A few years ago I took a short, one week trip to a few cities in the southeast of Turkey on a road trip, intending to go from Istanbul to Mardin, Hasankeyf, Diyarbakir, Sanliurfa, and Gaziantep. I got my ticket for the bus, which would depart the next day around 4:00 pm to Mardin. Mardin…
Over the past couple of years my brother Graham and I often discuss “the good tired feeling” in our email correspondences. Both of us had a similar realization after we stopped cycling, that we would have a hard time going to sleep because we were never tired anymore. For the better part of a decade…
I watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey the other night. Apart from the feeling like my head had just exploded, the use of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra struck a chord with me as well (yes, that was intended). It reminded me of the one time in my life when I played the timpani, in…
I got stuck last year in trying to write about my second trip to Albania in September. I kept notes in my journal but couldn’t motivate myself to polish them up and actually write something about it. I was flipping through the journal a bit, laughing at my stories and decided I’d just write up…
I Bir zamanlar Amasya’da Ahmet diye bir çocuk varmış.Ahmet 13 yaşındaymış. Ahmet’in babası Serdar Amasya’nın en iyi simitçisiymiş. Herkes Amasya’da Serdar’ın simitlerini bilirmiş. Serdar çok çalışkanmış. Her sabah çok erken kalkarmış, simit yaparmış. Her gün Amasya’nın caddelerinde yürürmüş, simit satarmış. Ahmet’in annesi İpek hemşireymiş. İpek Ahmet’i çok sevmiş. Serdar 20 yıl simit satmış ve Amasya’nın,…
I can’t seem to motivate myself to write anything about my recent travels. I keep meaning to get to it but I get sidetracked on different things. One of my projects is my ongoing story I’ve been writing in Turkish for the past 5 months. Well, I’ve been writing it in a language that resembles…
I’ve run into a snag with my Albania stories. Maybe I’ll get back to them in a while, but for now I’ll branch off on another topic. Not that I don’t have good stories (for example being accused of being a Russian spy by an old man because I wanted to take a picture of…
I arrived to Tirana airport in the mid-morning, collected my backpack and tried to leave the airport. I had been told that I could catch a furgon from the airport to Shkoder instead of taking a taxi to Tirana and then taking a furgon from there, as the airport is on the way to Shkoder….
I spent about three days in the hotel before heading back up to Uludağ to teach at another kid’s camp. I was relieved to have a little bit of rest; this was the first time in about two weeks that I had spent more than one night in the same place. I made a tally:…
The next day in Pogradec I enjoyed my complimentary breakfast of toast, fried eggs and Turkish coffee before departing the hotel. It was a nice, hot sunny day for my last few hours in Albania. Back in Gjirokaster upon first arriving in the country I had bought a number of postcards of places I had…