And the Genovese stretched their hand across the sea...

06.08.08 0621 O, lardie...it’s been a bit, then, hasn’t it? I feel as if Istanbul has passed me by in the blink of an eye. It’s over, people. Where did it go? There will be no more of AJ’s horrible puns, Kristina’s noises, Madison’s interjections, Cristina’s expressions, Alejandro giving me a hard time for being vegan, or Durán’s lanky limbs blocking photos… Everyone and everything else about them--this seems somewhat weird, but things like this happen so often as to feel almost normal right now; they are, indeed, a part of life, even as they are gone. There will, however, be Girl Talk in November, and guises of a social life before then, methinks.

I think that I could figure out the days and dates on which things happened, here, too, but where’s the fun in that? I’ll make it up as I go along.

Some days ago:
We scurried, late as we always are (were?), off on metro this and funicular that to one dock on the Bosporus, from where we took a two-hour long or so, methinks, boat ride to this little island. After climbing what proved to be somewhat of a daunting hill and passing right through restaurants and modern WCs on the way, we arrived at the remains of a castle perched high atop this peak. From here, I stared at the vast expanse of the Black Sea: Karadeniz, that wasteland of shipwrecks and weather as fickle as New England and yet more harsh in the nothingness.

İstanbul sprawling on one side, and the Black Sea looming on the other.

There were some wild plants up there, but the best part was the Turkish coffee at our meal.

We read out fortunes in it after. There is something calming to me in hearing people read my fortune, like having mine hair washed or listening to children sleeping.