İstanbul'da

Story/adventure/picture/narrative time. I swear that there are coherent ideas in mine head, but I feel the need to elaborate upon our travels and provide pictures first. I'll intellectualise later, given time.

So, three days ago now, we wandered around Istanbul a bit. I mentioned some of this before, but I'm so disjinted in mine head that I'll repeat it here for more clarity and coverage. We started by walking down from our dorm, through the equivalent of Beacon Hill and Newbury Street. We saw some examples of traditional (Ottoman, methinks) architecture in some or other university.

There were gardens along the Bosporus, but we didn't go on them. You could see the Bosporus from the road.

Walking along, we saw washing fountains for Muslims to use before prayer, along cobblestone streets that slope down to the water. Also, there were some more faces of Kristina...

I spied, too, a tree after mine own heart: not only a sycamore, but an anarchistic sycamore. Aw...

Here is a Muslim, methinks, cemetery, complete with golden inscriptions on the blue-grey grave-markers.

The end of the street was like turning from Newbury onto Mass Ave.

We walked to the university and had a tour. There was an ESL programme poster with Northeastern on it, and there was some Husky pride...

We walked outside to see the straits. On the fourth floor, with the president's office and whatnot, was a restaurant on a terrace that overlooked the straits. This is where our professor had lunch, and ti turns out that the president of the board of trustees was the one who invited us down to Gelibolu, as the university president is a woman (woot!). There were also Turkish flags everywhere (note them in the distance is the last photo above); the Turks are a very proud people, and there's something about that that I find charming, and not annoying, like American jingoism. We went down to lunch, which I mentioned, and will now...pictoralise.

At the two lectures that we had after lunch, I couldn't help but snigger when we discussed the Bosporus. We discussed the Bosporus and the Dardanelles (Sweeney Todd!), and the different between international and some other name--trans-national?--waterways. An international waterway, by name, would be a waterway that belongs to all countries, and the other was something that all countries could use. I thought that this was stupid, because everybody knows that there's no body of water in the world that has parts in all countries, so there's no need not to mention that name, and international waterway works just fine, in mine opinion, when referring to these two straits. I laughed, though, because as they were discussing how--at least in times of peace--all ships could pass through the straits free, I thought, 'Little do they know...not anymore! Domination has just begun...'

Do you want to hear about the next day? I think that I'll make it a post all on its own, as there's quite a lot of pictures to post.