Blogging
From Abroad

So I’ve been trying to take some pictures around town so that I might post them and give you some idea of what I’m working with on this end. However, whenever I see beautiful manzara (Manzara ne demek hatirliyor musun – Do you remember what manzara means?) I grab my camera and take a photo, and every time I’m disappointed at how short it falls of what I’m actually looking at. I did take some good ones while my friend and I fished off of the Galata Bridge today though so maybe next post will include some pictures.

One thing my I’ve noticed about Turkey is that business operates completely differently. For example, if you want a bike in Istanbul, there is only one place in the whole city you can get one and it is under a bridge in the Russian district. Not that there is only one store that sells bikes, there are in fact several of them. They all just happen to be in the same place. And that is the case with just about every type of good; if you want a cooking pot, plumbing materials, speargun, guitar, chainsaw, ect., you have to go to a very specific part of town, and you can choose between a whole bunch of stores that sell the same thing. To me it seems like they don’t understand the concept of competition but I’m sure this is not the case. There must be a reason for this and I’ve decided to make it a mission of mine to figure out why. I will report back when I figure out why.

Living in Istanbul is great because everyday you wake up in the greatest city in the world. Even a menial task like riding the bus is exciting because it is so visually stimulating. Around every corner is something that is not only completely different that anything you might see in Morgantown, WV or Amherst, NY (my hometown) but it’s probably seven hundred years old and incredibly well built. I’m not really a fan of the phrase “feel the history” but there’s really no other way to describe it. Istanbul is thought to have been continuously inhabited for as long as 5000 years so if feeling the history is possible, the feeling is going to be about as intense as it can be in Istanbul.