ISTANBUL NOT CONSTANTINOPLE

I got back from Istanbul recently and I believe it is my favorite city that I have ever been to. I LOVE IT!!! The people there are so friendly and hospitable and fun and honest and I wish I would have studied abroad there instead of stupid Roma.

Some things I saw/did:
Hagia Sophia
The Blue Mosque
Rode the ferry from the european side of Istanbul to the Asian side lots of times
walked everywhere
took off my shoes when I went inside
ate lots of dried fruit and nuts
ate doner (!) and durum and drank fresh squeezed pomegranite juice
made lots of turkish friends
made lots of austrian friends
made lots of german friends
saw the sistern basillica (and undergroud basillica)
drank Raki (traditional turkish liquor that tastes like death)
went to the spice bazaar
went to the grand bazaar
went dancing
couchsurfed with Emre, Emre, and Samil.

Why Turks are nice than Romans:
one time a family squished onto a bench with me and didn't speak any english but kept smiling at me and then they got up and bought some sesame rolls from a cart nearby and specifically bought an extra one for me

anytime adam and I looked a little bit lost some turkish person would run up and ask if we needed help and where we were going and always pointed us in the right direction

another time i was sitting on a bench outside of the spice bazaar and a turkish man sat down next to me and we talked for almost an hour about lots of stuff and I found out he was vegetarian also (and I think he may have been the only one in the entire city!) and realizing how much trouble i had avoiding meat in Istanbul proceded to feed me dinner that he has just bought at the market!

there are a lot of blind people in Istanbul and every time one of them looked like they were having navigational trouble or headed for a deadly set of stairs one or many people would grab the blind persons arm and take him/her wherever she needed to go.


Istanbul was everything all at once: asian and european, modern and traditional, enormous but tiny. Walking around in Taksim felt almost like 5th Ave in New York but I could hear prayers being chanted in Arabic from all the mosques nearby next to the clicking of fashionable women's high heels on cobblestone.

And here are some pictures:

this is Zurich, not Istanbul... i went there for a few hours on my way home and it was kind of a ghost town but there were these people playing horns. very swiss.

This is outside the spice bazaar in Eminonou

also outside the spice bazaar

people preparing doner in Taksim square near Emre's house


Lots of spices inside the spice bazaar

dried fruit and "turkish delights" in the spice bazaar
view of the city from the european shore of the bosphorus


some lady selling pigeon feed in Eminonou

Fish market near Sirkeci

taken from the Ferry to the Asian side.

stray cat inside Hagia Sophia. stray cats were everywhere in istanbul.

byzantine mosaic from Hagia Sophia when Istnabul was Constantinople

Inside Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya)

inside the Basillica Cistern (medusa beheaded)

Asia

Turkish couple in the park

the outside of Hagia Sophia

a rooster and some other fowl at an outdoor pet market

a man selling pigeon feed in Eminonou

fishermen on the golden horn

view from Karakoy
Islamic cemetary at some Camii (mosque)
the fountain and courtyard at a mosque in Eminonou
lady selling pigeon feed in Sulkhametet and a man carrying a cart of stuff.
Istanbul Unversity!

inside the Grand Bazaar

I guess I didn't really take that many pictues. And what I enjoyed most about this city was meeting lots of people. I don't have any pictures of them unfortunately.

Ok write me emails please I want to know how your life is!!!!

non amo roma oggi

Today made me dislike Rome, or mostly Romans, a lot.

I think people here are far more rude than any other city i've been to. I think someone has smashed into me at least 4 times today with no apologies. 

Recently my friend fell of his bike and all of his belongings spilled everywhere in the middle of a busy street and no one stopped to help him.

The general public seems so angry here all the time. I feel like Romans hate their lives.

Also our landlord shows up unannounced during the week and proceeds to yell at us for having unmade beds and leaves us mean notes in Italian calling us animals and is generally disrespectful. 

People who are friendly here are difficult to find and hold on to!

Viaggo a firenze!

This weekend I went to Firenze (Florence) with my art history class. I accidentally slept through my alarm and missed the bus ( and our visit to Siena) but took the train with my roommate/bedmate Meg to Firenze and spent the day wandering around and then met up with our class in the evening. Florence was a nice break from Rome. It is really small, maybe the size of Lancaster city, and smelled like leather all over. Despite the hoards of Duane Hansen-esque tourists Florence was really beautiful. I saw most of the important stuff there... Michaelangelo's David, a bunch of stuff by Donatello, the Uffizi Gallery, the Academia, Ponte Vecchio, etc etc. If you want to see pictures of the aformentioned you can look on google because i didn't really take any.

I had really awesome pizza and gelato but things were sort of expensive so we abandoned Tuscan eating after the first day and switched to falafel.  This week is midterms and then on Friday my friend Adam and I are going to ISTANBUL for 10 days. I'm really excited because i've wanted to go there forever. We are couchsurfing and in exchange for staying on Emre's couch he asked us to make a painting of a headboard for him to hang over his bed. I probably won't update this until I get back from Turchia! Here are three pictures from Firenze:

 

I really liked this stencil near Ponte Vecchio. "I'm Dead."

Really bright sun over the jewelery shops at Ponte Vecchio

paint

This is one of the first paintings I finished when I got to Rome... its kind of small about 24x32

Here is a poor quality image of some sketches.

I finished this one today... its about 5 ft x 3 1/2 ft

Vino Rosso

For some reason... I can't really figure out how to get my cut/copy function to work on this post so just pretend that the text after all the photos come before it.

Here is the crowd in the streets of Marino

View from some place in marino

the fountain full of wine

pouring wine into cups from the fountain

lots of meats

  Today I went to a wine festival in Marino. It was awesome and made me feel really Italian. There we speakers all over the town playing Italian folk songs and people singing along and dancing in the streets and eating lots of panini. The fountains in the city were filled with wine and at 530 they were turned on and the town was packed with people trying to get free wine. People fed us grapes and shared their wine and everyone was really friendly and happy and it was sort of how I had imagined/wanted Italy to be . The train ride back to Roma was so so so packed. Every seat was filled and there were tons of people in the aisles and sitting on others laps and some sitting on top of the seats and clinging to the luggage racks.


I'm starting to understand what people are saying when they speak in Italian... at least in Rome.

From what I've heard, Florentine Italian is different than Venetian Italian which is different than Sicilian Italian...

Here are some pictures from the wine festival:

not italian at all

this is in no way related to Italy. But it's very important.

ciao belli

buongiorno...

Roma still is not my favorite city but I am trying to find more ways to have fun here.

The other night, after unsuccessfully going to a Basquiat opening on Via del Corso,  some friends and I sat at the Piazza del Santa Maria in Trastevere at a fountain. It seems to be a meeting place comparable to Rittenhouse Square. A drunk toothless man told us stories of his life in Italian (and I understood him!). There was some street performers juggling fire and a bride-to-be having her bachelorette party which included making and selling crepes on a small burner and riding around on a rose covered razor scooter. We ended up meeting two italian college students named Marco and Antonio. We stayed up talked to them at the fountain until 3 am and then they helped us take the really slow night bus home. 

It made me happy to finally connect with people who I don't go to school with. 

Last night I tried to go to Circolo Degli Artisti ( a co-op just outside the walls) to go dancing but we got really lost and wandered around and met lots of people which ended up being just as fun as dancing would have been.

Tomorrow I'm going to a wine festival in Murino where there are allegedly fountains of wine for free. 

I am still painting a lot and still really happy to have a studio. I'll post some pictures of stuff I've been making in the very near future.