Did the Romans really need that many theatres?

It's been a while since my last post and I apologize for that. Time slows when one is at the beach and while a lot has happened ıt doesn't really seem it. I finished War and Peace after a three month battle. It wasn't that I didn't absolutely adore it... the actually story and characters rank probably at the top of anythıng I've ever read... it's just that Tolstoy has this compulsion to bluster repetitively about the nature of history for thirty pages at a time which would each time effectively kill my momentum. Probably a bıgger reason though is that I actually lost the book twice - one turned up a few weeks later in my grandmother's pantry, the other I would like to think has been going back and forth from Toronto to Vienna with Austrian airlines... perhaps ın the handbag of a comely stewardess (the italics indicate how to properly stress the word in this context).

Since then I've notched Atwood's Handmaid's Tale which was interesting but miles behind the Blind Assassin and definitely not warranting the comparisons to 1984 (not to say the world she paints is less horrifyıng or provocatıve, it's just not as well written.) Now I'm halfway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which has been a pretty intense experience (mostly the fırst chapter) it's a memoır by thıs 21 year old named Dave Eggers whose parents both died of cancer within a single month. I was really pissed off at him especially through the preface and to a lesser degree for the first chapter - a combination of resentment at him for seemingly taking away my tragedy and irritation at his obsessive reflexivity. In Chapter 2 though it clicked... you could tell he was more comfortable once he got past describing the deaths themselves (maybe I'm projecting). He really is a terrific writer though.

But that's not what you're interested in. 'He can read at home' is what you're probably thinking. So without further ado: Bursa, Turkey's fourth largest city, was a lot of fun after the initial wandering around for an hour with huge backpacks looking for a manger which we figured after a couple of hotels would be the only thıng available for a reasonable price. We ended up finding a place for about 18 dollars that was pretty comfortable. What was really cool though was that there was this neıghbour who was a vice principal at the local high school who just liked to hang out with tourists and spoke passable English. He took us to this tea house where young and old Bursans gather in the back to jam with traditional folk instruments. What was extra cool was that they gave us all percussion instruments of our own to join in. I must say that Karin and Brent rather lack rhythm. I on the other hand had the party bouncing. Later we went to a Sufi service attended only by local Muslims aside from us and involving Dervishes and very intensely human music involving chanting, what seemed like inuu throat singing, basic precussion, and some very emotive flute playing. It rocked.

From there we went to this place famous for making tiles in the 18th century, then a smallish town on the Aegean coast where we got into and won a fight with a cabbie over fare, although we've been growing less and less sure of our rıghteousness since. The place we stayed was probably the nicest of the entire trip. We were in a huge room in an old greek house with saffron curtains that billowed out from open windows through which it was possible to see all of the boats in the harbour. While we were there some soccer team won something and everyone got very excited. They wouldn't stop honking until 2 in the morning. 2 in the damn morning (I had a headache). Blah blah Effasus and Pergamum... lots of amphıtheatres and theatres and fat British people that in hind sight may just have been monstrous tomatoes pretending to be British people (they were red enough). I've realized that I find ruins pretty boring. I'm only really ınterested in the art at the sites, most of which has been looted, or ıf not, taken out of the sıte to some local museum where it's better preserved but out of context. Now we're in Fetiye and are going on a 4 day blue cruise on a sail boat (which we got for a pretty awesome, though dubiously classifyable as within my budget, 200 dollars). It include meals, water sports, shisha, and a bunch of other stuff. Not alcohol though. I bought some vodka which I need to learn to like pronto.

Hope all is well and sorry to all who have facebook messaged me ın the last couple of days... for whatever reason this computer won't let me log in.