, and sometimes it feels like the best thing to do is give up. When I started out a few years ago, after pitching a story I felt strongly about to twenty or more media…

My mother was widely acknowledged to be both extremely intelligent and very beautiful. It was generally agreed but always unspoken that I trailed behind her in the first category, and failed completely in the second. She was a strict parent who focused on doing things the right way. The type…

If you want to know how to improve your Turkish, I have one word for you. Bureaucracy. Forget expensive courses and fancy textbooks. Just spend one day, or maybe a lifetime, trying to get anything of a bureaucratic nature completed, and you’ll be as fluent as any native born Turk…