October 4-5

(in which our heroes arrive in Istanbul, which is one of two continents, but Laura is fuzzy on which)

Flights... what can you say. They were endless, and without much hope of salvaging a sleep cycle. Lots of turbulence from JFK/ZRH finished that. I did get to see a little bit of Switzerland, and one of my ancestral homelands, out the window of Flughagen Zurich. Not sure why some airline reviews called that place confusing. It all seemed sane enough to me.

It seemed extraordinarily Swiss to me - all red, black, white, and right angles. Jerry tried to convince me some hills with trees on them were Alps, but I was having none of it.

Air travel note #2. Was ticketed in the exit row for the first time ever, but since it was a Swiss Air flight from Zurich to Istanbul, wondered if we might not disqualify for language reasons. But, good news, the world still is safe for Americans with no foreign language skills. Air planes, at least.

I was sure that with a scheduled landing at 1:35, what with visas, passport control, and traffic, we wouldn't be able to make the 3pm (revised from 4pm) kickoff meeting, but we came in just under the wire at 2:58pm.

(And, as it turned out, that wasn't actually "leave the hotel at 3" in any event). They had IR scanners in the airport, watching for flu! But they didn't ask why we were there, the way many other customs agents do. (Our last London trip, Jerry got to be Business and I was Pleasure, which the customs guy said "Ah, shopping", which was not totally inaccurate, given the number of yarn stores I went to.)

Impression #1 of Istanbul: the roads into town, along the waterfront, tend to run either just inside or just outside, the old city walls, so you get to see lots of walls alongside (And occasionally integrated with) modern buildings. Once in a while, the road punches through the walls, too.

Many, many ships out in them straits, as though they are on the way to something...

Today our Tour was of the Blue Mosque. Lovely and impressive and built in only nine years? Much faster than my vague memory of cathedrals - though built later, when they had cranes? Our tour group has apparently earned points by not asking anything dreadfully offensive to Islam.

Dinner at Yeşil Ev, which Dana translated without assistance as "The Green House" and we did eat in a greenhouse, off of the garden of another hotel. When we were told the appetizers were spinach and cheese in pastry, I suspect we were all thinking of spanakopita - but no, one cheese and one spinach. Not Greece. And, Dave didn't want his Assorted Desserts, so there was much plundering.

We were all kind of splatted after the day and a half of airplanes, though, so we trundled back to the hotel for the evening.

And Mikka is trying to get me to buy a bowl in every city. There are nearly as many bowls as rugs, and the salesmen are very enthusiastic.