Blog posting numero two from ISTANBUL 7.29.08

Yes, hello my friends, sean here!
It’s Tuesday mourning and we’ve just arrived to our flight to Vienna on time! (Istanbul to Vienna, then Vienna to Dubrovnik.) My sincerest of apologies on the whole not-very-good-at-updating-the-blog-thing. I’ll assume at this point you’re at an understanding of how valuable my time abroad is, seeing how this thing might appear to have been moved to the backburner temporarily, I assure you this is not so. When I’m doing these things I like to try put my the full of my heart into it, as much of it fits, really. I just honestly haven’t been able to do these things ultra-frequently. So now, without further ado, I invite you into numero two….

Over the course of spending six days in Istanbul, I decided I had to bring back some material wealth to rightly mark my visit and, of course, to share with the people around me back home! With this in mind, I bought two major items in Istanbul: a Suz, and a Nargile (pronounced in English as s-oo-ze and nar-geel-a.) A suz is a middle-eastern type of guitar that, to me, sounds somewhat in between the ear-ery and exotic eastern sound of a sitar and the simplicity of an acoustic guitar. I only had a short time to attempt to make sound out of this thing and that sample was enough. I’ve also purchased a Turkish water pipe (nargile) used primarily for flavored tobacco (although I was told other things work well too.) In Turkish culture smoking the nargile is a symbol of relaxation, meditation, a time to unwind one’s mind of the daily stresses and drama and be at peace. I am very excited to bring these back to share with you and yours… I can only pray, at this point, that they’ll both make it home alive.

I’m sure most of you people have already heard about the terrorist attacks in Istanbul late Sunday night. You can now rest assured Sam and I are alive and very well. The attacks allegedly took place some twenty-five kilometers away from where we were sleeping, and apparently it was the biggest terrorist attack in Turkey for the past five years. We thought we might have heard some crackling in the distance Sunday night, but disregarded it as fireworks, which it could have been, or was (?) Hearing the news early the next day, I expected that the city and its people would have been someone shaken up by these events. To my surprise I didn’t notice much difference among the people, or the environment. I will note that as it could have been a coincidence, Monday was the first day I noticed the law enforcement carrying around larger machine-type-guns. Later that day a shoemaker had explained this madness to us in a Turkish tongue that was somewhat hard to decipher, yet we understood his point in explaining the absurdity of terrorism, killing, and the sympathy he felt that our race has succumbed to such an inhumane condition.

Leaving Istanbul today was an experience I won’t easily forget. Actually, Istanbul was an experience incapable of forgetting. Between running by aya sofia and the blue mosque in the warm rain this morning, saying our final good bye to our friend Gursel who served us breakfast every mourning, and all of the other countless and enthralling experiences instilled in this enchanted land; I don’t think I’d be capable of not coming back some day soon.

With this much I leave you for now, Dubrovnik is next, I'll be back up here soon, good luck to all, and thanks for indulging!

-sean

p.s.
REAL PHOTOS! there’s new photos on my flickr account (the picasa site reportedly didn't work) I'll try and upload more soon. just copy and paste this link into your browser:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28920993@N02/

...if that's not working, you can try searching the flickr site for yourgoodfriendsean and the results should come up with a link to my photos.