We’ve been busy here in Istanbul! Ellen and I arrived and were met by my brother and Cigdem (pronounced Chee dem), my soon to be Sister-in-law. It is so lovely to see them, to see my brother so happy. And I like Cigdem more and more every time I see her, and I liked her to begin with so that’s a whole lot!

We’ve been staying with the most generous and sweet friend that a family could ask for. Most of the week we have been on Büyükada; one of the Princess Islands. It is gorgeous and so low-key. There are no cars and the main transportation around the island are bicycles and horse drawn carriages!

Yesterday we did a little sight-seeing; the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, the Spice Market, the Basilica Cistern. The weather has been hot but beautifully sunny.

A note on the protests; if you haven’t heard there have been a lot of demonstrations here in protest of the government’s plan to cut down all of the trees in a little park next to Taksim Square to put up more buildings. It is a rather odd looking city because it’s so huge and spread out, but there are almost no sky-scrapers. It seems their development policy is to build in the empty spaces (or green spaces) instead of tearing down and replacing old buildings like we do in the US. So green space is getting rarer and rarer here.

Anyway, the protests themselves aren’t as bad as they look on tv. They did go very heavy of the teargas; I heard 8 dogs, 60 cats, and maybe 1,000 birds died from it. But in general I think it is more like what happened last year with the Occupy Wall Street movement; some people started protesting and then all of the government dissenters jumped on it as an opportunity to demonstrate. The police announced they were clearing out the park before they did it, so people weren’t caught unaware.

The only way it affected us was we stayed on the Island instead of on the mainland. They did shut down the main bridge last weekend so we had to take ferries, which I prefer anyway. And around 9 pm every night people bang their pots and pans from their porches, but that’s about it. We went through Taksim a couple of times yesterday and saw people doing a silent standing protest. There were maybe 50 police in riot gear sitting around but nothing else.

Anyway, we’re safe and happy and the wedding festivities are starting up soon! Hopefully my next post will have some new family pictures 🙂