Our search for “real” Turkey has reached it’s terminus.\u00a0 We are in Kastamonu, a beautiful city in the heart of the country, not a tourist in sight.\u00a0 And it’s got a great pulse too.\u00a0 The city has about 60,000 people and they are all out on the streets carrying on with their day to day business.\u00a0 The vendors are cater to locals, so gone are the endless stands of junk.\u00a0 Instead there are practical stores selling\u00a0tvs, washing machines, and groceries.\u00a0 But with a little searching one can also find beautiful scarves, cloths, and rugs. We even saw some craftsmen at work. Actually working that is; not toiling for the tourist’s entertainment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We have past plenty of nontouristy “real” turkish towns on our bus rides, but from the bus window they’ve all looked pretty unappealing–very poor, rundown, industrial.\u00a0 Kastamonu, on the other hand, is charming and lovely with plazas, beautiful mosques, and the best pastries yet.\u00a0 Furthermore, we took a cab a few km out of town to one of the\u00a0finest surviving\u00a0wooden mosques in Turkey, dating to 1366.\u00a0 It was sitting quietly in the middle of nowhere surrounded by fields and a little neighborhood of rundown houses.\u00a0 The imam was working in the mosque’s garden when we arrived and he unlocked the door for us.\u00a0\u00a0Inside was exquisite.<\/p>\n
I met a really nice girl on the bus ride to Kastamonu who didn’t speak\u00a0as highly of the city.\u00a0\u00a0She\u00a0is living here for a year\u00a0because her dad’s work (something to do with Islam she\u00a0said)\u00a0required them to move.\u00a0 She usually lives near \u0130stanbul.\u00a0\u00a0Of course no highschooler\u00a0likes to relocate, no matter how pleasant the new town.\u00a0 She was a very sweet girl. It took her a while to work up the courage to talk to me I think.\u00a0\u00a0Steve said he could\u00a0overhear her and her\u00a0friend practicing their\u00a0English.\u00a0 Finally she leaned over and said “Hello, where are you from?\u00a0 Welcome to Turkey”.\u00a0 In perfect English.\u00a0She really made my day.\u00a0 It is often hard to know how\u00a0we are being received.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our search for “real” Turkey has reached it’s terminus.\u00a0 We are in Kastamonu, a beautiful city in the heart of the country, not a tourist in sight.\u00a0 And it’s got a great pulse too.\u00a0 The city has about 60,000 people and they are all out on the streets carrying on with their day to day […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}