Safely back in Greece

I'm sitting in the cozy reception office at Hotel Votsala, after a day of re-acclimating to Lesbos and relaxing in Music Cafe playing Scrabble in Greek with Amanda and Alex. The rest of Turkey was amazing, but it's good to be back; I was getting tired of being hustled into all the stores and restaurants wherever I went, and being followed and spoken to by ALL the guys there, "Excuse me! Excuse me. Hello. Where you from? You English? Excuse me. Where are you staying?" It's like, EVERY guy there just wants to start up a conversation with you and hopefully take you back to his house. Every girl gets this, even an elderly woman with a limp who I talked to! It's partly because, in Turkish culture, women never go out alone except if they want to look available to men - like, if they're really promiscuous. So everyone thinks you WANT to talk to them, even if you don't show it, so we get hassled by all the guys. Anyway, I'm kind of glad that's over. But Istanbul was AMAZING. Instead of giving you a list of all my day to day activities, I'll just put up a list of things I saw in Istanbul:

- The Kadesh Treaty, the oldest existing peace treaty we know of; it's from the 13th century B.C., and it's a treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites, vowing to protect each other from enemies!
- The only surviving religious mosaic from before the Byzantine period of iconoclasm!
- An entire room full of pottery shards! (Gives some perspective to modern archaeology, and just how pointless every shard we found actually is...)
- Some talent/shekel measures from Babylon, 8th century B.C.!
- An endless field of beanbag chairs, stretched out before endless blocks and blocks of cafes and hookah bars!
- Some lion and goat mosaics from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, from like the Nebuchadnezzar II period (7th-6th cent.'s B.C.!)
- Some Byzantine emperors' tombs!
- The oldest tower in the world that's still open for tourists to go inside! (Galata Tower, 14th cent. A.D.!)
- An entire city block that was only guitar stores! (Glad Alex wasn't with me at the time...)
- A march to the Independence Monument in Istanbul, 2 days before Turkish Independence Day!
- Independence Monument ON Turkish Independence Day with Alex... and then we went to a Turkish karaoke bar where people were singing "I Will Survive," then to this tiny upstairs bar where there was a Turkish rock band playing a really cool show!
- Topkapi Palace, where the Sultans used to live and do everything (including harems, treasuries, pool-sized bathtubs, imperial kitchens, gardens, etc.)
- NOT Nicea, because the bus schedule wasn't in my favor to go there. But I DID see the Istanbul bus station, with zillions of individual bus companies occupying a gargantuan strip-mall type of building surrounding an enormous ring of crowded cars, vans and taxis. ANARCHY.
- St. Irene, one of the only churches from Byzantine times that hasn't been converted into a mosque, where they held the 2nd Eccuminical Council!
- The Grand Bazaar, which is in this 15th century building with approximately a zillion little shops inside and everyone's heckling you to buy things and coming on to you!
- The Hippodrome, where 30,000 people were slaughtered at the Nike Revolt in the time of emperor Justinian (about 532 A.D.) and where they put all these obelisks from all over the empire. The street that runs around the park is right about where the old horse track used to be!
- Enormous, enormous, gigantic, huge, really really big Haghia Sofia (St. Sofia) re-built by the emperor Justinian after it burned down in the Nike Revolt. So big. So beautiful. Immensely sacred place, built on the site of 3 previous temples, now a mosque.
- Asia!
- AND MUCH MORE!

I'm not putting up pictures, because I took SOOOOO many while I was there. I'll show you all when I get back. Oh but it was SO fabulous. And every night we would go to a different bar or cafe or hookah place, and just relax and talk about where we'd been, what we'd bought and how much we'd bought it for (I've got most of my Christmas shopping done by the way) and music and whatever. There were also TONS of international students there, so lots of fun people to meet. Travelling by myself was nice, it was cool not having to wait for anybody at museums and sites and things, but sometimes I got a little bit jealous of the people in groups for whom it was much easier to get acquainted with other groups at the hostel. Like Amanda and Helana who made friends with these British guys who had biked there from London over like 2 months. They were fun. At the same time they were always getting drunk (I ate breakfast with them once, they were having omlettes... and beer!) so I realized that that would've been kind of hard to deal with. Yeah being by myself was pretty great. Plus I was able to hang out with other people from my program; everyone who came to Istanbul was staying at hostels on this one block behind Haghia Sofia that was all hostels and hookah cafes, so we were all pretty much together. Mel came down from France and was living with Maddie, Clariece and Chris in the same hostel as me (though I had my own separate room) so them and I hung out some times, and Amanda and Helana were in that hostel too. Basically, if you hung out in the hostels or at those nearby hookah cafes and just waited a few minutes, people you knew were bound to stroll in through the door at any time! Lots of fun.

So now I'm back on Lesbos, and we're getting on the overnight ferry back to Athens tomorrow. Sigh. Back to the whole "school" thing in a few days... 4 huge papers... Attic Tragedy class... apartment life... no more sunny beachside hotel... sigh. It's a good life I lead. Cheers!