12/30/06 - (still) Istanbul, Turkey

Despite the fact that it feels like only a few days have passed, it was exactly 2 months ago this morning that I stepped off the overnight 'Friendship Express' in Istanbul's Sirkeci station, the same one that used to serve as the terminus of the famous Orient Express. My time in Turkey has been amazing, and also a welcome break from the more go-go-go travelling of the previous 6 months. This is in no small part thanks to my friend Emre (who has been among other things at various times a tour guide, translator, social planner, chauffeur and drinking buddy) and to the dozens of other Turks I have met, mostly through him. With their help, and through the fact that I've been here long enough to explore the city beyond the standard tourist sights, I also feel like I've gotten a pretty decent introduction into life in modern Turkey. So for a little while I've been meaning to write on a variety of topics that have occurred to me, but now that my grad school apps are finished and have been DHL'd to merry old England, I don't have much of an excuse not to, and since I'm leaving Istanbul on the evening of January 15, I'd better get cracking.

But since these entries will be a little different from what I've been posting up until now, I thought rather than use this site, I'd give the blogging functionality on travbuddy.com a try. So you can check out 'Talking Turkey' here (at least as soon as I write the first entry tomorrow morning). My New Year's resolution is to try to write once a day until I leave Turkey, but then again, we all know New Year's resolutions are made to be broken, so we'll see how it goes...

Happy New Year! / Yeni Yılınız kutlu olsun!

-Mark