READ WELL, ADORING FANS

It's possible that on an overnight bus ride, wherever you are at dawn is the most beautiful part of the trip. However, it's just as possible that a perfectly clear morning in rural northern Turkey, with mountains silhouetted against a silent sky, fails all explanation. Welcome to Sinop.




Sinop is a small town along the Black Sea. It's not really a tourist destination, but Ali and I decided that we wanted to go somewhere along the Black Sea, and this place looked nice. An overnight bus ride from Istanbul's Otogar (this place is ridiculous, by the way. It's a bus depot for a country that relies heavily on them, complete with convenience stores and restaurants. Imagine a gigantic parking garage with like 100 businesses operating out of it. Thousands of buses. Mind-boggling, really) put us in Sinop at about 9. We got ripped off by a cabbie (for the first time!) and found a small hotel. The duder there was about 140, really nice, and patient with our miming / complete ignorance. We tooled around the port for a few hours, took a nizzap, and hit the town. First stop: prison.


Sinop's Fortress Prison for Redundant Criminal Crooks existed in some form since the 7th century BC before closing down in 1997. Now it's a tourist attraction, although I should be very clear about this part- it's some buildings you can walk through. Place was weird. The rooms were either not cleaned out or poorly decorated, entire buildings lacked signs or explanations, and for a place as big as this prison, there was no one working. Like, no security. No custodians. Just people wandering around, apparently peeing everywhere. Oh yeah, the place reeked of urine. That was its redeeming feature.

In reality it was kind of nice. Ali and I walked around for a while, speculating as to the various uses of these torture-chamberesque rooms, wondering about what Turkey considers "tourist-worthy." Here are some pictures:



Those don't really communicate anything other than "Jesus Tom, you should learn the basics of photography." But yeah, Sinop Fortress Prison... we spent like 3 hours there.


We were still exhausted, so it was a pretty early night. The next day our plan was to explore these waterfalls about an hour away, but we realized that there was a big hill just asking to be climbed. This was one of the better decision we've made, as it afforded us these views:

Pretty dope, right? To get there we had to trespass on some farmer's land, which may or may not be owned by the government. All I'm saying is some military guy whistled at us from a guard tower. Sinop kind of juts out from Turkey, meaning that the Black Sea borders it on both sides. An island connected to land, basically. Which one of you will be the showoff who tells me the proper name for that in the comments section? Swaney? I think it's going to be Swaney.

That night we took another overnighter (why do Turkish people like this? It's kind of cool, but maybe not for how often we're doing it) back to Istanbul. All in all a successful weekend, and we certainly learned that we can travel without too much worry. People were nice, interesting, and engaging despite our complete lack of Turkish. Classes start tomorrow and I'm pretty excited to get into a routine. These last 3 weeks I've felt in limbo between summer and college, and am ready to fall hopelessly behind in schoolwork. Yeah, 11 week semester.







Oh, and regarding that last post: I guess I'll explain a few pictures in each of the next few posts, starting with the ones i'll forget soonest / are the most interesting. Here we go:

TURK KASI! This is the ultimate team I'm playing with. Maybe half ex-pats, half Turks, half jungle, half stack, 100% rewarding. These people play with the passion that got me playing in the first place, and it's so refreshing to watch 30 year old men and women fall in love with the game, throw terrible forehands, and gleefully chase a 175 gram piece of plastic all over a piece of crap rock pit that calls itself a soccer field. We play once a week from 2-7, which works out well for me. I didn't come to Istanbul to play ultimate, but when I'm not traveling, it's nice to go out there and run for a bit.

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There are a lot of stray dogs here. What's weird is that Istanbul has many of these dogs tagged to show that they're up-to-date on their shots, so you shouldn't be worried when one of them bites you. What? That's some weird logic. These "freedom dogs" have been known to bite, but usually only when they travel in packs... which is after dark... on my campus. Whatever, it's better than putting these dogs to sleep, I suppose. But anyway, a lot of these dogs are sassy. I've spent an unhealthy amount of time trying to take pictures of them, and will soon begin assigning them voices. Many of you know what I'm talking about. The rest of you will find out eventually. There are also stray cats, but they tend to be sadder.