Culture vultures

Last night Meltem and I went to a guitar recital at a very nice concert hall (next to the Military Museum!). The performer was Eliot Fisk, a real virtuoso. He played a bunch of stuff ranging from Spanish classics to Bach and some composer who's still alive. It was really amazing to see a great player at work; sometimes it sounded like he had about 16 fingers all playing at once. Meltem and I were both struck by how interesting it is that here's this guy, basically plucking five lengths of catgut strung over a hollow box for resonance, shortening each one as necessary to yield different tones; and it all comes together in this great river of melody. Human ingenuity will never cease to boggle my mind.

Ah, also yesterday I didn't have to go to campus, so I went down to Sultanahmet (i.e. the old city, the touristy part) to hang around for a bit. I took a couple of pictures with my swanky new cell phone, including one of a maintenance worker pushing a wheelbarrow around the dome of Hagia Sophia. God, do I hope that one came out legibly. I will post a couple of my pix soon, it's a matter of figuring out how to get them onto my Mac (I can e-mail them to myself from my phone – again, how cool is that – but that costs money and let's face it, I'm cheap).