This trip was all made possible by the Roger Short Memorial Fund, and to the fund and its generous contributors I am eternally grateful for such a life-changing experience. I would like to additionally thank Victoria Short for her hospitality in Istanbul, and her commitment to help throughout the trip. From the generosity of the fund and its contributors, I was able to travel from Istanbul to Ankara, and I added privately-funded trips to Beirut, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem.
What follows is a day-to-day account of my travels throughout all the cities I visited, as well as my final thoughts on the experience as a whole. Following a net total of 24 hours spent in planes, airports, and cars, I arrived in Istanbul.
My eyelids were heavy and I felt fatigued, but driving through the city completely reinvigorated me. As I got in a proper taxi, I was greeted with a Coke and a cigarette: Turkish hospitality. My driver helped me practice my crude Turkish as we navigated the anarchy of the Turkish highways.
I savored the potential that lay within these first few moments in a city unknown, looking around at the completely unfamiliar. I saw houses dot the mountain sides surrounding the city, layered on top of each other like a tiered cake.
I saw men relaxing with their feet up as they drove at a cruising speed of 80 miles per hour. I saw a city that I would certainly never know fully, but one that I could only hope to know a sliver of by the time I had to leave.
