November 18th 2013
Turkey Trip of a life time. Turkey Today. 4 of 8
Turkey today is a modern secular mix of Christianity and Islam. 
You hear the call to prayer five times a day, but that plus the mosques are often the only reminder that this is an Islamic country. Friday is the holy day, so the bars stay open longer, while some places close on Sunday. The women look like they are in Paris and the men are all business ( No beards, fezes ).
The President does not have a majority so like Harper he has had to look for issues to maybe get a majority. He is appealing to the simpler country folk that the country has lost its Islamic roots and needs to retrench. Lots of talk and little change (well in some places you can no longer buy beer at gas stations).
The urban Turk is all over being European, worldly and they are having nothing to do with this talk, being more interested in the local soccer scores. The debates stay in the newspaper and the parliament, not on the streets- it would be bad for business. The biggest incident in years was local folks in Istanbul getting upset that developer was going to cut some trees down. (We saw more action from Greenpeace in BC over the years) Sure Syria is a neighbour. But the impact on your visit to Turkey is like the impact riots in Detroit would have on Toronto. You will stay in four or five star hotels (We were in Hilton hotels , the general manager in Izmir is a Canadian so he treated the 14 of us to an amazing really fresh seafood dinner, the local wine was really good, – I kind of lost track of the courses, once I started on the Raki shots – its like Ouzo yumm).) 
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