HEADING FOR HOME... Tomorrow, Friday, we will leave Istanbul at noon and arrive in San Diego around 9:30 p.m. the same day... but going with the sun, we will travel for around 20 hours.

From where I sit on the eleventh floor of the Istanbul Intercontinental Hotel I see at least a dozen large bright red Turkish flags flying proudly over this city of thirteen million people. The Turkish people have good reason to be proud of their country... and hopeful. Margaret and I walked at least three, perhaps as many as five miles today; and we found the people and their city to be invariably friendly and clean. We followed a bunch of students getting off a ferry arriving from the Asian side of the city. Carrying backpacks and notebooks, they hurried the way students do. They walked up winding streets to the University at a top of a hill not far from our hotel. The scene on campus was exactly what happens in the middle of the day at American universities. The young people we saw there and their counterparts all over the world are our hope for the future of this planet. Even with the mess my generation and the one following mine are leaving for them to clean up, I must continue to believe people may someday get it right.

The photographs today show Istanbul as it is today, not the famous monuments from centuries past. The most curious shop in Istanbul surely is an Islamic Country’s version of Victoria’s Secret. It’s called Laura Baresse. I can’t help but believe the guy who came up with that name couldn’t bring himself to call it Laura Bare Ass.