Live from Istanbul!

Hello friends, I am writing this from a hotel room in Istanbul, Turkey! We are approximately somewhere here. Istanbul is such a change of pace from Jerusalem and Israel, but we've taken to it quite nicely -- especially the more relaxed pace of our days! We feel much more like tourists and less like students madly cramming for the next exam. There is a danger in letting our guard down and becoming tourists only interested in comfort rather than in learning about our surroundings, studying the places we visit, and challenging our minds and perspectives. But at least for the moment, I can safely say we are glad we are visiting museums and eating lunch at restaurants rather than trudging around abandoned, dusty archaeological mounds all day and making pita and hummus and carrot sandwiches for lunch every day. :-) It's a good break.

I am on another laptop right now than the one I store my pictures on, so you'll have to wait for pics until another post. Sorry! Some highlights so far include the Blue Mosque (largest mosque in Turkey), the church of Hagia Sophia (now a museum), the former Ottoman imperial palace (Topkapi), a visit to the national Archaeological Museum (which had a *sweet* collection of Roman/Hellenistic-style burial sarcophagi, so great!), attending an evangelical church here in Istanbul (placed ingeniously inside the Netherlands consulate, so that the government of Turkey can't shut it down or touch it), taking an almost 2-hour boat tour of the Bosporous and sailing under the two bridges that connect Europe with Asia, and even attending an authentic Whirling Dervishes dance. Wow! A group of us capped tonight off by drinking apple tea at a restaurant on a bridge in the middle of the Golden Horn, the bay that separates southern from northern Istanbul, with the full display of city lights twinkling all over the waters and distant hillsides as far as the eye could see. So fun. Istanbul is such an interesting place...part European, part Middle Eastern. There's a reason for that -- it really is the place where Europe and Asia meet. Literally.

(For those readers who like such things, I took a picture on the boat tour today of the point of the mythical Symplegades that Jason and his men finally defeated on their quest for the Golden Fleece -- I was terribly excited. Even if nobody else knew or much cared! :-)

Of special importance was the private audience we had yesterday with Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch. He's kind of like the Orthodox Church's "pope"-figure, even though the comparison isn't really accurate since he's more like the top spokesperson rather than the literal guy at the top of the chain of command. Still, very cool. He spoke to us some words of greeting and well-wishing, then had to go prepare for a church mass, so he asked a deacon (who is ironically a Chicago native!) to speak with us longer and answer any questions. Since the students had been assigned to read a book on the Orthodox faith and write a paper on it due that morning, of course we had many good questions. To his credit, the deacon Niphon represented the Orthodox Church position quite well. One of the questions that I know many of us are still pondering was on the idea of church unity, across the subdivisions of Christendom. Can there be real unity without all of us compromising on so many things, or do we all just have to become like one branch of the faith, whether that is Greek Orthodox or Assemblies of God or Roman Catholic or Evengelic Free or something else we've not even thought of yet? What makes or "marks" real unity among all believers, among all those who are truly counted by heaven as belonging to the universal family of God?
We have all been challenged in many theological ways on this trip, for sure. That can only be a good thing, however confusing or disorienting it may be right now for some of us.

There's much more I could say, but I'll let this suffice. We are here and mostly well, and enjoying ourselves. We've started to have our first real bouts of illness though among a few, so we would appreciate your continued prayers for us. The municipal water is a known problem here, so we are drinking bottled water all the time. We are also in general recovering slowly from pushing ourselves so hard in Israel, and our bodies are now craving that long-denied sleep! You know, there is a reason the ancient Greek poets called it "sweet sleep" so much of the time.

Tomorrow (Monday) we will visit the Grand Bazaar (should be quite grand!), doing some fun shopping (the dollar goes pretty far here, which is great), and then heading back to the airport for a quick flight down to Izmir to get ready for our big site visit to Ephesus. Can't wait! Again, I'm not sure when I'll have internet again, but until then..

PERGITE CVRSVM CVRRERE