Travels

After the rain, the skies are penetratingly blue.  And by that I mean, it's so blue that you can see inside the blues, that you can look and the different depths of blue will pull you in and up and on and on

Oh, and it was also where we puffed hookah pipes and talked about how we liked to smoke hookah between heavy clouds of flavored smoke.

The thing that struck me: all over Turkey, the pattern of archeological-robbery repeated itself, as it did and does in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and all the other places where Europeans and Western scholars have gone.

I'll write about the honeymoon soon – we're holed up in this delightful town right next to the beach and nestled between mountains.

We had lattes at a cafe facing the Asian side of Istanbul.  Next door, beyond the tiny square with a fluttering fountain, was a mosque, its minarets poking the sky so that all the yellows and pinks oozed through.

Here, the women are phantasms behind dirtied windows. They floated by on gray streets in black robes, heads to soles.