Remembering Where I’m From
The mutant seagulls of Istanbul are shrieking for just one on the top floor of my Kurtulus apartment tonight. My sister went home on an early morning flight from Ataturk Airport. The heat has yet to work in my room and it feels like camping in the high Cascades in the fall months. Nevertheless, I […]
Budapest the Best
Budapest is backpacker fun. Budapest has lots of history. Yay. These truisms are about as well worn as the goat pen at a petting zoo… If it was the new friends who made my Northwest Anatolia trip so special, it was seeing two old friends who made my recent five-day trip to Budapest so memorable. […]
Hospitality, Hitchhiking and History in Northwest Anatolia
I thought about how I ought to blog about this trip: whether I ought to just recount the places I had been and things that I learned about Turkish history, culture, etc., or whether I should include what truly ended up making the trip special. I will choose the latter.
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Be More Like the French
Notorious for their insistence that tourists and expats speak their tongue, the French do help their visitors do one thing: help them learn the language more effectively by allowing learners to walk on the hot coals of their learned tongue. This isn’t their conscious aim of course, that would be cultural pride, mainly. But in […]
Bulgaria: Don’t Knock It Til You Try It
I sat on the empty platform waiting for the train to take me back to Plovdiv. The day was brutally hot, with a high of at least 40 degrees. Across the rusty train tracks overgrown with weeds were dilapidated, Communist.-era industrial buildings that sweated rust in the waning evening sun. I had been in Bulgaria for more than 24 hours, and yet that was the first time I had seen before me an industrial landscape that so perfectly fit my preconceived notions of what a post-Communist, Eastern European country should look like.