Safran Otel (Guesthouse) Bursa

... br>to the basement workshop where another friend spends the night hours
creating beautiful, traditional, five-stringed Sas instruments. He
is a well-known craftsman who designs unusual instruments from his
imagination, and will soon be joined by his daughter who just
completed university.

CONTEST QUESTION!!

11. Why did/do the Dirvishes whirl?

(We picked up something in the Konya market for another prize, so keep looking for those
answers!)

... and their families and friends. (Turkish cities have facilities dedicated to various professional groups: teachers, ljudges, military). I had perhaps been let in by the Turkish sense of hospitality. And because probably no one else would even try. I don't know.

The only thing Turkish about the meal was that Turkish people were eating it. It was your basic baked chicken banquet plate. Not somehing to be savored, but it certainly met my needs on the spot. At 22YTL (about US$18.50 ...

... reluctant to pack up for even a short move across town. Furthermore, it seemed that the shuttle bus driver lived in my same vicinity, so it was easy for him to leave me off at night and pick me up in the morning. At least this was the story that was presented to me. I have my suspicions that it was perhaps a fiction of Turkish hospitality and accommodation.

Where the others were housed was at a site called a Hobi Baçe, that is a hobby garden camp. This is a ...

... military parade. Lots of troops marched through town, and there were many, many armored troop carriers and tanks and such. The uniforms looked pretty much like they might have been U.S. supplied, as I guess were funds for the rest of it, from what I have read. (Unfortunately, most of my pictures of all of all of this were as yet undownloaded from my camera, which was subsequently stolen in Valencia, Spain a couple of months later. No ...

... The command form of a verb in Turkish is the root stem of the verb, in this case, gel. This is the word you hear uttered most often in Turkey. It seems that every time someone is backing up a bus, truck or car, there is a guy out back shouting, "Gel, gel, gel." Or, more likely, "Gelgelgelgelgel. . . ."

Now, for a person who performs a task the suffix "ci" is attached (this is the short explanation, skipping the Turkish alphabet and vowel harmony part). So, a person ...

... us and our reactions. It was great. All the kids came up to me with their cell phones and cameras and took hundreds of pictures... Actually, several people requested a picture of us (and with us) at the mosques, so I am guessing that not many foreigners, much less Asians, visit this area. Bursa really is not included in the major tours because it is a low-key village. People seemed sweet and untainted, and the guys here were definitely a lot more attractive ...

... that the world will end, not with a bang, but with a whimp**.

What follows are collections of news articles, mostly, that off** insights into the daily abrasions to which humans, mostly, are inflicting upon the global environment, its own social organizations, and its seemingly precarious continuance.

26 Octob** 2007 [My "Forward"]

The first article reprinted h**e has come 10 months aft** I first began assembling this document (for what purpose I don't ...

... days. Which points out another fact. Parenthetically, I have a contact with a university professor of environmental law. She has recently been shocked--after all these years--by a report of some agency relative to the failure of the Arctic ice cap to coalesce this summer. And she urged me to "spread the word on climate change" here in Turkey.

Well, I am reluctant to share my cynicism with her. Or any one, for that matter. (On second thought, I'll provide a toxic ...

... of Görükle, a "village" about 10+ kilometers west of Bursa. Well, it used to be a village, perhaps. But now it was rather more like a separate suburban town, having grown up around the Uludağ University complex. Scores of the "standard" modern Turkish concrete apartment complexes now populate the hillsides. Okan had previously done one public sculpture symbolizing the academic nature of the place. The current project, so far consisting of three separate human figures, was ...

... Mudanya dolmus terminal, and I ran to catch a Bursa-bound dolmus that was just exiting the yard. Those Turkish Travel Pixies, working on a Saturday evening!

Sunday I try to designate as a "hiking day." Bursa basically crowds the northern slope of Uludağ, a mountain with a skiing resort, it is so high. And the foothills to it are steep and high next to the city, and so provide a very quick access to steep forests. I had seen a ...