Why did Terry not post a VIWHUI newsletter last week?

I apologise for my absence, again, but I went to Turkey for a vacation. I discovered we had won—I saw a league table in an Istanbul newspaper, so saw we had gained three points, although I did not know the score—while having a coffee in the district of Beyuğlo. I went to Istanbul for two days. It is wonderful, but after seeing a few A List sights—Blue Mosque; Haghia Sofya, etc.—I ran from the Topkapi Palace, so large are the shuffling groups standing behind guides clutching umbrellas, and discovered outlying districts such as Fener, Balat and Edirnekapi, the former of which we ate in a first-story restaurant where locals bought us raki and invited us to a sing-along with clarinet, and the latter in which we discovered a shop selling honey on the comb. Then we flew to Southern Anatolia, to the small city of Gaziantep, which translates as “Warrior Pistachio” and took a bus the next day to Şanlıurfa (“Glorious”), which was even better. This was a town of Kurds all wearing violet headscarves and offering small cups of tea in tulip-shaped glass every time we even neared them. Hospitality in this region is amazing, and I was not rude enough to wonder how all this tea was paid for. It goes like this: “Çay?” That is, chai—tea. And when you say, yes, please, tea is called for and arrives. The bringer of the tea disappears, and at no time is money transferred. It was all mysterious and wonderful. Maybe there is a monthly fee for unlimited tea? Then we headed south to Harran, which claims to be the oldest, continuously inhabited place in the world, where Abraham and Job once walked. Now it has Harran Culture House I and Harran Culture House II, beehive-shaped houses, a ruined, tall minaret, camels, shepherds, hoopoes, owls and calm. We drove on stony roads to the border with Syria (we did not have a visa so could not cross) and up to Mardin, where we were invited into a house by the elderly women who owned it, after she saw us admire her door. From her roof all of Mesopotamia was unfurled in front of us. We crossed the Euphrates and dragged our hands through the Tigres. Then we headed north through Batman (who could resist), put the car on a ferry and drove to the majestic mountaintop statues of Nemrut Daği, which were built by Antiochius approximately 2.000 years ago.