Istanbul, Turkey

Well, there's not much to report on the game (we lost, and I didn't play much, but did hit 2 three's) but Istanbul was a city to report about! It was more "Americanized" than we thought with many chains available including McDonald's (which are everywhere!), KFC and Popeye's, Domino's, and Starbucks just to name what we saw of this humongous city. I also did not know that half of Turkey is considered part of Europe, and then across a body of water, the other side is considered part of Asia. Very strange, and they accept both the Euro and "Lire", I believe it's called, in most places.

The Americans took a taxi out to downtown the day before the game, and we were able to go into one of the hundreds of mosques (their places of worship) and a bazaar, which is like their version of a flea market, I suppose. One of the strangest rituals, and at times scary if you don't know what's going on and you get woken up in the middle of the night, is that every 5 hours or so, the mosques get on a loud speaker and sing out their prayers to where the whole area hears. If you are near two mosques, it's almost like they are competing to be heard.

We found some great deals at the Bazaar, but then found out that we got gypped because we didn't shop around first... Anyways, they specialize in mostly scarves, and we bought several of them with a very soft material that would cost you 70 bucks or more in the states for about 10 to 20 there.

We won big Sunday in our Italian league game even though I had one of the worst shooting nights ever! It's nice to spank people when they come to your gym though. It's like back in high school where you're so good you do get a lot of team's "A" game when they play you, but there are those teams that already think they lost when they walk into the gym to play you, which is fantastic! :)