Budapest

I got up pretty early the next day, June 13, because we had decided that we would go over to Budapest and see the sights there. This we included myself, Fahrunnisa, Sermin Teyze, and a friend of theirs, Alper Amca, and his son, Ridvan. We all piled into his car and drove to Hungary to Budapest. It took around two-three hours, not very long. The border was very funny--there wasn't any passport control or anything, so unless you were driving with someone who knew where they were going you wouldn't have known that you'd just passed the border between two countries.

Once we got to Budapest, our first stop was the tomb of Gul Baba. Its a very beautiful tomb and all around it are rose gardens--his name means Rose Father if you directly translate it, so the connection is obvious. Here's a picture of a part of the garden and the fountain there:
It's a very small, quiet, and beautiful tomb. Here's a picture of the inside of the tomb:
After visiting the tomb, we took a drive towards the river Danube and took pictures along its bank. Here's a picture of me:
And here's one of me and Fahrunnisa. Admittedly you don't see much background but its a nice photo :D
After walking around and taking pictures at the river bank, we got back in the car and drove to the Fishermen's Bastion, which is exactly what its name says: a bastion. The view was incredible, and the bastion itself was also incredible, so I think I spent more time taking pictures of the structure itself rather than the view. But here's a picture of one part of the bastion:
After walking through and around the bastion, we decided to walk around the entire place which really wasn't very big, and came across the grave of the last Turkish governor of Buda. Here's the picture of the headstone:
The engraving on it translates as: "After 145 years of Turkish sovereignty, the last governor of Buda, Abdurrahman Abdi Arnavut Pasha, was slain near this spot in the afternoon of the 2nd day of September, 1686 at the 70th year of his life. He was a heroic enemy, may he rest at ease!"

After walking around some more, we decided to go on to the Estergon Kalesi. Its a very small but important fortress, and its very old. There's a church in the compound, and when one goes into the fortress itself, there's a small area where they display all of the bells that have ever hung in the church, and they date back to the 400s and 500s. One thing to note here: when we went and walked around the fortress, there were no signs that the Ottomans had ever been there. The fact that these bells were there, and the fact that there were bells from the time the Ottomans were there shows that the Ottomans respected the traditions of the local population and did what they could to foster and nurture a safe environment for them to keep on practicing their own religion. Not too many other empires who would allow for that kind of freedom. Here's a picture of the fortress from the other side of the river looking back towards it:
Apologies for the presence of the bridge but it really is the best photo I was able to take in the circumstances of being in the car on a road.

The reason I mention the tolerance and respect of the Ottomans has many reasons, but the most prominent is this: on the other side of the Danube river, right across from the Estergon Kalesi, there is supposed to be another fortress, much like it, maybe smaller, called Cigerdelen. This is the general area of where it is supposed to be:
The Cigerdelen fortress is supposed to be around the area from the end of the bridge on the opposite bank and to the right end of the photo--that's where it should have been. As you can see, nothing is there. Completely destroyed. Every stone taken away and who knows what's been done with them. We weren't able to walk around that area because we were running out of time, but I'm thinking that we probably wouldn't have found even the slightest indication anywhere around there that a fortress used to be there as well. I guess we should count ourselves lucky that the Estergon fortress is still around and does provide us with an example of many politically sensitive things that shouldn't be gotten into in a blog.

It'd gotten pretty late by the time we finished walking around Estergon, so we decided that it was high time we head back to Vienna. Before we did that though, a random Turkish person who'd heard us speaking in Turkish came up and told us that there was a mosque being renovated by Turks that we should see so we decided to try and figure out where that mosque was. We were able to find it; it's a very spread out mosque that is actually somewhat small when it comes to the prayer space, but one can see that it was made to serve the needs of the people around it in every way possible, not just for prayer. I don't have many good photos of the mosque, but if anybody wants to visit it someday, I highly recommend going there.

Having discovered the mosque and paid our respects to the past generations of ancestors that we all probably have coming from there, we piled back in the car and drove back to Vienna. The journey continues in Sarajevo!!

Vienna

Once I got to Vienna, I was picked up from the Südbahnhof bus station by Fahrunnisa, a daughter of our relatives. We went to their house and had breakfast first, and then I was able to shower which got me feeling more like a human again, and after my shower we decided to go out and walk around Vienna, and they would show me the city and the places that I should visit during the last three weeks of my trip here.

Our first stop on the one-day tour of Vienna was the Yunus Emre Fountain in the Türkenschanzpark. Here's a picture of the fountain with me and Fahrunnisa:

The fountain is really quite beautiful, almost everything on and around it, all of the decorations and everything were brought from Turkey. The writings on the fountain are verses from Yunus Emre's poems. Here's a general view from farther back of the fountain:

After visiting the fountain, we walked around the park for a bit and then went to a school where there was another Turkish fountain, but the school was closed so unfortunately I wasn't able to get to see that fountain. Its supposed to be smaller but very nice, similar in concept to the Yunus Emre Fountain. I'll make sure to post a picture if I get to see it during my last three weeks there.

After looking for the fountains, we went back to the center of Vienna to meet Izzet Abi, Fahrunnisa's older brother, who gave us a tour of the center of the city which included all the details that most tourists miss from the guidebooks. His tour also included stories of the Ottomans from when they tried to conquer Vienna. The city is really quite beautiful with many statues and pretty buildings, but there was one thing that got to be somewhat annoying and insulting honestly as we walked around. It seems like the entire place defines itself by the defeat of the Ottomans and the victory of the Christian religion against the Islamic one. Many of the statues that we saw had at least the crescent being trampled underfoot if not a soldier of the janissery. Here's a picture of one of those kinds of statues:
You know the Turk from the beard. If more information for placement is necessary, he's the man lying down at the feet of the other victorious angels and such. This was the kind of statue and placement of figures that I basically saw around Vienna, and much as I understand the fear that people of the 16th and 17th centuries would feel when they heard the word "Ottoman," I don't understand projecting that fear into the present and the future. People do get along well, I assume, but I feel like it would put a strain on relationships between Turks and Viennese. But, what's done is done.

After walking around some more, we went to a really nice cafe and rested a while. Here's a picture of us in the cafe:
Going from left to right in the photo: Şahika (the youngest daughter), Şermin Teyze (the mom), me, and İzzet (the eldest son). Fahrunnisa was taking the photo which is why she's not in this picture. Because she isn't though, here's one with me and her:
After relaxing at the cafe for a bit we went back out and started to walk around and they pointed out some more places that I should definitely visit once I had more time. Since I was there only for one day we didn't actually go in and see what was inside most of the places simply because it would've taken too long, but they did show me the ways to get places so hopefully I'll be able to go around on my own or with my group once we get to Vienna.

We got home towards dinnertime, and by that time I was getting into really sleepy mode but eating helped a lot, and before and after dinner I got lessons in poetry and how to write dates from letters from Baki Amca, the father of the family. Husrev Abi also came to the house so I was able to meet the entire family. Here's a picture of all of us after dinner:
I went to bed at a pretty good time, around 9 pm, and was able to sleep really well and really deep. I definitely enjoyed my time here in Vienna. Tomorrow I go to Budapest, so the adventures of that day to follow in the next post!

First Post!

Hello everyone and welcome to my new blog for this year's summer adventure. I'll be traveling around the Balkans and then Vienna for an exciting 6 weeks.

I've actually been on this side of the ocean for 3 days now, but honestly it feels like I've been here for at least a week--I haven't been sitting around lazing so it seems like what fit into 3 days should actually be fit into at least a week but yeah...SO I'll be backtracking a wee bit and then go on to the actual days as we go along.

I arrived on Friday, June 12, to Vienna at about 8:30 am. This was earlier than I was expecting to arrive, but I'm definitely not complaining. Here are some highlights from the two flights I took (RDU to DC, DC to Vienna) that I wrote down while on the plane to keep myself awake:
-Californication video by the Red Hot Chili Peppers for the first time in a really, really long time
-Weird shuttles at the Dulles airport to take me to my gate...they looked like oversized Hummers running on electricity. I know. Electric and Hummer is a huge oxymoron but that's the only way I can describe it.
-Really, really short flight from RDU to Dulles.
-Jason Statham and Transporter 2...might be 3...so here's the thing: Jason Statham is very good-looking, has skills in action segments, but the dialogues between him and the other characters in the movie were just...ridiculous to the point that I kept bursting out laughing, in a quiet manner of course since I'm on a plane but yeah...anyways...
-Really colorful seats on the Austrian Air plane--my section was pine green with yellow-green blankets, red pillows, and the headrest colors differed between white, yellow, and red. Business section was blue and yellow and had purple pillows. They also got to have serious blankets, not the sheet-like blankets we got. But that's okay. I had a yellow headrest.
-What I understood to be a Russian lady came up to me and asked for help, in Russian, which shows that I need to learn Russian, as well as German. Bloody weird it feels to go to a country and not know the language.
-Old lady two seats across from me gets addicted to playing Solitaire on the little TVs in the plane.
-The Gorillaz' Clint Eastwood song...simply HI-larious.
-About 50 channels on the TV, of which each channel repeated at least 3 times per channel because each movie was being shown in 3 different languages: English, German, and French.
-I drank coffee twice. First time was during the RDU-DC flight, and I drank the first half of the coffee without milk, after which I asked for milk and sugar. Second time, I asked for milk and sugar immediately when I got the coffee, which turned out to be a good decision. But I have confirmed that tea is my thing. Tea and water.

After all that adventure, I finally arrived in Vienna, found my bus and went to the house of some relatives that we have living there. The Vienna adventures to follow in the next blogpost!