Why did constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the turks

Good morning, my TASPly comrades.

I say good morning only for your benefit, of course, since it is evening here in Istanbul.

Yes, that is right. I have seen Friday night. It is dark. I would tell you more, but that might upset fate, so I'll refrain and let you go about your own, slightly delayed Friday unperturbed.

Anyhow, Turkey is incredible, and I find myself thinking, as I often have in the post-TASP universe, that I wish you all were here. (Especially Alison. Ottoman palaces everywhere, Ms. Lawrence. Was T.E. Lawrence ever here? I've been wondering that.)

A few of you have asked me why I'm here, which seems a fair enough class. My dad is teaching a two week law seminar at a university here, and my sister and I came along for the first week. We're staying in dorms on the campus, which looks surprisingly like an American university. None of the women wear the hijab- it's forbidden in schools, even private ones. As soon as you leave the campus, though, it's clear you're in a muslim country. Excepting when I was small and uninterested in this kind of thing, I've never been to a Muslim country. I've never seen women walking down the street with their faces completely covered or thousands of people gathered in a square to protest the visit of the pope. Almost everyone here is Muslim, at least by heritage. It seems that most people are religious also. Five times a day, when there are prayers, they're broadcast from the minurets on the mosques (those pointy tower things) via loudspeaker. Wherever you're standing, you can hear the prayers from several different places at once. That's how close together the mosques are.

In fact, when I first got here, I was surprised by the sheer number of mosques.At any given moment, you can see four or five from where you're standing. Maybe there are just as many churches in the US and I'm just desensitized, I'm not sure. But mosques are way more interesting looking than most churches. Even your normal, everyday neighborhood mosque is domed and elaborate and ancient looking. That's another thing. I forget sometimes living in the US that the rest of the world has so much HISTORY. In Denver if a building is 150 years old, we consider it ancient. Even on the east coast, 400 years is as far back as our civilization goes. But people here barely blink as they tell you the building you're standing next to is 1000 years old. It blows my mind.

Speaking of the pope (which I was, a while ago. shutup, this can be a segue), he is unsurprisingly disliked here, but not as much as you might expect. A couple days ago, a law student took us around Istanbul, and she seemed just as frustrated with conservative muslims as she is with the pope. In her opinion, both groups cast an equally negative light on Turkey in the western world. She's impatient, as I suspect many are, with the islamic world being equated with a kind of backwardness. Unrelated but also interesting- this woman, who is a Phd student, speaks three languages, very intelligent, etc. believes that the Armenian genocide was not a genocide at all, but a military battle whose history has been severely warped. It's a shame of Turkey's of course, to be associated with a genocide. Just a couple of weeks ago when Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer, won the Nobel prize for literature, he spoke out against Turkey's silence regarding the Armenian genocide, and now he's pretty unpopular here (totally unrelated parenthetical insertion: i'm reading his book Snow right now and it's well written but way fucking weird. Has anyone read it? I'm not sure if I like it and I need someone to bounce the weirdness off of).

Back to the pope, I was relieved to realize that, radicals aside, the anger here is less directed at christian people as their leaders. The same is true of the president. I actually had someone tell me he didn't realize until he visited the United States that the people were very nice, even if he despised the country's foreign policy. Agreed, good sir, agreed.

Anyway, this post has become strange and rambly, and I need to go get ready for dinner, so I'll leave you. But I'm going to post some pictures later this evening, so check back. I hope everyone is doing well, and if you haven't responded to my email yet, you should!

Over and out from Istanbul (not constantinople).