Recovering from a Turkish Rug Purchase in Six Easy Steps
1. Find a bar, order a martini and hope it turns out like the Bird Island variety.(#3 Top Ten). Garnish with your own bitter tears. Enjoy.
2. Visit Miniaturk and admire how the Greeks, Ottomans, Byzantines & Turks made big things to match all the small ones. Also appreciate the fact that you could have seen the entire country in a few hours. 
3. Practice the art of the self-portrait on a boat tour of the Bosphorus.
4. Be happy that “fish on bread” isn’t on the lunch menu.
5. Be especially happy that you’re not John Malkovich in a green suit peddling house plants.
6. Return to the beautiful Grand Cevahir Hotel thankful for your new friends, both Turkish and American, and rember that you are, in fact, the luckiest person in the world, life is short, and credit counseling is free. (The orchids in the photo are all real!)
Live Clay 
How NOT to thank your sister for watching your teenage daughter for almost two weeks: steal her only decent sun hat, take it to Turkey, then pose in photos, thus revealing the theft.
There had better be a lot more than turkish delight in that suitcase for yours truly!
you can blame mom for that one! I took 2 of my own but she made me wear that one for the photo!
It’s sooo obvious that we are all stuffed like foie gras.