Tulips!

Istanbul's flower is the tulip and I think that I read somewhere that this goes back to the Ottoman Empire. Every year Istanbul's parks blossom with thousands of tulips, more varieties than I have ever seen in the U.S. I stole these next sentences from the internet-

"One-hundred and twelve kinds of tulips have been planted this year throughout İstanbul. The tulip buds were mainly grown in Çumra, a town of Konya. A total of 11 million 500 thousand tulips have been planted for Istanbul in 2011."

I had a grand idea to go see the tulips in Emigran Park, where supposedly the most tulips were planted and take a beautiful family photo. The weather was nice and sunny on the Saturday that we went, but the traffic was horribly congested and a 20 minute drive turned into 2 hours! By the time we got there it was around 5 pm and the temperature had dropped at least 10 degrees, now being in the low 50's or maybe high 40's. It was just too cold to get the twins out, so Mark sat in the car and I took Aivia to play on the playground. Then we switched places. The tulips were gorgeous, but even I was too cold to want to be outside! The last picture I had to take from the car because there was too much traffic for us to stop. It is a picture of purple flowers (not tulips) made to look like a river. It was amazing- notice the ceramic ducks!