"Be the change you want to see in the world"

When I want to explore a city, I love to walk, just walk, hour after hour with only the vaguest of notions where I am going. Walking a city is one of the best ways to get to know it. It gives me an intimate understanding of the city’s rhythms, its traffic flow, its lively [...]

Over ninety percent of Turkey’s population is Sunni, and most of the rest are Shia. With that many Muslims you’d think there would be more religious observance than there is. But Turks in Istanbul are about as likely to be regular mosque-goers as Americans in New York are to be regular church-goers. In the heartland [...]

Mr. E stood by, watching and translating, doing his best to not insult what little dignity I had left. The technicians eventually gave up on me and put me under so I’d sleep through their second attempt. Knocking me out did the trick, and after what seemed to me like mere moments I found myself [...]

I have chronic heartburn. A half dozen times over the past 15 years I have had some dramatic but short-lived complications due to it. The complications come in the form of incapacitating abdominal cramps that last for a few hours. When the cramps are in force it’s not a pretty sight and uninitiated witnesses worry [...]

In Turkey we took almost all of our vacations near the sea. Our favorite spots were little towns along the Aegean, places like Assos, Bodrum, and Marmaris, places where sandy white beaches border water so clear I couldn’t tell whether it was one foot deep or ten. I never ventured far from the shore, swimming [...]

When my girlfriend was little she was a ballerina. Today she has the long, lanky, body and graceful manner of a natural dancer. One sunny summer day in Santa Barbara, in our early days of dating before we moved to Turkey, we went out to her car to drive over to a party and meet [...]

Four hundred years before the Ottoman Turks conquered Istanbul in 1453 their predecessors, the Selcuk Turks, arrived in western Turkey and started to take control of a small amount of land. Their hold on the land was fragile though, and they spent a few hundred years battling with the Byzantines, the Mongols, and a disorganized [...]

And then of course there was Jan, a towering and solidly-built Dutchman. Every time I ran Simon into the fence or otherwise made up for my lack of skill by physically disrupting the movements of others, I knew I would have to pay the piper. Jan was the piper. Running into Jan was like running [...]

We played on a small, fenced-in, astroturfed field tucked away between the backsides of apartment buildings and a mosque. There were some very noisy cats that were always fighting in the bushes near the apartment buildings. I never figured out if those cats fought on a schedule every Saturday at 2:00 pm, or if they [...]