Istanbul

It's only been nine months since the last trip update. We've put up some photos of the places we've been, but I haven't put up any stories since St. Petersburg. Millions of people conceived and bore a children in that time, and I couldn't get around to putting together a blog post. Life is so hard in the industrialized world sometimes.

Perhaps it is my Irish roots and the beers I've had, that this *finally* seems like the most appropriate time to work on these travelogues. I think mostly, that it has to do with callouses. After all the travel, I couldn't get it together to write up the fascinating events we'd lived through every day. Half-way through the trip, I could go 10-12 hours in museum and never get bored. But I couldn't get it together for a blog post. It was too hard.

We got back to the States, and I could do a 14-hour stint in an art museum with no problem. Getting a job though... 4 hours in, and I'm like, "Where do you people take naps?! People can't be forced to work like this! I need a hammock and two hour nap. NOW." The structure of work and having to get things done (GTD) all the time provides the scaffolding for writing up some memoirs. I'm born again hard.

The best story of our time in Istanbul is about Perin's best friend's dad's girlfriend and tour guide: Sevin. We needed to catch a taxi to get the Galata Tower above the city to see the beautiful sunset. The guy in shop we ate at said we needed to walk down the hill, take the subway one stop, then walk up some other hill. Sevin called bullshit on him, called a taxi and told the driver where we needed to be.

He hauled ass down the hill, going around corners with a high velocity. Sevin didn't put her seatbelt on, leaned forward and started yelling at the driver. He started yelling back and pointing and yelling vociferously at his meter. Back and forth they yelled as we sped through twisty cut-backs in heavily populated areas, honking and pushing pedestrians out of our way. We swiftly arrived at the tower, paid the driver, and Perin and I were sure that we had barely escaped death. Sevin then says to us, "That driver told me the funniest story! Some tourist couldn't find some address and spent hundreds of lira on taxis driving around looking for it. Then she found me (the taxi driver), and I used to live on that street with three houses, so I knew where it was! Even though the meter read four lira, she tipped me 200!"

Sevin took us to some amazing food places, shopping, and spice bazaars. It was some of the best food we ate the whole trip.