More of this beautiful city

We had our first practice with coaches this past Sunday. The practice went very well minus the fact that it was freezing cold. We are still missing some key people at practice but we are looking a lot better. I am really excited for this weekend. We are going to Antalya, Turkey this weekend for a tournament. This is the first football tournament I have ever heard of, but it I am excited to see the city. The pictures of Antalya I have seen are beautiful and I can't wait to see if the place lives up to the hype. The only bad thing is the 15 hour bus ride that we have. We leave Friday night and drive all night, play Saturday and Sunday, and then drive all night Sunday night to get back to Istanbul. It should be a long, interesting, and fun weekend. We practiced Tuesday night as well and we had a great time. I am hating not playing but I am really loving helping with the o-line. The guys have a pretty solid base and I think some of the little things that I can help teach them will really help. The weather was much better the other night and I am hoping it holds out for practice tomorrow night.

Yesterday we went to visit the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (The patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church). It was built a really long time ago and there is a church on the grounds that has been the patriarchal church since 1601. It was really cool and really pretty. We also saw some ruins of what used to be   the city walls. These were probably my favorite thing that I have seen so far. It was just incredible to stand next to these ancient walls that the city has just grown up around. I am led to believe that some portions of these walls date back to when Istanbul was ancient Byzantium. This means that those portions are well over 2000 years old. Many more sections of the wall date back to the Roman empire. I had an incredible sense of history looking at those walls and knowing that at one point an army once stood on the same ground, frustrated by these formidable walls that are now dwarfed by skyscrapers. It was an awesome day of history, maybe the coolest day yet.


These two pictures are from our practice field. The first is the Black Sea and the second is the University that we practice at, Koc University (pronounced "coach").

These two are two of the many pictures I took of the ruins of the city walls

The above picture is a Bulgarian Orthodox Church. It is all cast iron with a steel frame. It was built in Austria and shipped to   Istanbul. The whole church is held together with nuts, bolts, and welds.
The below pictures are both outside and inside the Church of St. George, which has been the patriarchal church for the Greek Orthodox Church since1601.

These last few pictures are views of the ground for the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In all of them you can see the Golden Horn (the body of water) in the back ground.