Some interesting pictures

My camera's pictures currently won't upload onto my computer, so I don't have any recent pictures to show. So here's a picture of a large Medusa head used as a column base in the old Byzantine (Justinian, I think) cistern. No one's quite sure why there's these two Medusa heads, or where they came from, or why this one is sideways (and the other one is upside down). We went to the cistern the first full day, same day as the Hippodrome.

Zooming forward in time, here is a picture from the Chora Church, which is famous for its many mosaics and frescoes. This mosaic shows the death of Mary. I thought this was particularly interesting because Jesus is holding a baby in his arms--that baby is actually Mary's soul. Weird, huh? I'm not sure when we went to this museum (church), because apparently I neglected to write about it in my journal. But it was a little later.For contrast, here's a lovely mosaic that was once part of the floor of the Great (Byzantine) Palace. It depicts two leopards eating a gazelle (I think). There were a lot of fighting scenes in the mosaics: a lion and an elephant, a deer and a snake, and eagle and a snake, a gryphon and... a horse? I think that's what it looks like.

Anyway, I hope I figure out the pictures soon, and then I can put up pictures from Troy and Pergama, etc. Until then I'll try to post some more random pictures.

update

Well, here are some pretty pictures that have nothing to do with right now. This picture, for example, is from one of the Prince's Isles, in the Sea of Marmara.
Right now I'm in my dorm room at Bilkent Universitesi in Ankara. Students are free to arrive anytime now, so I don't know when my roommate will show up. This week we joined in the orientation Turkish class (basically the same stuff as our last Turkish class) and went on a field trip to Ataturk's Mausoleum and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations.


This is me eating lunch back at Istanbul Teknik. Looks like this meal today is yoghurt soup (gross), schnitzel (with fries), pilav, and kavun (melon).

This next week orientation continues at Bilkent, and our group also starts our own Turkish class and our core class on Turkey.

Here's me and Kelly, who also goes to Grinnell, eating ice cream. Turkish ice cream is very thick, so that they don't do round scoops, they just use a thing more like a shovel to get a flat chunk of ice cream. It's very good, anyway. I'm eating chocolate and banana in this picture.

Of course, they have lots of other ice creams too. They sell cartons in the grocery store, and lots of ice cream bars and stuff sold everywhere.