Photos!

My first few batches of photos are up! I'm working on captioning them all, as after a bit one mosque looks a lot like another, so bear with me.
Photos are at: flickr.com/photos/bonkano

And a few brief thoughts:
-I forgot that the Turks put french fries in their sandwiches. I ordered a Mediterranean wrap the other day, and was bemused to discover fries among the chicken and lettuce.

-There is an Istanbul version of Foodler. Yauwa. Also, for every 30 lira you spend on the site, they give you a free DVD. One night in with my roommates = I am now the proud owner of The Illusionist in Turkish.

-I find I have a tendency to switch into Hausa when a word isn't coming to me in Turkish. I'm not really sure why my brain leaps between those 2 languages; perhaps because of the Arabic links?

-I took a walking tour of parts of central Istanbul with my language program yesterday, which was pretty fun, very interesting, and incredibly informative. We walked 7.5 miles to look at mosques, churches, and architectural examples; I woke up a bit late and thus did all that traipsing in flipflops which, in hindsight, was great for the mosques but not for the walking.

-I saw my first abayas in Istanbul yesterday, in the Fatih district. The Fatih district of Istanbul has a reputation as a stalwart bastion of conservatism in a secular city; I didn't realize how true that was. I don't think I ever saw an abaya in Ankara.