It’s been nearly two months since I last checked in. Time’s traveled very quickly in those two months and it’s hard to believe all that’s happened in that time. For starters, I’m in Turkey now. I have an apartment in a pretty hip neighborhood in the heart of Istanbul, and it looks like I’ll be staying here through november. I’m mainly here to try and sit down and write. I’ve had a couple ideas that have been floating around while I’ve been traveling, and it’d be great to get them down before they float away. This has meant a lot of time working in cafes, which thankfully my neighborhood has plenty of , along with antique shops. (Istanbul has this weird habit of sticking all the shops of a given type in one particular neighborhood. There’s an electronic district, a bakery district, even a music district. I happen to live in the antiques district.) Anyway, I’ve been getting a lot of “you’re where?” emails, so I thought I’d give a little update as to what I’m up to.
Since I last wrote here I’ve been on a bit of a whirlwind tour. I left off in Venice just after leaving the farm, my home for two months. From there I made my way up to Switzerland to meet up with an old friend before heading down to Milan to visit a new friend who lives there. After a couple days I took an eleven hour train down Naples, and quickly made for Amalfi and the coast, making sure to spend a day each at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Two days here, three days there, these were an exhausting couple of weeks and quickly taught me what pace was too fast for me when it came to traveling. After all this I was relieved to spend almost two whole weeks in Rome, putzing around the city with my friend Aaron, with plenty of time to stretch out my legs and take in the city in the way that I wanted to.
At the end of two weeks my friend J showed up and it was time to get on the move again. Travelling up to Pisa we caught a plain to Marrakech and spent two weeks working our way up North through Morocco, eventually crossing over the straight of Gibraltar and catching a train to Madrid as part of a pilgrimage to see the Prado. We flew back to Rome for a few days, and I picked up my luggage which I’d left at J’s apartment, much to his disgust I’d been travelling with a small backpack carrying 3 pairs of underwear, 2 shirts, and one pair of shorts to go along with what I was wearing the day we’d left. From Rome I caught a flight to Istanbul and have been here since.
There’s more to tell obviously. Morocco’s more deserving of a post than a sentence, and there are many stories which have been left out along the way, but these and others will all have to wait for another day.
NowHere 