Turkey, in a way, it's not only the most surprising but the best trip I've been on, and it's really too bad that they're having such troubles now. It's all part of the Mid-East situation that more and more countries are getting involved in.

Really terrible, complicated, oh my god. So Turkey's now joined, Russia has now joined, who else is new? Syria, no, Syria's been involved the whole time. Centers around Syria right now, although that's not the only center, it's just the major center. The new players are Turkey and Russia and Saudi Arabia in this year, I think, and, let's see, any other troops or airplanes involved?

Not that I can think of, but, anyway, about Turkey, it's too bad. A terrible massacre, 97 people killed yesterday.

But my vacation there was wonderful, and I was just thinking about Antalya because I'm sitting here by the bank on one of their benches.

And I remember sitting on benches in Antalya when we walked around that Sunday morning. Really nice, nice day. Antalya is a nice city. The hotel was very unusual but very nice, except for the room. I didn't like the room, too big. Didn't like the tile in the room; they ran away with their imagination on the rooms.

The buffet was good, and that whole area there was good, and the garden in the back with the steep precipice down to the ocean, down to the Mediterranean Sea, the Cote d'Azur, no, the Turquoise Coast. There you go, so that was really nice. I enjoyed that city, and next thing that comes to mind is the city where Rumi lived, or at least where he's buried, and his Mosque there in that museum.

Looked forward to that because I knew a little bit about Rumi. Anyway, Cappadocia, and, of course, the underground cities, and that was very interesting. Not exactly the way I had imagined it, but to think that people lived there, maybe 20,000 people lived in underground cities.

And then, the other things I liked were the porcelain guy, the potter, and the restaurant inside one of the little things. [LAUGH] I don't even remember what they are. The volcano-like things.

Well, you can't expect me to remember everything. Moving on to Hittite land, and that really fired me up, and then Ankara. And then, it was in Cappadocia that I had that brief chat with the woman who was a kind of a New Ager and we compared notes spiritually. She fired me up into mania, so I came home manic.

And that was the trip where we got home, and the flight had been cancelled. You couldn't get on another flight, and the last flight home from Chicago was nine o'clock in the evening, and it was full, so I wanted to go to a hotel because I was totally exhausted and Sharon wouldn't. She said, well, let's see if we can get on here, so we left our names as a stand by, and from the display, the stand by was filled, but the agent said, we might be able to get you on. We sat there and waited, and we did get on, and short flight back.

I talked to a guy, very interesting guy across the aisle, because I was manic and I talk to strangers, right? Well, this guy turned out to be a young guy that works for probably some big financial company. I'm guessing financial company becausehe was talking about acquiring companies, and so it would have been a private equity company like Mitt Romney.

He'd been to China and a lot of other places, and he was young, and he was from somewhere around here. Okay, that was the end of the trip.

Beginning of the trip, trip to Turkey. Let's see. We flew into, oh, yeah. There were adventures there, too.

So flying toward Munich, I got sick, and I had just had the small bowel obstruction thing and so I got sick. I vomited and had diarrhea and a pain in my stomach, I think. So I thought I needed to get off the plane and see a German doctor. Had to go to a German hospital rather than Turkey because I had no idea how advanced Turkey was. Found out later that they are quite advanced. They're really European, at least in the western part of the country, but anyway, so I got off the plane, went to the airport medical center, they did something and nothing, and then took me to the hospital. It was really a clinic, I found out, a government clinic, so it was a socialized medicine, wow.

Okay, well, what that amounted to was that you had to wait. It wasn't fancy at all. We had to wait, but finally, a doctor came, and I believe he was competent. He gave me a lot of confidence. He gave a blood test and I said, what about a scan? And he said, no, the blood test tells me that you're okay, and the diagnosis was gastroenteritis.

So we got to the airport, late of course, and had to reschedule. They would not just forward us on. They expected money, so we called Grand Circle and got no help from them. Did get some help from a couple of ladies speaking English. Now remember, oh, I'm not manic yet, okay I'm not manic yet, but anyway, they helped us with the phone since we were confused and they were very nice to us. And we were gonna give them a drink, but they had to leave. Okay, so finally we went back and had to pay to get to Istanbul, but, on the other hand, we got reimbursed for that later.

So we got to Istanbul past midnight, and we were due there, I don't know, two o'clock in the afternoon or something. So we took a cab to the hotel, and the program manager, he came up to me at breakfast and said, are you so and so? Yeah, oh, we were so worried about you, but anyway we connected with him right away.

Okay, then, so then Istanbul. Istanbul, let's see, I might as well go on here until my coffee gets cold. Good, okay. Double espresso, double chocolate. Wow. Okay, so Istanbul, first thing we did there was we went on a little boat ride on the Bosphorus strait and that was very interesting. Got off on the other side, on the Asian side, and saw the back of Dolomite Palace, the smaller one, fanciest palace in the world according to the Sultan in the 19th Century. We went to that palace, and we went inside, and we saw it from the back, from the strait. And then, let's see, we went to lunch at a seafood restaurant, and the guy's throwing out scraps for the, I think they were cormorants, they dived under the water.

Anyway, oh, everything was interesting. Okay, so then, let's see. We also visited in Istanbul the big palace, the secret city, the harem, and all that stuff, great museums, and let's see. I can't keep the cities straight, so this is Istanbul, and we went down to the Dardanelles and saw the World War I markers and I thought about "Gallipoli", the movie.

And then we crossed the water on a ferry and stayed in a hotel, it was just a tourist hotel, nothing but tourists, big hotel, nothing but tourists. And then we went to Troy, and Troy, you know what? It was disappointing, but it is just a pile of rocks, okay, Paul? But, on the other hand, it did have detail, and we spent some time there, and it kind of emerged more and more. And especially the more and more that I think of it now, the more I appreciate it. That this is Troy, it's not a mythical site. There was a real war there. So, Homer is based on some kind of real event that we don't know too much about, but the archaeologists can reconstruct some of it.

Okay, so then we went to have a home hosted lunch, and that was a nice family, a nice little village.

Then we went down to Izmir, ancient Smyrna, and Smyrna goes back at least 3,000 years. It's mentioned in the Bible, and Izmir was really unexpected. It had a wonderful fresh market, wonderful produce, and a museum, I recall. And then we found the Roman forum, the Agora, and it had a level underground, so there's a basement to the Agora, so to speak, with Greek columns.

Very interesting. So we enjoyed Izmir. I think we were there two nights. From there we went to Ephesus, and Ephesus, of course, you have expectations for that, and, in this case, the expectations were exceeded because I got to see that library I knew about, and there were some biblical things there. The amphitheater where Paul preached. They had nearby the place where John the Evangelist was buried, and I have no reason to think that he wasn't because, heck, they could keep records in the first century, the second century, and why would they lose track of where he was buried?

So let's say he was buried there. Sure, why not? That's historical. I stood at a marker that very well could have been where his bones still exist.

Then on from Ephesus, oh, yeah, we went to the white travertine pools. That was kind of a disappointment, too, but still it's very nice, very nice.

Then there was the Antalya Museum, and there was Aphrodisias, which is really great. Great ruins of a city, Roman city, and then there was a Roman theater as Aspendos that was more complete than any I had ever seen in pictures. It had a proscenium, and, oh my gosh, there were so many surprising things in Turkey. I really, really enjoyed it, but I'm really, really sorry that they're having troubles now.