I didn’t remember Istanbul like this. I guess it’s always a question of viewpoint. This time I was very positively surprised, I could even imagine myself living here. And it’s so cheap. The Lira is loosing it’s value by the day, since around four years. Someone made a nice comparison: It’s like when you take out ice cream into the sun on a sunny day, it’s melting more rapidly than you can eat it. And there seems no end in sight. Erdogan the president just reelected himself for another four year, he’s another stupid, unconscious idiot. Or how Cem, whom we met in Izmir, said: Er ist einfach ein Arschloch, ‘asshole’… I guess sometimes it’s easier to just accept reality: He is just an asshole, like Trump is as well. And this asshole president in Nicaragua, and this other asshole Uribe in Colombia. And all their asshole supporters. Well the list is without end. The truth is there are a lot of assholes. I guess if one accepts that fact life is much less stressful. It’s much harder to see that we’re all the same with only different opinions about the world. Still working on that one.

Well back to Istanbul: The old town (Beyoğlu) is spectacular to walk around, better without luggage, it’s steep up and down every few meters, reminded me of the Sikkim region. There are tons of cats in the streets, and everything is very old. I guess I’m only that sensitive to old stuff because Laura is always so exited about it. Especially columns and fountains and preferably this two things combined! There are people out in the street in front of their apartments talking to each other, kids playing. It is how I imagine it was like this for many hundreds of years. From our balcony there was a nice view, where in the far you could see modern high rises and closer by the old parts of of Beyoğlu.

Istanbul or like it was used to be called, Constantinople (capital of the byzantine empire), is old and it has so much history like everything in the region. Region means all the way to Palermo (Sicily), and north to Venice from what we have seen on that trip. The quickest way to understand that seems to visit Santa Sofia, get an Audio Gide and take your time. There are influences since the byzantine empire. Even the celts left their marks in that church. The church was then modified to be a mosque before it became a museum.

I unfortunately eat a bad kebab, then had two weeks of diarrhea, which I then tried to cure with an antibiotic against travel diarrhea, which didn’t do the trick. I had it coming back again repeatedly. Only in Ljubljana I finally met a doctor, who was very helpful and subscribed me heavy antibiotics for 10 days. The heavy stuff, where you cannot drink alcohol at all because it’s a similar stuff like they treat alcoholics with and with a strong photo syntentic effect, which means you can get skin rash staying in the sun!!

Whenever there is time to pray all the mosques start to do their thing and it’s a bit over the top really. Ok, we get it, main religion here is muslim, that’s all right, do your thing but take it easy. It’s on a similar noise level Iike when they do their sirens testing once a year in Zurich. Just every few hours. I don’t think it was like this 13 years ago, when I’ve been here the last time.

From here we went to Izmir. That’s way more relaxed, people here are laidback and also seem to be not to fond of Erdogan in general.  I like Turks in general from how they treated me. I wish them well and hope the political economical situation is calming down soon, it doesn’t seem so though…