Monday, June 4, 2007

Fire Chicken

The Lonely Planet guidebook for iStanbul says that the word "Turkey" probably comes from Chinese, who apparently referred to "them" as "Tu Kues" (with an umlaut over the U). The word for the animal "turkey," in Chinese, translates to "Fire Chicken."

-Apparently buses in Turkey are really nice. I keep thinking about the buses in Chile, i.e., with waiters and attendants, who give you blankets and tea and breakfast on the bus. We'll see.

-There's a lot of interesting stuff in Turkey, biblical things, religious things. I don't think I'll be able to see the whirling dervishes.

-Flipped through the Istanbul guidebook and it seemed like it could have been describing Beijing. Huge migrant population, not much green space, old political and cultural capital of an empire, and so on.

-There are Chinese clothing stores in several of the Greek islands. I think we saw at least three clothing outlets, selling Chinese imports and owned by Chinese people, in Samos.

-Ferry schedules changed, and last night we took a ferry from Mykonos at midnight that arrived in Samos at 6:15 in the morning.

-One new Turkish Lira is equivalent to 1,000,000, that's right, one million, old Turkish Lira.

-Off to the Fire Chicken in about an hour!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good for people to know.