Digitally Exploring the world

Here's my first attempt at creating a movie using Picasa Movie Maker from pics taken during my backpacking trip across Egypt and Turkey .

I traveled across turkey by bus from Istanbul to the Western ,Central and East-Central locations for 2 weeks. Turkey, with its population being 98% Islamic , has separated religion from the state and is quite westernized after the transformation started once the Ottoman rule ended. Istanbul , with its old mosques ,road side eats out, cobble stoned streets and cosmopolitan crowd was fun to just be part of and walk around. I spent a few days here and simply enjoyed walking around the old parts of Istanbul (Blue Mosque,Haphia Sophia ,Top Kapi Palace and walking around the narrow streets all the way to the Galata Bridge ) and on another day crossing over to Istanbul University all the way to Taksim and Eminou ferry dock . On the first day at Ramzan ,the area around the mosques had a different buzz with more food stalls , benches and as the sun set ,it slowly had a huge gathering of families seated together breaking their fast, travelers, passersby and live music at some places. Cana...

My trip was unplanned but did have some rough plan wanting to do the Nile Valley (Cairo-Luxor-Aswan-Abu Simbel) by road before I started . Cairo The vacation started with a bit of a twist with a missed connecting flight from Istanbul to Cairo and then desperately trying to get in touch with an ex-colleague Abed , who was suppose to meet me at Cairo and wasn't aware of the missed flight. The computer that I found at the airport lounge had a Turkish keyboard and Turkish windows installation and all my attempts to get my email account to work failed, finally after hours ,I just asked someone with a laptop to let me use it for just a few mins to drop an e-mail. I reached Cairo at 2a.m. in the morning and took a taxi to the hostel and was surprised to see quite a few shops open people moving around. Abed called the hostel early morning and with only 3hrs of sleep, we drove to the Ramses station to book the train tickets for the sleeping train to Aswan that Night. We then drove down to ...