My Girlfriend Jen McKnight and I saw some amazing sites during our trip to Turkey and Greece. It was the trip of a lifetime based merely on the many ancient and modern wonders we saw and photographed. What made this trip especially satisfying, though, were the people we met, and there were many. Turkey and Greece offer an endless stream of incredibly friendly people. Combine that with the fact that Jen is a people-magnet; combine that with my natural curiosity, and you end up with animated conversations in some of the most unexpected places. It happened so often that after we'd been in Turkey for a day, I decided that whenever we ended up visiting with a person for more than a few minutes, I would ask the person/people to take a selfie with us and trade contact information. I'm posting some of these photos here. On the flight to Goreme, a Turkish woman who teaches language, but who lives in Amsterdam, volunteered to give Jen and me a crash course in Turkish. What a gift! We actually did incorporate a couple dozen Turkish words into our vocabulary. Thank you, Mustafa Kabalci, who was our host in Cappadocia at Sultan Suites Cave Hotels! He was as good a host as I could have imagined, offering us unending advice and encouragement. We'll never forget the wise eyes of Ismir, the dog either. And there was Haydar Elçi from the Goreme restaurant, who presented us with a free desert of baklava on our final night in Goreme. Who else? There was Karolina Barac, the model from Croatia with whom we shared an inspiring balloon ride. And then there were two Turkish women from Istanbul, who we met at Derinkuyu, Turkey, Tilbe Cana İnan and Nesrin Göksungur who approached Jen and me 100 feet underground, asking if they could walk with us to distract them from the claustrophobia. That led to a later (above-ground) wonderful dinner conversation in Urgup on a breathtaking overlook. While in Turkey, we also met Fatih and Jenna, the two young law students from Indonesia, who were taking a break from their schooling at the University of Leeds in London at sat next to us in the small outdoor restaurant in Goreme. There are many merchants among the people we got to know, especially since it was a holiday season, and all of them offered us insights and friendship. That list includes Fatih, Mohammed and Suddik. Jen bought a cute little birdsong whistle from a man in Istanbul for a total of 1 Turkish Lira (30 cents). He then chased us down to make sure that Jen knew how to fill the whistle with water and showed her several techniques for making bird sounds.