Just back from ten days in Istanbul, which is near to being the cat
capital of the planet.
Jack - did you take any PICTURES?? I want to see!!

Nope. I don't have a digital camera (they just don't work for the
sort of pictures I take, too slow to operate); quality film and
processing is too hard to find in Turkey; and the current climate of
official paranoia means any film I shot could be vandalized by x-ray-
wielding "security" thugs. So I've given up travel photography


- just south of the top of the Tunel is the Galata Sufi centre.
This has an extended family of cats guarding the saints' tombs
Sufis have saints?

That's the usual word Sufis writing in English use. Arabic and
Turkish have words for different categories of them, much like
categorizations you implicitly get in Christianity as well, but
let's keep it simple.


: seeing so many homeless cats, even if they are relatively healthy,
: would make me very, very sad.
: They may lead a relatively decent life (enough food, etc.) but you
: know they don't have a human to love and spoil them.

The ones I was talking about attach themselves to workplaces rather
than houses. Turkish workers can put in very long hours, so they
probably get more human contact than they would left to themselves
all day in a commuter's empty house. There are homecats as well,
of course.


: Istanbul is, unfortunately, a city in the third world

No more so than New York. Its wealthy people are not much less
wealthy than the American rich, and its poor are certainly not as
badly off as America's poorest. No way is a place like Heybeliada
"third world" - by any imaginable standard its quality of life is
far higher than the Scottish village I live in (unless you count
having a car as significant, the zoning laws absolutely ban them).
I'd swap in a minute if I could afford it.

============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
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