Wednesday 24 July 2019

Sebnem Hotel, Istanbul, final days of May

The name of the hotel translates as "dew" and it is pronounced “sheb-nem”. The staff were helpful and solicitous of our wellbeing. One night we had a chat with two of them about politics and history and learned that they were not overly enthusiastic about the national government. Young people in Istanbul appeared to mostly speak English and seemed to have relatively progressive views on things like politics.

The little wooden desk in my room was suitable for quickly writing blogposts. There are 41 files in the 'ME 2019 trip' folder on my PC now, which is where all the document files for the Middle East trip are stored. The photos are stored in different folders, and sometimes there are two copies of each photo depending on how many posts I used them in.

There are three series of blogposts that derived from the trip. Most of the posts in the first series were made while travelling, the exceptions to this rule being the final two. The second and third series were made once I had got back to Australia. This is me in my hotel room fiddling with my laptop's power cord.


The first series, which went up mostly in May, constitutes a set of daily digests. The second series went up in June and is about food and drink consumed on the trip. The third series went up in July and is about history in the Middle East. For the daily digests, I usually wrote using the laptop at the end of each day, using notes I had recorded on my mobile phone. Sometimes I posted the day after the events described. Sometimes a mobile hotspot was necessary (using my mobile phone) in order to connect to the internet, and sometimes the hotel's wifi was sufficient for my purposes. 

On the shelf above the desk is a warm can of beer that I had not drunk the night before. I got the beers from a local convenience store that stayed open late. They also sold gifts for tourists, such as Turkish delight. A beer normally cost 10 lira (about A$2.50) but bigger containers like this one cost a bit more, as did bottles of imported beer.

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