The Easy Work of Meeting People while Traveling in Turkey and Greece

My Girlfriend Jen McKnight and I saw some amazing sites during our trip to Turkey and Greece. It was the trip of a lifetime based merely on the many ancient and modern wonders we saw and photographed. What made this trip especially satisfying, though, were the people we met, and there were many. Turkey and Greece offer an endless stream of incredibly friendly people. Combine that with the fact that Jen is a people-magnet; combine that with my natural curiosity, and you end up with animated conversations in some of the most unexpected places. It happened so often that after we'd been in Turkey for a day, I decided that whenever we ended up visiting with a person for more than a few minutes, I would ask the person/people to take a selfie with us and trade contact information. I'm posting some of these photos here. On the flight to Goreme, a Turkish woman who teaches language, but who lives in Amsterdam, volunteered to give Jen and me a crash course in Turkish. What a gift! We actually did incorporate a couple dozen Turkish words into our vocabulary. Thank you, Mustafa Kabalci, who was our host in Cappadocia at Sultan Suites Cave Hotels! He was as good a host as I could have imagined, offering us unending advice and encouragement. We'll never forget the wise eyes of Ismir, the dog either. And there was Haydar Elçi from the Goreme restaurant, who presented us with a free desert of baklava on our final night in Goreme. Who else? There was Karolina Barac, the model from Croatia with whom we shared an inspiring balloon ride. And then there were two Turkish women from Istanbul, who we met at Derinkuyu, Turkey, Tilbe Cana İnan and Nesrin Göksungur who approached Jen and me 100 feet underground, asking if they could walk with us to distract them from the claustrophobia. That led to a later (above-ground) wonderful dinner conversation in Urgup on a breathtaking overlook. While in Turkey, we also met Fatih and Jenna, the two young law students from Indonesia, who were taking a break from their schooling at the University of Leeds in London at sat next to us in the small outdoor restaurant in Goreme. There are many merchants among the people we got to know, especially since it was a holiday season, and all of them offered us insights and friendship. That list includes Fatih, Mohammed and Suddik. Jen bought a cute little birdsong whistle from a man in Istanbul for a total of 1 Turkish Lira (30 cents). He then chased us down to make sure that Jen knew how to fill the whistle with water and showed her several techniques for making bird sounds.  

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Cyclist getting wiped out by car door

I'm really ambivalent about what happened in this video. Cycling is my preferred method of transportation. I've never yet been doored. I assume that every door I pass can open at any time and wipe me out. Therefore, I slow down quite a bit when in a hazardous situation. The guy in this video likes to take changes as part of asserting his rights. Check out the way he shot through the pedestrians before the crash. The narrow path right before the crash and his insistence at traveling at a brisk pace were accidents waiting to happen. That he was wiped out by a door thrown into the bike lane angers me, people should be more careful opening car doors. On the other hand, almost all people who open car doors do it blindly. It's a fact of life, like the fact that the tides go in and out. Further, the consequences of riding fast through hazardous areas will be an injury suffered by the cyclist, not those who throw their doors open. Hence, my approach of riding very slowly in such zones, even though I would be legally entitled to go as fast as I want in the bike lane. I'm sorry to see this guy wiped out, of course, but the video leaves me quite ambivalent about who was the victim.

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St. Louis Riverfront trail good ride and diverse sites

Given that today's high was in the low 80's, I decided to ride my bicycle up and down the 11 mile St. Louis Riverfront Trail this evening. As for things to see, this paved bike path offers a bit of everything, including the Mississippi River (actually quite beautiful in the quietude of the sunset), but also industrial areas, junk yards and several areas under construction. It's a worthy endeavor for anyone in half-decent biking shape. The end point is the Chain of Rocks Bridge, originally part of Route 66, but revamped as a pedestrian walkway and gathering spot, with vistas of downtown St. Louis far in the distance. If you click the title, you can see eight photos I took along the ride this evening. IMG_9694 riverfront chain of rocks IMG_9625 riverfront chain of rocks

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Ressurrecting the F1 rocket

Wired has published an article that ties the present space program to the highly successful Apollo program many decades ago. We might be on the verge of recreating the F1 rocket engine. Lots of amazing facts and figures here:

There has never been anything like the Saturn V, the launch vehicle that powered the United States past the Soviet Union to a series of manned lunar landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The rocket redefined "massive," standing 110 metres in height and producing a ludicrous 34 meganewtons of thrust from the five monstrous, kerosene-gulping Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engines that made up its first stage.

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