OK. We just arrived in Alexandria, and here I am making my first Istanbul post. Kathy is catching up grading papers and I am catching up with postings. It’s 9am, and our first foray into Alexandria will be 2pm when we head out to the new Alexandria Library. Looking forward to that! Meanwhile, I hope to make use of the available bandwidth as the ship quickly empties this morning.

7/19. We entered the Dardanelles, heading for the Sea of Marmara and the port of Istanbul. This narrow, strategic strait must be traversed to reach the Black Sea.

Allied forces made a famous, failed attempt to beat back the Ottoman Empire during WWII here at Gallipoli.  It was a very bloody, eight-month campaign, notable to me because it resulted in the promotion of Mustafa Kemal from a little-known, low-ranking army officer into a national hero. He was promoted to Pasha and with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I became the founder of the modern Turkish state with the title Atatürk, the Father of Turkey.

Amazing transformations happened under Atatürk. He helped prevent the dismantling of Turkey following WWI, separated church and state; created a legislative body, threw out the Caliphs, westernized the dress, replaced Arabic with Turkish as the official language. (Apparently if there wasn’t a Turkish word for something they made one up). He ruled as a dictator, but left behind a functioning secular democracy in a predominately Muslim country.

In the years following 1926, for the first time in history, Islamic law was clearly separated from the secular law of the nation and confined to its religious domain.  Mustafa Kemal said “ We must liberate our concepts of justice, our laws and our legal institutions from the bonds which, even though they are incompatible with the needs of our century, still hold a tight grip on us.”

We approached Istanbul as dawn was breaking and got our first glimpses of the “Blue” Mosque, Hagia Sophia and the Topkapı Palace.

I had great plans to catch up with blogging this morning.

We left Istanbul last night. I got into the lab nice and early. Chaos.

Broken printers, internet not working, broken monitor, broken keyboard….

Has Mercury gone retrograde???

So this will be a brief “I’m still alive” post.

We visited Sabanci University in Istanbul. They give all incoming students a laptop. Formerly Toshiba, now Lenova.

I tracked down their tech support group to say hi.

Ah! Here is a sign!

Laptop support this way

And another sign!

Hey! it leads to the …

Library loading dock

Ah…

Here they are!

Inside, cubicles. I didn’t get a pic as I was busy trying to see if they had any English. Regretfully, I have no Turkish yet. So we laughed, but didn’t exchange any useful tips. But I felt the IT clan kinship with them being stuck in rooms off the library loading dock.

OK. Coming soon, Turkey posts.

After our hot walk up to the Acropolis and the bus ride back to the ship, we took a short break, changed, and caught a cab to Marina Zea. That’s the small port in Piraeus. The waterfront is lined with restaurants open to the water. As we passed each the owners would read their menus to us. “You want fresh fish? We got the freshest. You want mussels? Calamari?”. We were looking for a place with charm, some customers, variety, and reasonable prices. We walked around the port and on our way back went into one we liked. Good choice! Roasted veggies, grilled lamb, fried feta with honey, suvalaki,  a plate of olives, a 1/2 kilo of local red wine. yummmm.

On the ride back to the ship the taxi driver explained how the economic problems were all the fault of the incompetent government. His retirement pay had been cut in half so he was back driving a taxi.