I've got the music in me...

Still in Turkey... enjoying Istanbul, although struggling with a bit of a cold. Later this evening, I'm on my way to Goreme, which is a cave town in the Cappadocia region, southeast of here. If you've been keeping up with the news, you probably know that there are some hard feelings toward the US in Turkey right now... and it appears that things are escalating with the Kurds at the Iraqi border, but so far none of that seems to have impacted my experience as a tourist here. I've posted a bunch of pictures, so check those out. As usual, I'm finding that it's so hard to truly capture what I'm seeing here, but I hope the pictures give some idea of the amazing things I'm seeing.

Thought I'd take a few minutes to write a little about the music on this trip. Just a few favorite "musical moments"-

- The Croatian man singing a heavily accented version of Cat Steven's "Wild World" outside my window the first night I was in Split. "Oooh, baby, baby it's a wild world... it's hard to get by just upon a smile."

- A male-female duo performing Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?", as the rain poured down outside in a cafe in Korcula.

- Listening to the guy behind the counter at the internet cafe on Hvar Island singing along to Tracy Chapman, "And you can say baby, baby can I hold you tonight?"

- Hearing Beyonce's "Irreplaceable" and Rihanna's "Umbrella-ella-ella" EVERYWHERE (this is not so much a "favorite" as just part of the soundtrack of this trip, and the umbrella song is all I could think of my first full day in Istanbul as I was walking around in the rain and being offered an umbrella by seemingly every man I passed "Lady, umbrella, lady, umbrella. Good price. Umbrella, lady?").

-John Lennon's "Imagine" and Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" playing as I sat in the internet cafe in Dubrovnik and wrote about my experience at the War Photo exhibit.

-Sitting around the table at the hostel in Sarajevo drinking big beers before dinner, Bob Dylan playing in the background, and suddenly four of us breaking into song at the same time "How does it feel? To be on your own, no direction known, like a rolling stone".

-Drinking in a pub in Sarajevo while the Bosnian owner plays his guitar and commands us to sing along. He starts to play "The Boxer" but no one can get the words right (except of course for the lie-la-lie).

Allrighty, more later. Love to all of you.