The recent past and recent present

The following are some photos I took over the last couple months of various special moments.

Upper left, we have Ayhan, my friend, as I'm teaching him the game of cribbage. I have NEVER met a Turkish person who knows how to play the game. In fact roughly 90% of the folks I talk to here have never heard of it. This amazes me because its luck-to-skill ratio, segmented progression and routine style of play, is perfectly in line with popular games here such as backgammon and okey. I think the game would catch on here if people only knew it. Anyway, continuing counter-clockwise with the photos, we have the Wednesday bazaar in Sarıyer. I bought half a kilo of mushrooms, a kilo of tomatoes and a kilo of clementines.

Next we have a very specıal moment. I drank the last of the really good beers from Denmark with Stewart at a favorite pub of ours. Then we enjoyed some baklava that he brought from ANTEP!! We were so spoiled that evening. Lastly, there's the nostalgic tramway in İstiklâl, Taksim. It was decked out for the holidays and I thought it looked a bit dumb, so I took a picture.

Those four pictures were taken with my phone, but this next picture was from my camera one morning on my way to work. Some days I work on the European side and I have to take a boat. The view while waiting at the docks at sunrise is... not bad.

Those shots were all fairly random and spanned a couple months. These next few are from earlier today.

There's a new tramvay car and Stew and I were just lucky enough to finally catch it. Isn't it pretty? The interior was a much smarter, more spacious design than the old tramvay cars.

We visited the original end of the famous Orient Express, instead of just passing by. There's an old restaurant there. By old I mean 120 years old. This is at the Istanbul Gar in Sirkeci.

After a few pints, it seemed comical and appropriate to take pictures of ourselves wearing Stew's hat.

 

 

The evening wore on, and as we got off the boat back in Kadıköy, we met some friendly ladies who had recently moved to İstanbul. So we went out for beer with them. The Galatasaray match was on, and to my surprise they were winning. However, this one guy sitting near us was cheering whenever GS got scored on and I knew what was going on. Our eyes met and I began kindly flipping out on him about why he was cheering for GS's demise when even to a Fenerbahçe fan, it shouldn't make a difference given the circumstances of this season. We had a lively conversation and it felt really good to speak a bunch of Turkish fast and with passion. Anyway, those guys were awesome and I'll probably visit that bar during the match next weekend to see if I run into them again.

Altogether it was an excellent weekend. I called home to my father who turned 60. I talked a lot with my brother as well. I went out, I stayed home, I was industrious, I was lazy, calm.