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.