4/3/98: Switch to Istanbul Hostel after an early morning search for a better deal. Turns out they opened only the day before! Very nice and clean. Met up with Chris & Beth B for lunch, and took a ferry across the Bosphorus to their apartment. Also a visit to a spice bazaar and a candy store.
4/3/23: Chris & Beth were friends from our church back in Chicago. They had been students at Northwestern back then, but were now living in Turkey and working with university students. We ate lunch at a place with live music, some of which I recognized from my days with the folk-dance troupe in Evanston, IL. They took us to a spice bazaar, and it was the first warm day of Spring, so it was more crowded than they had ever seen it. They also brought us to the confectioners shop where “Turkish Delights” were invented (made famous by C. S Lewis’ book: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe). We bought several boxes for ourselves!
When we crossed the Bosphorus to visit their apartment we set foot on the 2nd continent of our journey. We strolled the neighborhood with them a bit, and then Ruth prayed for them as we sat in a square next to a lovely fountain.
Returning to our hostel in the Golden Horn, we ate dinner prepared by a Kiwi expat who was the staff chef. It was delicious. Interestingly, we shared our table with another traveller, whose name was Aquila, like the missionary whom Paul worked with in the book of Acts. This fellow was from Colorado, and seemed young and aimless. His described his father as a Sufi Muslim, while his mother was a sort of hybrid Buddhist. I talked to him about Christianity, but he seemed uninterested in discussing anything that sounded substantive and solid, especially since there are exclusive aspects to this worldview.
He recommended reading “Meetings with Remarkable Men” by G. I. Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic who died in 1949. I never did find a copy to read for myself, but I love the title and recognize that the trip Ruth and I took twenty-five years ago included meetings with many remarkable people, including Chris and Beth B.!
