Look, it's a fancy chicken, in the middle of the street! I felt bad for her - it was so cold, and she's one of those skinny sub-tropical sorts of chicken.



You might have to enlarge this to see it - one of the jillions of stray cats had clearly hit paydirt, in the form of the open bucket of kitty food on the steps of this pet store:



I went for a walk along the shore on the sea of Marmara side of the golden horn, today, and there was quite a line of ships waiting to go through the Bosporus. Probably none of them had been able to procure cattle yet, and so were unable to pass through the cattle-bearing strait.



I mentioned earlier that almost nothing of Byzantium or Constantinople (which reminds me that today I heard, blaring from a purveyor of belogoed spandex, a Turkish cover of Istanbul to Constantinople, or whatever that song by They Might Be Giants is actually called) is incorporated into Istanbul. This, for instance, is what's left of the hippodrome: