snow and sea

Yesterday, on the limits of Istanbul.

then, it snowed

I woke up this morning to the news that school had been cancelled. The joy of a snow day is equally felt by both teacher and student, and like a kid, I lounged about in my pajamas until about two o'clock. I made a feast of eggs and sausage for breakfast, and sipped on coffee while luxuriously grading student work in my living room. It was marvellous.

Then I just had to go outside.

Pedro wanted to check on the gulls at the Mimar Sinan Bridge, and needing a break, I agreed that this was a fine idea. The scene was very bleak outside the kitchen window; yellow-grey skies and bouts of whirling snowdust. We bundled up and climbed into the car, now dubbed "Atilla the Krill Mobile" (which I will explain later), and carefully made our way towards the bridge.



Among the huddled groups of fluffed feathers, we spied some pink Slender-billed Gulls and this fine Pallas's Gull— which excited me, as I had only previously seen Pallas's Gulls in Oman. Somewhere in the snow, we spotted the shapes of those three flamingos who seem reluctant to leave Büyükçekmece Lake.



The snow came in waves, and during a pocket of dryness as the light was fading, we jumped into Atilla to head back to town for a certain fish soup and a plate of fried anchovies.



The best part of winter is coming in from the cold— the defrosting of limbs is quite euphoric!

the bridge and the sky

Büyükçekmece has a beautiful little secret— well, secret to most foreigners. Undulating across a little neck of water between the Marmara Sea and Büyükçekmece lake is a 16th century stone bridge, built by the Michelangelo of the Ottoman Empire: Mimar Sinan. As the vast Empire stretched from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, the work of Mimar Sinan can be seen not only in Turkey, but in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Syria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is said that his approach to architecture was an inspiration to the architects of the Taj Mahal.



Over the course of an hour the sky and light changed so many times, illuminating the stone into a gold, or fading it to grey.

the morning commute

One of my souvenirs from Prague was the book Letters from Prison, by Milan Šimečka, a dissident against the Communist regime in former Czechoslovakia. I read this a long while ago, but one of the concepts which stuck with me was a link that he noticed whilst imprisoned, between the lack of nature and depravity.

Since leaving Istanbul, the weight on my chest has lightened. My morning commute is now twenty-five minutes through foggy fields, spiderweb sparkling with dew, grebes on the lake— instead of an hour or two of aggravated drivers in grey gridlock.

I'm so glad I left the city.

by the sea