Yesterday my friend from university, Christian, and I spent the day traveling to, and then climbing around on, some ruins from the 5th century AD. One of the things I love about Turkey is that ruins are a dime a dozen around here, and so you can climb around on old...
This little boy was playing with my phone at the airport and found some things on it I didn’t even know existed. He did need some help figuring out the camera though.
Here’s another geek post about the stuff in my backpack. This one is about a black long-sleeved shirt, and what I do and don’t use it for. This shirt is made out of some sort of man-made fiber, but I don’t know exactly what that fiber is. The...
Yesterday Anton reminded me that I need to write more posts about what’s in my backpack. I refer to those posts as "geek posts," because it takes a geek to be interested in stuff like that. But that’s okay, being a geek. I understand. I am a geek...
I spend most of the time on the walk looking for places to sleep, eating junk food from gas stations, and smelling like a wet dog. Every once in a while though, a moment comes up that makes me feel like one of the luckiest men on the face on the planet, like having my...
Well Istanbul, it’s been real. Your siren song is one of the strongest and most irresistable I’ve ever heard, and it’s been tugging at me for years. But I’ve got work to do, and it’s not here. So later today I’ll be boarding an...
I attended a meeting of the Istanbul Toastmasters Wednesday and practiced speaking to a group of people about the trip. I’ve got those meetings coming up at Tarsus American College in December, and I wanted to get some practice in. It’s been three years...
In Istanbul I’ve been staying in Harbiye, a neighborhood just north of Taksim. Harbiye is my old stomping grounds from 2003 and 2004, before I moved across the Bosphorus to another neighborhood called Moda. This is Cumhuriyet Caddesi, one of the main drags...
For those of you who are big fans of Taksim, next time you see it it might not look like you remember it. The square is undergoing some pretty major construction, and has begun closing off to traffic. Here are a couple articles about the construction. Basically, it...
On the road these days most of my social contact comes from beet farmers and gas station attendants. Lest my readers think Turkey is nothing but beet farms and gas stations, I went to Istanbul’s Nisantasi today. Nisantasi is the kind of neighborhood where you...
Today I got the paperwork for my residency permit approved. When I first started planning this walk oh-so-long-ago, a residency permit was not going to be necessary. Turkey had a 90-day tourist visa, and when your 90 days ran out, all you had to do was take a bus to...
One of my favorite snacks in the world is peynirli su boregi ("cheesy water pastry"), and I used to assume it was all over Turkey, but I don’t think I saw it once in two months on the road. So here in Istanbul I’ve been eating the stuff every...
Today was the 89th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Turkey, and I observed the holiday by paying my respects to its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. At the end of World War I the Ottoman Empire was carved up, cutting Turkey back to basically just a stump....
Last night I boarded a bus from Konya to Ankara. Tuesday I’ll board a bus from Ankara to Istanbul. I’ll be in Istanbul for about 3 days, and then I bus it back to Konya to resume the walk later this week. I’m here in Ankara to document Monday’s...
And then, at the end of the day’s walk, was the city of Konya. Konya’s population is about 1 million, which I used to think was the size of just one small part of a larger city. Now a million is a sprawling megalopolis. I’ve become such a hick.
