Love Being a Basket Case

One of the unfortunate truths about living in a 21st century metropolis is the disconnect we have from our natural environment, ergo, we buy our vegetables from a store, we exercise in planned parks or gyms, we travel by various modes of transportation that all involve high levels of engineering, or at least cement under […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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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 […]

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