People keep asking about Istanbul... a positive thing since it is a place I could conceivably go to meet up with people. It is easier even than going to other closer places in the Middle East for obvious reasons. Overland border crossings into Syria and Iran... not a good idea. And there are only flights from here to a few places. Anyway, my impression of Istanbul was much different than the picture I had developed from my high school encounters with it through the Romantic poets.
There is apparently some kind of law (says T my Turkish American neighbor) that if you build your house entirely at night (in one night), that it is legal- squatter's rights! I will check that 'fact' later with Z who, as it turns out, is not Turkish Kurdish as I previously claimed, but is in fact Turkish. It is said that Turks hate the Kurds and therefore, it is unusual that he is here... but it seems that when he was a journalist for an English paper in Istanbul, so he was probably interested in all sorts of 'subversive' things like human rights (Kurds in Turkey are not allowed to have Kurdish names even), so that is perhaps partial explanation. More about all of this later. But more to the point that I was trying to get at in this post (before I went to celebrate a successful trip to the Christian area for alcohol and lost my train of thought) is that Istanbul is far more 'Asia-like' than I had expected. The photos in the series are in a tiny area of a huge and sprawling city.
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