the past few days have been very fun.

i don't remember if i mentioned this before but i found out a good friend of friend's is interning here in istanbul this summer also, along with a few other students from Yale. So Weds night (i think it was weds...) i went out to Istiklal and hung out with her for a while. it's AWESOME to have finally found people to hang out with. that has been my biggest complaint and it's been very good so far. there's also a new intern at Amnesty who is British/Turkish but studies in Emory. seems like a cool dude, plus he knows Istanbul very well since he grew up here. speaking of work...still doing near nothing. i haven't gotten a response back about some questions i had regarding the program i'm writing the grant for and bla, gotta keep waiting.

also, i hung out with Marisa and her mom the past two days! that was so funny and yet very enjoyable. i did a lot of toursity things i wouldn't have done if they weren't here and im glad i did. e.g taking a chair-lift up to the hillsides at the end of the Golden Horn and looking over all of Istanbul (looking over ALL of istanbul is impossible by the way. maybe from a plane. this is a MASSIVE city). also we went to Eyup mosque where one of the Companions of the Prophet (pbuh) named Ayoub al-Ansari is said to have fallen in battle and they built a mosque there. that was...cool. we then took a bus back to Eminonu, had lunch, went to Asia, had coffee and walked around a bit and then went back and had dinner under the Galata bridge.

Well, all of that probably has no real meaning. The problem is, i'm having a hard time "finding meaning" here. Even though the world feels so much smaller to me now than it did say 6 years ago it's still incredible that i'm here. then again, i wonder what the hell that means. I try and take myself out of this and pretend i'm a Turk (or any other non-American nationality) living in NY for 2 months. What would I think if this person, having never before seen NYC, told me, "wow, i can't believe I'm in NYC!" and proceeded to tell me all the wonders of actually BEING in Brooklyn and SEEING the Empire State Building and actually DRIVING across the GW. I'd probably agree that it's a great city and has some cool places to see but at the same time i'd probably think where he's from is SO much cooler. That's something that's been bugging me. I wonder how much of being here is just on-the-surface tourist giddiness. But it all comes back to the history. The history here is just unbelievable. I looked over the Golden Horn today and tried to imagine the massive chain across the entrance or try and understand the fear of the Byzantines when they saw the massive army and enormous cannons all facing them and with the sole purpose of conquering Constantinople. It's bewildering. You read about it and hear about it but you can never really experience it. the past is the past and we all just claw at it just to get some scraps of feeling or emotion from events hundreds of years ago. Being here though, seeing all of this, touching the stones of these old old buildings, seeing the sun set over the Galata tower, it's about as close i'll ever get to feeling what those Byzantines withinthe walls and their enemies without felt.

But it's not just 1453. it's the 500 years of this city being the absolute center of the "east." We talk about orientalism: this is what those writers looked to. the mysterious east. as a bosnian too it's strange being here because this was the capital of the empire. my ancestors MAY have heard of america but they sure knew where Istanbul was. in the bizzarest way, i feel like this city's history is completely intertwined with mine; my country and my religion. At Eyup there's the tomb of Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic, one of the greatest viziers during the high point of the Ottoman empire, and he was sure enough from Bosnia. Coming from a country where the ONE thing foreigners know about it is that there was a horrible war (but can't point it out on a map and then say, 'it's near russia right?'), it was AWESOME standing next to the tomb of the man who had all of europe trembling and paying bribes to the Porte to keep the "turk" out. It's idiotic to think of today's Bosnians as the same as those of the 16th century (that's the idiocy of nationalism friends), but we today know that Mehmed Pasa loved Bosnia because of all the amazing buildings he commissioned there. And it may be roamntic and silly but i can't help but bring up this one line from Ivo Andric's "bridge on the Drina" where he discusses how the adolescent Mehmed Pasa must have felt when he was crossing the Drina on his way to Istanbul. I can't remember the exact words now but the image i have in my mind is of a young boy looking over the Drina to Bosnia and feeling a coldness, physical and emotional, from crossing that dividing line. he must have felt a warmth towards Bosnia if he commisioned the bridge in Visegrad in order to connect his two worlds.

yeah, lotta rambling, lot of bosnian history that you probably don't know. main point: i feel a connection here that's deeper than just being a toursit or an intern in istanbul. it's faint and i can barely feel it but when i get closer to the old city and go see those old buildings it becomes stronger. but that world is long gone. istanbul is extremely different now. the ottoman empire is long dead; the echos of the heartbeat are just barely audible.

i really can't just write all my thoughts here. too disorganized, too many thoughts. this was a good start though. right now i am RIDICULOUSLY tired. got up at 7:30 am, walked literally all day. 2 continents. bla.

till next time. peace



i may be rambling now...but i felt like this blog should be more than a list of things i did. those don't mean anything and they're boring and pointless cause you don't know what any of these places are unless i explain (i assume).