Day Fifty-Two: Fenerbahçe En Büyük!

Hi, everybody!  I'm still alive, if you were wondering, and still loving Istanbul.  I haven't written for a while, mostly because I've exchanged the "doing something new and exciting every day" format of our class for the "do the same thing every day" plan more commonly associated with workplaces and I don't know how interested you would be in a play-by-play.  I'm at the closest thing to a real job I've ever had, and so far I'm having a pretty good time.  My coworkers are all very nice, and I'm learning how a Turkish office works.  Basically you come in sometime within an hour of when you're supposed to, you go to lunch promptly at noon, and you drink so much tea that you need to start brushing with whiteout (disclaimer: I have not started brushing with whiteout, nor would I recommend that anyone reading this do so).  Seriously though, the job of Guy Who Brings Everyone Tea is so important here that the ICI employs two of them.  The result is that I drink 3-5 cups of tea a day.  They're serious about their tea here.  I've also learned from Mehmet, the Guy Who Brings Everyone Tea, that they're very serious about soccer.  He asked if I knew about Fenerbahçe, one of Istanbul's popular teams, and when I said something along the lines of "Yes, and I've heard of Galatasaray" he laughed and turned away from me with a dismissive wave of his hand.  I'm learning, though; he taught me how to say "Fenerbahçe is the greatest!" (the title of this post) and taught me their colors by pointing to my blue shirt and the neon-yellow lemonade on his tray.  Fun fact: then I spilled lemonade on my pants.  It wasn't too noticeable, but I hope it was enough to convince him I loved Fenerbahçe enough to wear their colors to work.  At any rate, I think he's forgiven me for mentioning Galatasaray.
My only assignment thus far is to prepare a presentation on something related to the environment.  After a couple days of sitting at my computer and looking for possible topics, I've now moved to phase two, which is sitting at my computer and looking into ecolabelling.  Ecolabelling is basically when a government or NGO or something of that nature (like the Chamber of Industry!) sets a certain standard for environmental friendliness for companies.  If the companies or, more commonly, individual products, pass the test, the companies then receive a label that they can put on their product(s) in order to boast that they are environmentally friendly, which leads to an increase in sales to people like my mother.  I'm looking into how the ICI's ecolabelling program can be expanded and trying to think of ways that the government could help make it even better, maybe by providing tax breaks to companies that win the label or giving them "Get out of jail free!" cards or something like that.  If you have any ideas on that subject, let me know.  The most challenging part of the job so far (other than not knowing Turkish) is probably the stairs.  The ICI building consists of two buildings (both of which, I think, used to be hotels) that have been fused into one mega-chamber.  While I can get to my office fine, the fact that this building was once two buildings means that there are two sets of elevators and two stairways, each of which are very close to each other, although they are never quite level with one another.  One set of stairs goes all the way to the entrance hall, while the other comes out somewhere around there, I don't really know.  It's the closest I've come in real life to the staircases that "like to change" in Harry Potter.  No sky-imitating ceilings, though.  At least not as far as I can tell.
I won't try to describe the neighborhoods we're working and living in without he benefit of pictures, which I promise I will take one day, so for now I'll just say that they're both very nice.  The walk uphill to Istiklal every morning is a great workout, and Katie, Jill, and I are confident that we will have some of the best calf muscles on campus when we get back.  (Although probably not better than Don Cabral '12, who's currently at some sort of sports thing in London.)  Our walk to work takes about ten minutes, which is not bad at all, and as we pass between the TRT television station and the Pera Palace Hotel we get a brief view of the Golden Horn, which is good because I've promised myself that I will see some body of water every day that I'm here, while I still can.  In fact, from my office I can actually see right across the Golden Horn.  The view of the water is blocked by some apartment buildings when I'm sitting at my desk, but I look right across it to the Beyazid Tower, which is possibly the tallest structure in Fatih, built at some point during the Ottoman period in order to spot fires.  Basically a primitive smoke alarm, this tower was very important given that Istanbullus have a tendency to build things out of wood and then expose them to extreme heat (not unlike the COH).  If I stand up from my desk, I can see right down to the Ataturk Bridge, which crosses the Golden Horn and is only about a block from Kadir Has.  Since KHas is on the waterfront, I can plainly see the entire campus where we studied for six weeks, and if I look hard enough I can make out the tiny red rectangle of our old Compound, wedged between some huge housing building and what I only learned two weeks ago was a tomb.  I'm actually pretty glad I only learned we were living next to a tomb a few days before we moved out.
Living in the apartment has been great.  The fans do away with the worst of the heat and if I weren't being careful not to jinx it I would tell you that a certain service that rhymes with "pinternet" has been working much better lately.  But I won't do that.  I've decided that having a view of the street and a bit of a breeze is not worth packing up my stuff, which only took a few days to get strewn all over the floor of my room, and moving it across the hall, so I'm going to stay in my room and let Katie and Jill split their time in the big room.  They seemed fine with that.
We spent a good chunk of last weekend in the Kadir Has library, working on our papers for the Global Sem, which are due at the end of the week.  It wasn't the most exciting weekend, but we did go see the new Batman movie, which was totally awesome.  When we walked into the theater and the previews were in Turkish I got worried, but the movie was in English with Turkish subtitles, so I (thankfully) didn't have to try new things.
Although the living situation is going really well, I'm sad that we can't operate our TV because I really want to watch the Olympics.  They don't seem to have many sports bars around here, but we were resourceful and went to the bar in one of the hotels near the ICI to watch Phelps and Lochte swim on Saturday night.  I wish I could do the same tomorrow for fencing, because Soren Thompson '05 is competing in his second Olympics and I interviewed him about it a few months ago.  Mom, dad-any chance you could record that?
I'll have more eventually (because I know hearing about my walk to work has been so riveting that you're all dying for more) and I promise I'll put up some pictures soon, because this area really is very beautiful, but that's it for now.  Thanks for reading!

Day Forty-three: Fan Appreciation Day

A lot has happened in the last week, including an interesting lecture from a member of the ruling party, several enjoyable evenings wandering around Beyoğlu, some emotional goodbyes, and the beginning of the second leg of my time in Istanbul: the internship.  Jill, Katie, and I start work tomorrow morning at an office on Istiklal Avenue.  I'm hoping it will be on one of the top floors, because the building overlooks the Golden Horn, but I'm not sure if interns typically get an office with a view.  At any rate, it's close to our apartment.
Speaking of which, we now have an apartment.  We moved in after the bulk of our friends left for the airport yesterday afternoon, making two trips and lugging all our stuff up four flights of stairs.  We're living on the other side of the Golden Horn, a few blocks off of the avenue that goes from Eminönü to Taksim, which means it's a little less than a five minute walk to Istiklal and just about five minutes to the Chamber of Industry.  Our building is not much to look at from the outside or from the inside, but once you step inside the apartment that all changes.  It's clean, well-lit, very well taken care of by whomever was here last, and bigger than I expected.  It's already starting to feel like home, largely thanks to our friend Mujgan and her Turkish hospitality.  A few hours after we moved in, she came over with her little cousin and several bags worth of dinner, which she and her aunt had just cooked.  We had a very good meal, something that has become the norm for me in Turkey.

from left to right: me, Katie, Jill, and Mujgan's nine year-old cousin

background: our balcony and a TV we don't know how to work

Turkish people are the best.  Anyway, back to the apartment.  Jill is in the large bedroom facing the street; Katie and I have slightly smaller rooms facing the interior of the building, which means our windows look out on this weird space that is open to the sky but completely enclosed by the building.  I can't see all the way down, but it's too small for there to be a garden or anything down there, so I'm not really sure what it's doing, but I do know there are birds.  That window will stay closed.  Katie and Jill have devised a plan by which we will switch rooms every nine days so that everyone gets to have the big room at some point.  We'll see how that goes.  I'm perfectly happy in my room.  The only thing I don't like is the CONSTANT OPPRESSIVE HEAT.  This is a problem in every room, although you feel it less in the living/dining room and in Jill's room, both of which face the street.  It was great to sleep last night knowing we didn't have to get up at any specific time, but what was less great was how long it took to get to sleep thanks to the CONSTANT OPPRESSIVE HEAT.  For that reason, we headed for an air-conditioned area as soon as we woke up this morning.  We had a great breakfast at a nearby place on Istiklal, and we stayed there for maybe three hours, doing work on our essays (our apartment's internet leaves something to be desired, so we may be utilizing the free wifi at cafes a lot).  Once that got old, I set out to find something the MLS has been searching for for years: fans.
A quick look around Istiklal told me that I would not find fans in any of the shops right on the street.  The vast majority of them are either touristy or restaurants or expensive clothing stores, or some combination thereof.  I called one of our Turkish friends, who told me that she didn't think there were any fan stores but that I should ask around at the cheap jewelry stores in the area.  There are lots of those.  I asked around for maybe half an hour before someone finally said they had fans.  I was relieved, until the shop owner pulled out a box from under her desk and opened it to reveal a large collection of hand-held paper fans, the kind that you always associate with Japan and that don't cool down an entire room.  I had forgotten that that type of fan existed, probably due to the COH.  In hindsight, I probably should have realized that a box fan is an odd thing to sell at a jewelry store, even if they also sell shirts that say, "I'm famous in Istanbul" like some places I've seen.  Too embarrassed to call the one friend, I called another Turkish friend, who told me that there was a huge store where I could get the kind of fans I wanted and all I had to do was walk to Taksim and take the subway two stops over.  I did this, sweating until I reached the cool caverns of the gigantic Taksim metro station, and when I got off the train I saw an enormous mall that rose maybe seven stories in the air and went several more stories underground, as I learned once I entered.  There was a massive electronics store right near the entrance, and after checking out some 3D TVs I went and found two powerful fans (I tested them) for our apartment.  They were not that big, but the boxes they came in were just big enough not to fit in the same bag, so I took the metro back to Taksim and walked the fifteen minute walk to our apartment with a full load of fans.  I'm not complaining-they were absolutely necessary.  My fan now sits on my windowsill, blocking my view of the weird void, and as I write this I am no longer bothered by the COH.  I still wouldn't call the temperature in our apartment comfortable, but it's definitely livable, which is great because I start work tomorrow and I can't afford to lie awake thinking about how hot it is until the wee hours of the morning.
I'll end by saying that when Katie got back to the apartment she had with her a fan that she had bought from a mall on Istiklal that I somehow missed.  There was a huge appliance store there, of course.  I think I've learned a lot in Turkey, but I'm still working on that whole "common sense" thing.

Day Thirty-six: The Halfway Point

I've spent most of the last week either getting to know the city or learning about the Fourth Crusade.  The crusade is the topic I finally chose for my research paper.  It feels good to actually know what I'm writing about.  I'm still learning, but I think a basic synopsis of the Fourth Crusade would be "medieval Christians want to take back Jerusalem so they decide to attack Egypt but don't have the money or manpower so they just lay siege to Constantinople even though it was a Christian city."  The crusade was led by Enrico Dondolo, whom I believe I have mentioned in an earlier post.  What I may have failed to mention is that, at the time of his attack on the city, in which he led a charge against the walls, he was 90 years old and blind.  So call him what you want-and historians have called him some pretty bad things, according to my research-but Dandolo was dedicated.  Anyway, experts may note that our class is on Ottoman history and that the Byzantines were not, in fact, the Ottomans (recent studies have proved this definitively).  Luckily, our professor is chill enough that he didn't mind the rather off-topic nature of my essay.  I think he was glad to see someone interested in ancient history.  For the record, we walked into a bookstore in Taksim the other day and saw a pile of his book on Ataturk in the Best Seller section.  Writing a book in the first place is something to be proud of, and having it received well is quite an accomplishment, but to have your book on Ataturk become a best seller in a country where everyone has been talking about Ataturk for the last ninety years is just crazy.  Logically, I figured, it must be one of the greatest biographies ever written, so I bought a copy.

that's Ataturk on the cover, not Professor Hanioğlu

Good stuff.  Now, about the city.  We've spent a lot of our free time lately in the area across the Golden Horn from Eminönü (yeah, I figured out how to type Turkish letters), where buses, trams, and cabs crowd the area near the Grand Bazaar.  I'm still not sure what to call this area.  It's near Taksim, so for a while I referred to it as Beyoğlu, the name given to the area around Taksim Square and İstiklal Avenue, but nobody else seemed to be doing that.  It's centered around the Galata Tower, an ancient building that actually played a significant role in the Fourth Crusade, so I'm thinking now it might be called Galata, although the tram stop is called Kadiköy.  Let's just say it's Galata.  Anyway, Galata Tower is a major tourist destination but the area around it seems not to be that touristy.  At least that's how it seems to me, a tourist.  There are lots of cool cafes, like the one where I got awesome (and organic!) yogurt and granola for brunch yesterday, and some great restaurants and bars.  Mostly, though, I just love walking around.  It's not incredibly crowded at night, at least not like Taksim is, and there's something cool to be found on every block of the cobblestone streets that wind down the hill toward the water.  Plus, every now and then you'll walk out of some building and look down the street to see the gigantic tower looming at the end of it, like Pluto's Ghost in Luray Caverns back in Virginia.  Always a pleasant surprise.

If my calculations are correct, I'm halfway through my time abroad.  Five weeks have passed, and there are five more to go.  It's nice, because I miss everyone at home and it's good to know it isn't too long before I'll be back, but at the same time five weeks is enough time to see what I want to see from Istanbul without feeling rushed.  I do feel at home here, which is great.  Yesterday, I walked back to the Compound from brunch in Galata, a walk that took me down the hill to the Golden Horn, across the Eminönü bridge, and through a large market I hadn't known existed back to Kadir Has.  It's nice to be able to get around without worrying too much-we pretty much have the transportation system down.  I might feel a little less comfortable once we move into our apartment, just because we'll have to get used to a new place, but (again, if my calculations are correct) it actually won't be that far from the area I just wrote about, which is fantastic.  Despite the still significant language gap and the fact that I don't look that much like a local (although I'm definitely tanner than when I arrived), I don't feel like a tourist anymore, even though I called myself one earlier in this post.  Istanbul, as it has been for the last few weeks and will be for the next five, is home.  For that reason, I don't feel homesick like I would on a shorter trip-it's more like it is at school, where I miss Richmond but I don't exactly think of it as home because, even though that's what it is, I have a home here now, too.  The neighborhood around the Compound and, more recently, Galata have started to feel like home: the kind of place you're glad to return to, where you feel comfortable once you start to see familiar sights.  Of course I can't wait to see Richmond and everyone in it, but it'll be sad to leave Istanbul, too, and I'm glad I won't have to for a while.  Long story short, it's nice to be settled in here at the halfway point.  Thanks for reading!

Day Thirty: Amasra, Safranbolu, and NYC N.C.A.A. America Today

Part of the reason I haven't written for the last five days (not that that's unusual) is that we've only had internet for a few hours of them.  This weekend was our trip to Amasra, a beautiful town on the coast of the Black Sea about six hours from Istanbul.  Before we left on Thursday night, the power went out at the Compound (our name for the Kadir Has dorms), so we huddled around the chairs in the Kadir Has Starbucks and watched movies while we waited for the bus to Amasra to pick us up at midnight.  Driving through Istanbul at midnight was a great experience, although being in a cramped bus for the next six hours was slightly less great.  Still, it might have been worth it for the view you get from the second Bosporus Bridge when it's dark and you see the lights of the city spread out as far as the eye can see, broken only by the black strip of the Bosporus.  It was also cool to see just how large the Asian side of Istanbul is.  We had been driving for an hour before we final got out of the suburbs, or at least what looked like suburbs at one in the morning.  The rest of the drive was beautiful, and the cramped conditions plus my inability to sleep in moving vehicles ensured that I barely missed a second of the scenery.  We pulled into Amasra around seven in the morning.  I was literally unable to keep my eyes open at that point.  I could only force them to stay open by standing up when we finally came to a stop, and much of that morning is a blur, but luckily I took pictures.  Here's the beach, as seen from either right outside our hotel or a little down the road from it:

Amasra is situated on a peninsula that sticks out into the Black Sea and has a perfectly-shaped bay on either side.  We were on the Eastern bay, but it was less than a ten minute walk to the bay on the other side.  We walked up a tall hill and got a beautiful view of the perfect, turquoise water and the now-deserted island just off the coast where there was once a monastery, but I was too tired to remember my camera.  I'm sure you can Google it.  What I did get a picture of is a mountain that forms one side of the bay closest to our hotel which people say looks like the profile of Ataturk.

This isn't the greatest angle, but you can kind of see it anyway, right?

Anyway, after powering through a walking tour of the island, we threw our need for sleep to the wind and went to the beach.  The water was perfect-refreshing but not murderous, unlike the other times I've been in the Black Sea.  We stayed there for quite a while, long enough for me to get decently sunburned, then had dinner and went to bed almost immediately afterwords.
On Saturday, we went to Safranbolu, a town about two hours inland from Amasra.  The name translates to something like "City of Saffron," but I think a more fitting translation would be "City that Seems to Have Been Designed So that You Can't Find Shade Anywhere."  The city was beautiful, and it provided an excellent opportunity to see what Turkish towns with populations lower than 15,000,000 look like.  It's also noteworthy because it has stayed much closer to its old Ottoman culture than most cities in Turkey.  All the houses, or at least the vast, vast, vast majority, looked nearly identical, all exemplifying late Ottoman architecture.

See what I mean?  The owner of that partially blue house must have been a real loose cannon.  Anyway, we saw plenty of examples of Ottoman architecture.  We also visited an old han, also known as a caravan saray, a place where caravans traveling on the Silk Road could stop for a while and rest, trade a little, catch up on news, go to the bathroom, see how the Mets were doing, etc.  I especially enjoyed this because a similar structure had played a role in a book I read for my freshman seminar, The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric.  It kind of played second fiddle to the bridge, but still.

After Safranbolu, we went back to Asmara and had a nice night on the beach, where the water was still warm enough to swim, at least by my standards.  The next morning, we woke up to a whole lot of rain, so we decided to have lunch and head back to Istanbul.  Of course, by the time lunch was over, the weather was more like this...

...but we left anyway, since the drive back would take a very long time.  We left around 3:30 and got back to the Compound at 12:30, so I'm not sad that we didn't stay longer, as much as I would have loved more time on the beach.  It was a great mini-vacation, but now it's back to work.  This week, we're studying Ottoman literature, so Professor Hanioglu is at his beach house and another Princeton professor has to deal with us for a week.  As it turns out, this professor is this guy, a former ambassador to Afghanistan who spent most of his life in the State Department and seems to know everything about the area between Bosnia and Japan.

which, as you can see, is big

After his lecture on Ottoman love poetry, which was great, I talked with him about the State Department over lunch.  He said he had enjoyed it, that he felt like it gave you an opportunity to make a difference, and that there was no specific formula to follow in college that would give you an advantage when applying to the Foreign Service.  I'm sure Dad will be glad to hear that.

In the spirit of fostering friendly relations between the U.S. and our allies all across the world, I will dedicate the last part of this post to some examples of truly beautiful English translations that I encountered in Safranbolu.

 you don't get to know what heats it

 there are only two things wrong with this translation 

 it's possible they meant to say "ice"

I laugh, but I don't think I could even begin to say any of those phrases in Turkish.  I know water is "su," though.  Finally, I found this t shirt amusing, so I had Thomas take a picture of it while pretending to take a picture of me.  It reminds me of the Simpsons episode (yep, I'm still quoting the Simpsons all the time, despite not having seen it for a month) where they go to Japan and someone has a shirt that says "UCLA Yankee Cola."  Apparently, there are places where you can just string together America-ish words, put them on a t shirt, and make a living selling them.

I feel like that guy might have been on to me-doesn't it kind of look like he's posing?  Anyway, it's been a month since I left Richmond (and NYC N.C.A.A. America Today), and I'm doing great.  I hope everything is awesome on the other side of the Atlantic!  Thanks for reading.

Day Twenty-Five: A Turkish Fourth of July

Happy Fourth!  I hope all the celebrations are going great back at home.  For some reason, they aren't nearly as into the Fourth of July over here as I thought they would be, but I'm sure the Columbus Day celebration more than makes up for it.
Even though Istanbul went on with business as usual today, we had the day off.  Our group went to an island in the Sea of Marmara, very close to Istanbul.  Though still considered a part of the city, the island is apparently predominately a place for summer homes, with 80% of the population living in the city in the winter.  We arrived by a speed ferry, which is basically a ferry that looks like a huge speedboat.

It's also faster than a regular ferry.

When we got there, it looked fairly busy to me, but it may have been lent an air of business by the horses that were trotting around everywhere, pulling carriages.  Apparently all the transportation on the island is either horse- or bike-related.  Not sure why, but it was nice.  It was very hot, but there were lots of awnings and trees and Coke in glass bottles, the superiority of which is something that America could definitely learn from its European friends.

After a brief period of exploring the city and sweating, we headed to the beach.  The walk there resulted in even more sweating, but we got to see some very nice trees.

Aren't they nice?  I thought they were nice.

When we got to the beach, we were momentarily disappointed by the fact that it consisted mostly of rocks, the discomfort of which is something our European friends should definitely learn from our American beaches (although I should point out that I've been to several beaches in Europe that are very nice and sandy).  Anyway, although walking on the beach proved painful, the water turned out to be much more comfortable than the frigid Black Sea waters in Constanta.  I'm not sure if I covered that in an earlier post or if my fingers were still frostbitten at the time, but it was cold.  The water was perfect today-uncomfortably cold at first, then refreshingly chilly, then perfect.  It was the first of what I hope will be two (maybe even three) excellent beach experiences I've had in Turkey (we're going to the Black Sea coast for the weekend, too).  We walked back up from the beach to a restaurant with a stunning view, this one:

There was a very cool haze all over the Sea of Marmara that almost entirely obscured the bottoms of the islands and the Turkish coast, at least from where we were sitting.  We could see the island pictured above as well as some of the coast of Turkey.  It surprised me how built-up that area was, given how far we were from the parts of Istanbul I knew, but the city just keeps going down the coast on the Asian side, evidently.

I don't know if you can see it, but there's a whole mess of buildings over there.

After lunch, we witnessed a ceremony naming a hill (with nice trees) after a local who was apparently a big part of the founding of Kadir Has University and loved the hill so much some people (I like to think there's an Istanbul Chamber of Hills that deals with these matters) decided to name it after him.  Then, as if that weren't enough excitement, we decided to rent some bikes and ride them around the island.  The island was plenty hilly, as islands tend to be, so there was a lot of walking up hills and squeezing the brakes on the way down, especially since I hadn't ridden a bike in a few years and these ones were of questionable stability, but it was a great way to see the place.  Around pretty much every corner were stunning views like this:

My attempt at a panoramic shot

At some point, on one of those hills, Alfonso and I started singing "The Star-Spangled Banner."  Other than that and wearing a red-ish shirt (and boxers) today, we didn't do too much to celebrate America specifically, but we observed the holiday as George Washington would have wanted: by chilling on a Turkish island and listening to music on the speed-ferry back to Istanbul.  U-S-A!  U-S-A!

For no particular reason, here's a picture of a typical ferry.  For some reason I just find them really cool.  These babies are criss-crossing the Bosporus and Golden Horn all day, every day, and our trip to the island taught me that they go out into the sea as well.  They're always full of people and there are just so many people trying to get places in Istanbul that I don't think I've ever seen one (ship, not person) without being able to look around and quickly spot at least one more (actually, that's true of people as well).  Coming back to Istanbul at about six, it looked like there was a whole convey headed into the Bosporus.

I just think they're awesome.  Anyway, thanks for reading, and happy Fourth of July!  I'll leave you with a picture of me, Thomas, and Feng standing proudly by one of our nation's most hallowed and ancient symbols.

One more thing Europe needs to get on board with: Krispy Kreme.

Day Twenty-Two: Smoke on the Water

Hello, again!  We're halfway through with the seminar, which means I'm a little less than a third of the way into my time in Turkey, and I'm loving every minute of it (except the last Turkish quiz we took online, which counted my answers wrong because I said "do not" instead of "don't").  Yesterday was an amazing day.  Mujgan (pronounced Moojg-yan), on of the Turkish students in our class, arranged for a shuttle to take us about a forty-five minute drive up the Bosporus to a nice restaurant right on the water for brunch.  I found a number of excellent vegetarian options, including borek, and we all sat there eating for what seemed like a good two hours.  After that, the bus took us to nearby Koc University (pronounced "coach"-it should be spelled with a Turkish letter that I don't know how to make using my keyboard), Mujgan's school, a seemingly brand-new series of beautiful, Stanford-esque buildings spread out over an otherwise deserted area of forest overlooking the Black Sea.  I say Stanford-esque because the architecture is what Stanford's looked like in it brochures and because the area looked a lot like Northern California.  Or, at least, what Northern California looks like in its brochures.

Once there, we were able to make use of Koc's swimming pool, on the condition that we wore swimming caps.  After lounging around for a while, some of us went to play soccer on a nearby turf field, hoping to burn off at least some of the weight we'd gained at brunch.  We may have burned off a few calories, but the more noticeable burns ended up being on our feet.  Turns out that stuff gets very hot in the summer, which I guess makes sense.  I was able to borrow sandals from Thomas, which were not ideal for soccer but worked out fine considering I had very little soccer ability to be hindered by improper footwear in the first place.  Alfonso was less lucky.  I'm not sure why, but he played the entire time, almost an hour, without shoes.  It was painful to look at how red his feet were afterwords.

As our feet recovered, we packed up and moved on to Solar Beach, where they were having an annual music festival called Mono.  The festival took place in a series of stages on a hill overlooking the Black Sea, making for quite possibly the best venue ever.  I saw bands like Gogol Bordello, Oh Land, Metric, Com Truise, and other weird names like that, most of which I'd never heard of but all of which were very fun to watch.  The atmosphere was great, and once the sun went down on Solar Beach the gigantic cargo ships off the coast turned into a series of Christmas lights stretched out along the horizon.  It's incredible to me that there can be that many ships waiting to get through the Bosporus at a given time.  What's even more incredible is that it was just like that the last time I was on Turkey's Black Sea coast, four years ago, and I doubt that the stream of ships has let up this whole time.

Speaking of things that never stop, it seems as if everyone in Turkey smokes.  I would say that anyway, but the point was really driven home (and by "home" I mean my lungs) at the festival yesterday.  After about twenty minutes in the crowd, I realized that I had to crane my neck up in order to get a breath that actually seemed to have some oxygen in it-everything below that level was just tobacco smoke.  Well, maybe not just tobacco, but definitely just smoke.  At the Oh Land concert I met a very nice Turkish guy who, it turned out, had graduated from Kadir Has and had visited Virginia.  He asked if I had cigarettes, and when I said no he asked if I was actually from Virginia.  Philip Morris is doing great here-they don't have to hide behind the names of other tobacco brands or the "Altria Corporation," and seems that the Turks are collectively ignoring the gross pictures of cancer on their cigarette boxes.  Getting on the bus the other night, we saw a kid who couldn't have been older than 10 smoking.  As my friends and I discussed how ridiculous this was, he handed his cigarette off to a kid who couldn't have been older than 7, who was smoking like he knew how to do it.  I know it's a different culture, but I can't say I'll miss having smoke everywhere when I leave.  That might be the only thing I miss, really.  Well, that and the quizzes.  Thanks for reading!  Happy July from Istanbul!