Day Twelve: Who's Winning the Match?

This actually happened yesterday, but I thought I'd mention that I played soccer with some local Istanbulus (that's what you call people from Istanbul, I think).  Most of the guys in our group wanted to play, and I had fond memories of indoor soccer in middle school, so I joined them as they went across the street to play in the chain-link boxed-in turf field that Kadir Has put across the street so that people could play "mini futbol."  Wasn't that nice of them?  As a side note, I think it's funny that pretty much every language in the world has a word like "futbol" and the USA is the only place where it doesn't mean soccer.  I'm not saying it's bad, it's just funny that we managed to avoid that otherwise universal term.  Anyway, some of the guys in our group are pretty good at soccer, but obviously I'm not one of them.  Nobody wanted to play goalie and, although I'm not really good at dribbling or shooting, I'm great at getting in the way of things, so we decided I would be the keeper (apparently soccer players have adopted some Quidditch terminology).  We were playing some local kids whom some of the guys had met the day before in the same place.  They were all very nice, especially the one who kept asking me how I was, although the more I think about it the more I think he was just trying to distract me.  He succeeded once, and the Turks scored on us.  I don't mean to brag, but that was one of only three or maybe for times they scored on me.  The term "greatest goalie ever" gets tossed around so much that it's kind of lost all meaning, but I don't think it'd be too much to say that I was the greatest goalie there.  Granted, the other one was a very small Turkish kid (I think they were all about 14 or 15) who kept tripping over the ball, but, I mean, you didn't have to look at the competition to know that Pele was good, right?  Anyway, we beat them handily.  The only tough moments were right at the beginning of the game, when this kid named Faisal took a long-distance shot and I blocked it with my mouth (all the teeth are still there, I checked) and, of course, the numerous times when my total ignorance of the rules of soccer proved embarrassing.  I think maybe they just wanted me in goal so that they wouldn't have to teach me how to play without using my hands.  For the record, if there are any FIFA officials out there, it's way easier if you use your hands.  So, I don't know, maybe look into changing the rules.
Speaking of soccer, our lecturer today (a Turk who went to a German school and now teaches at Michigan in very interesting accent) mentioned that a few years ago Turkey hosted Greece in some sort of soccer tournament and the home crowd brought a huge banner reading "1453," the year that the Ottoman Turks laid siege to Istanbul, then Constantinople, and finally captured it, toppling the Greek-ish Byzantines.  I like the idea of bragging about something that happened further back than anyone can trace their ancestry, and evidently the Turks do too, because this was facing the Bosporus on the Asian side near a lighthouse we walked by:

We should do this with 1776 and put it right across from the British embassy.  Or on top of our embassy in London

They also did the same thing with 1923, the year Ataturk came to power... I think (we haven't gotten to that stage of Ottoman history yet).  I was reminded of a shirt I saw recently that had an American flag on the front and on the back, around a larger American flag, the words "Back to Back World War Champions."  Take that, forces of evil!