Many modes of transport to Byzantıum (Turkey 2006)

First off, I have discovered a tip for anyone who ever find themselves in a foreign country typing on a non-qwerty keyboard: open MS Word, change the setting from whatever language it is in to English, and then presto! All of a sudden the punctuation you know and love is back in the places you think it should be. For example, as I type this in Turkey, I am pressing the key labeled "upside down exclamation point" which is actually one of the Turkish letters (and instead of getting an upside down question mark, you get a quotation mark """"""" See? And just then, for the question mark, I pressed the Turkish letter for the Ch sound- a C with a tail under it (ç), but thanks to the wonders of technology, MS Word does the translating for me and realizes that I want the question mark, not the c with the tail.

So, anyway, I am off to a rambling start which does not bode well for the rest of this travel dispatch. So let me backtrack to the beginning.

Hi All!! I am in Turkey, where I have been traveling for the past 10 very frenetic and hot days. It has been so busy that I haven't had much time to send my regularly scheduled travel dispatches, and the free time I have had was on a boat in the Mediterranean which while having pump toilets did not have internet access, so there you go. And here I am, writing you from Konya, Turkey, the home of the mystic poet Rumi and his Sufi sect most famous for the whirling dervishes (you know, the ones in white with the fez like cap who spin around and around, the ones that through no fault of their own remind me of the hippie kids at the Grateful Dead shows, the ones who always hung out in the back, spinning and spinning and spinning).

But I am ahead of myself again! Ok, let's go back to Istanbul, where my trip started and will ultimately end next Sunday. After some near snafus at the airport in Amsterdam, I landed in Istanbul, and took the new Metro and slightly less new but no less modern tram to Sultanmehet, the historical and tourist center of Istanbul. I got lost trying to find the vegetarian restaurant in the guidebook, so I ate at a sidewalk cafe and made my first discovery about modern Turkish cuisine: french fries are considered vegetables, vegetables on par with tomatoes ann cucumbers. I ordered the vegetarian special which consisted of eggplant, rice, and french fries simmered in tomato sauce. Fortunately, every thing I have eaten in Turkey since then has been a squillion (a new term I picked up from my new Australian friend Shelly) times better.

Before I went to sleep, I did the one thing I have been waiting nearly 365 days to do (since I left Morocco): I went to the hammam! Oh happy day! In fact, here is the website of the hammam I went to in Istanbul

http://www.cemberlitashamami .com.tr

That this hammam built in the 16^th century by the same architecht who built the Blue Mosque (the one on all the Istanbul postcards) has its own website with flash plug ins says something about Istanbul that for some reason many people find hard to believe: it is an extremely modern city. I think some people have this perception of Turkey as being this backwater country that harbors terrorists, and while it is still developing, parts of it could really be in Italy or France.