Istanbul!

Many years ago, freshmen year, we were assigned our very first project in architecture. An analysis on a vast urban scale... the city of Istanbul, including all it's history... all these years later... we went!

Istanbul was a complex city... definitely not western, but not really eastern either. It's spot in between continents was apparent. We went to the Blue Mosque and stayed for a prayer services, sketched for hours in Hagia Sophia (one of the most beautiful buildings in the world), drank countless glasses of cay (tea) and sahlep (no way in the world to describe what it was, or how delicious it was... sort like a sweet yogurt drink, but not...), smoked hookah and hung out with a couple Canadians and a German chick at the hostel. Meet with some friends of a friend at their apartment and they made us dinner and then we went out on a party boat and got our discoteca on in the Bosporus. Took the ferry to the Asia side, so now I can say I've hit three continents!

And so we came back to Rome... we cooked, we talked, we worked, we walked around...

Meandering to Villa Borghese (my favorite place in all of Rome), exploring Villa Ada (another park farther behind... filled with families and children running around)...




My, my... look at all this interesting architecture...


Perhaps my favorite Roman activity... getting ready to leave studio, finding somebody to partner up with for dinner, running to the grocery store, going back, having a beer while we cook dinner, then a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, then a couple more glasses of wine after dinner, sitting in the kitchen for two hours, then the trek to the Spanish Steps or Piazza del Popolo, of Villa Borghese... 5 or 6 of us meandering through the streets of Rome... good times...




Can't tell you exactly what it was that we did in the days between Sicily and Istanbul, but I assure you... once or twice a week we did that...

So I could talk about Rome, and my work here and such, but let's be honest, why am I here? To travel!

And so, on our first travel weekend, the first chance we got, we went to Sicily. Poor time planning. The mountains of Sicily were still covered in snow and it was raining and wet. Besides that... it was amazing. I have never eaten better in my entire life. There were barely any tourists anywhere, and we stayed in the middle of the older section of the city. Palermo is one of Italy's larger cities, but it didn't feel that way. At the risk of sounding cliche, it just felt a lot more authentic. There were no restaurants trying to wrangle tourists in, no English in the street. It looking back it may have been my favorite trip we went on...

So we arrived in Palermo Friday morning. We meandered, stumbled upon Baroque sexual sculptural fountains, fell asleep in the Piazza of the Duomo, talked with a Carrabinieri (state police) for an hour in Italian/German (well, Colin did...), ate dinner in a guy's shed next to his wood shop in a room with one table and talked with him while he cooked the meal, and went to a "sangria party" at our hostel (a couple handles of vodka with a bottle of wine splashed in... bad news).
The next morning was a little rough as you might imagine. But we got on a train and went to Cefalu, a tiny town on the coast an hour outside of Palermo and spent the day walking around. I was able to fulfill my lifelong dream, driving a scooter! It was everything I could possibly have imagined.




And so it was Sunday, and our flight was that night... We took the bus up to Monreale, another small town on the side of the mountain overlooking Palermo, and continued to walk around. We saw a sign for woods and, intrigued by the prospect of nature and trees, walked in the direction it pointed. An hour later we decided to give up on that search as the street just kept going, but we did see some farms and beautiful vistas of the city.



And so we headed back down to catch our flight. We should have factored Italians dislike for general work into our plans. We got to the airport... and saw this...



... some sort of labor strike. And so, unexcited about the prospect of having to spend more money than we already didn't have on another night, we got in line to see about rescheduling our flight...


Twenty minutes later, we had a flight the next afternoon, a luxury hotel for the night with free food and a hot shower (which is rare in European hostel travelings), and another day in Sicily. Oh, and they were legally required to compensate us 20 euros, which is more than we spent on the entire trip... no biggie...And so we walked around for another day and found entirely new parts of Palermo that we hadn't seen before. And we finally did make it out that night, back to work and the test that we had missed and now had to make up. But, all of that work did happen to be in ROME, so we weren't too disappointed.

I don't know that I've eaten better in my entire life in one weekend. Connolis, arancine, Sicilian chocolate cake, street meat, fried sandwiches, gelato, kebab, indian food at the small place right outside our front door... we were engorged the entire weekend!


And so back we came, to do just a little bit of work, until Spring Break... and Istanbul!