racist dessert

Today I went for a walk to where I hoped I would find some of the native horticulture of the Istanbul isthmus (I have not seen more than a few scraggily trees in small parks) by hiking to where google Earth told me there would be some green space. It turns out the whole thing was encircled with 10 foot high concrete walls and razor wire. It was a military shooting range, surrounded by all sides by soviet block looking housing. It covered the entire side of a mountain for about a mile uphill. I would say the whole base was several square miles large, you could see all the way to the other side, where it was completely surrounded by Asian istanbul. I followed it to where I could see a large road intersected it and hoped to get one of the scenic metropolis panoramas that I live for. By the time I made it up the sun was getting close to setting, and most of the city was hazy. BUT, though there was apocolyptic wasteland below me (the military installation (complete with empty bunkers and scrappy silent dogs who followed me along the length of the fence in eery silence) , just on the other side of the road was pristine anatolian forest. I couldn't get to it (more razor wire) but just walking along the road was peaceful, high up in the mountains above the city, peeking between the trees. A man stopped in his car to give me a ride, as I was in a pretty bizarre place to be walking, he had on a skull cap and a muslimy beard, I politely refused with the hand gestures of my hands walking and the thumbs-up sign, and hiked back down the hill to içerenköy. On the way back I saw some crazy graffiti on the cement wall that I hadn't seen in my huffing and puffing on the way up. one said : böyle yaşamak istemiyorum (i dont want to live like this) and another one that said devrimci gençlik (revolutionary youth), which, considering the very spooky madmax setting, made it slightly more believeable than any angsty I-use-the-anarchy-symbol-when-I-write-my-A's type scribbling I've seen before. I got lost for a little while on the way back, disoriented by the identical mosques with the identical maghreb izzan, but once I bought those charming jim-crow oreo's I found my way home. For any of you wondering (queue is there anybody out there by pink floyd) , here is what home looks like: