Istanbul Bound

So I've booked my first big trip across Europe. Actually, it's not even in Europe.

I'm over here, well, let's just say 'unofficially'. I don't have a work visa, I just have the 3-month tourist visa that a Canadian gets when one lands in the European Union. On December 22, my three months are up.

When I got here my host family said that we could do the paperwork to get a proper visa, but it would cost about 450 euros and take a long time. Another option would be to just use that money for me to travel outside of the EU because when I come back in I'll get a new 3-month stamp.

Hmm......tough choice!

So, I'm off to Turkey on December 14th. I'm going with a good friend, Lindsay, who's an aupair living just over the border in Belgium. She came up last week to see me and we hit a few Amsterdam museums.

I'm pretty excited. Istanbul, known previously as Byzantine and Constantinople, is one of the most historically significant cities in the world. It straddles the only opening to the Black Sea, making its geographic location extremely strategic. A history dork could spend months there without a boring day.

I'll wait to say more about Turkey itself until I go there, but it's a fascinating place to keep an eye on. It encapsulates so much of the tension in the world right now--the clash between secular democracy and Islamic sharia rule.

Turkey also currently has about 100,000 troops along the border with Iraq and has been threatening very seriously over the past month to invade. A group called the PKK, a Kurdish separtist group, has carried out many terrorist attacks across Turkey over the past decade and operates out of the northern Iraqi Kurdish region.

So, hopefully there isn't a massive regional war being fought when I go.

(pictures used in this post are from here)