In keeping with her tradition of making weird paper things and sticking them to our walls Mary Ann fashioned a decoration for our living room. It is supposed to be a stylized tughra, which itself is a stylized signature. I guess that makes it extra stylish. When Turkish people visit our house they think it is kind of cool. When other people visit, they suspect us of membership in an evil cult. Well, we are expats, I suppose.

Baby sister is a really weird baby. Currently her favorite food is onion. Raw onion. Sadly, her intestines aren't as taken with it as her mouth. I've smelled worse poop than onion poop. But not much.

On the weekend we made a trip to the ruins of St. Hilarion Castle in the mountains above Girne. We had heard that the coolest way to get there was to head straight towards the mountains north of Guzelyurt and follow twisty little roads connecting mountain villages until you reach the crest. From there you follow a road that runs along the spine of the mountains all the way to the castle ruins and then on to Girne pass. It was actually pretty stressful going up the narrow, steep, windy roads still without much practice driving a stick shift. Things were made worse by the chaotic Mediterranean driving and parking conventions. Things were also made worse by BS getting carsick partway up the mountain and vomiting all over herself and the seat. Also, I'm not sure if I made a wrong turn somewhere, but we ended up doing the last bit of climb on an unpaved dirt road, crisscrossed with massive ruts. It was steep enough that every now and then our front-wheel-drive car would start to lose traction.

I guess I'm going to have to try to get one of the other guys to drive us along the mountaintop route sometime. Most of the time, I had to focus on the road so much that I hardly got to look around at all. I had hoped that Mary Ann, at least, was benefiting from the great views but she later confided to me that she was too scared to look off to the side very much. There were a handful of spots where I was able to stop the car, though, and get out to look around and calm my nerves. Every now and then were able to see the ruins St. Hilarion perching on a mountaintop off in the distance.

Tour guides and tourist information for St. Hilarion invariably contain the claim that the castle was inspiration for the evil queen's castle in Snow White. This seems a bit dubious -- a quick internet search comes up with a handful of other castles in Europe which make this claim. It seems a bit of a stretch as an inspiration since it is pretty completely ruined. The castle's heyday was back when the Lusignans ruled the island. When the Venetians later took control, they destroyed all of the interior castles in order to consolidate power along the coastlines. There's two other mountaintop castles further along this range which were also destroyed by the Lusignons -- Buffavento and Kantara.

Some of the rooms were more destroyed than others, but they all had incredible views... (Note: the frog took this picture.)

St. Hilarion is built on three different distinct levels on the mountaintop. With lots of stairs between them. The frog made it all the way up to the top. He's getting pretty tough, that kid is.

On the third level of the castle is the main royal apartments. A particularly evil queen did live here for a while -- the Lusignan Queen Eleanor. Supposedly she had a string of lovers while her husband was away (as the Cyprus kings always seemed to be) fighting in the Middle East. After she tired of them, she would push them out of a window of the royal apartments. Her husband also had a mistress briefly. While her husband was away, Eleanor hunted the mistress down and had her thrown in the dungeon in Girne and tortured in an attempt to kill the baby that she was heavily pregnant with. News of his mistress' torture and his wife's high profile assignations eventually got back to Peter via his brother Prince John. Peter returned to Cyprus in a rather foul mood and was assasinated by Eleanor's lovers. She later blamed the assasination on Prince John, and after tricking him into pushing his personal guard one-by-one out of the window of his tower, she killed him.

On the way down, at last.