Short report

Well, this day was cut a bit short by my foot. It really hurts. The blister on my little toe is huge. I can avoid stepping on it, but doing so has caused my foot to hurt in other places. Basically today consisted in getting to this other Turkish bath, getting a message, having coffee, and coming home.

Now is a worthwhile time to say how wonderful the public transportation is here. It may be the best I've ever used. There are three subway lines that have fairly frequent stops. Normally they are just a flight of stairs below street level. And the subways stops are gorgeous -- full of beautiful carved wood, etc. I tried to take some pictures but they didn't turn out so well. I'll stick one in here so you get a basic idea. The trains seem to come about every three minutes. The buses and trolleys are also set up in a very intuitive way. I have a month transit pass so I can just jump on and off the trains, trams and buses at will (it basically works on the honor system, with a fine if they catch you without a ticket or pass). So anyway, yeah, I've gotten very comfortable with it and am happy to jump on a subway and then hop off to try a new cafe or check out a new neighborhood.

The Turkish bath I went to was quite nice. Funny story though... when I went to the first Turkish bath an elderly man took aside this Japanese tourist and showed him around and explained to him that he should go directly from the hottest bath to the coldest one. So when I show up, I look around the bath. It is very cool, quiet and relaxing. Again, an octagonal pool with a dome over top that lets shafts of light in (I've posted pictures of the domes from the outside and of the front of the building). Having sat in the baths for 10 minutes I head back upstairs for my massage. This somewhat excitable short man in his 40s comes up to me and says, "come, come" and pulls me towards a different door. I think, "Oh, he wants to show me around like what happened with the Japanese tourist." I start coming along with him. I'm a bit disoriented so I'm lagging behind him a bit, looking around. Then he grabs himself and says "Wir spielen," beckoning me forward. That's when I realize he is leading me to the bathroom. "No. no. no." "Wir spielen!" "Nein. No." And I walk out. After my massage I go back to the baths and it become clear to me that this is a gay pick-up location for around half the people there. Or perhaps prostitution because there seem to be older men and younger men pairing off together. My other disturbing experience involved this guy who looked around 70 who kept on slowly following me and once brushed up against me. But anyway, once the German tourists showed up I infiltrated their ranks and was safe.

Despite all that, overall a good experience with a couple minutes of unpleasantness. Even aside from the whole avoiding-getting-picked-up aspect, I think I preferred the first Turkish bath, so I think my further bathing experiences will be there. That also has the warmest bath and the best masseurs :)

Then I just sat and read and drank coffee with a view of the parliament across the river. Tough life. I hope to visit it when I can walk properly. It was reasonably cool for the first time yet. Before today I had been sweating more or less non-stop. I have these new wicking T-shirts and they have been working great. When I wore my normal t-shirt it ended up with salt-stains underneath my neck from a day of walking around.

I decided to go to a grocery store for dinner. I got a great loaf of bread -- whole wheat with sunflower seeds and oatmeal on top -- a yogurt and some pastries. I'm quite happy with this.

I finish with graffiti. There's a lot of it. Here's some from a passage that goes under a busy street.

-- David