Green Bursa, and end of tour

How can it be that we are ending our Rotary tour tomorrow?  The month has flown by, and when our biggest problems have tended to be such things as finding stamps for postcards, coping with unfamiliar Turkish keyboards, and cramming our ever increasing luggage into minivans, you might get the idea that it’s been a great trip.

 Bursa is indeed a green city:  trees all over the place.  Today we saw a couple of very old mosques:  the newer one was 600 years old.  We also saw a 600 year old maple tree!  Really:  I’m not making this up.  The thing was the biggest tree I’ve ever seen.  We drank tea and ate fresh mulberries, cherries, and strawberries underneath its massive branches.

Tomorrow will be our farewell dinner at Rotary, since the next morning we will be leaving the Rotary district (Istanbul is in a different one).  As Jenda noted, we’ll catch a ferry across to Istanbul in the morning and then take a whirlwind walking tour of historic Istanbul in the afternoon.     More time in Istanbul would have been nice, but it will have to wait for the next visit.  And as we prepare to leave, our attitudes are definitely tending toward the ‘when I come back’ variety.  In a month we’ve barely been introduced to this country, and we all want to explore it further,  as well as continue to make new friends with some of the most hospitable people in the world.

– Dick