Update from Izmir

Last night I took an overnight bus to Izmir (in a suit and tie, no less) to observe a sermon committee meeting today.  I’ve interviewed the mufti and after lunch will be back for the meeting.  Tonight I fly back to Istanbul in order to make my Wednesday flight to the U.S. 

 Everything’s on track, but the last few days have been stressful because my laptop’s power adaptor burned up (my friends on Facebook may have noticed I was struggling with it).  I’ve had no Internet and I haven’t been able to run Stata for a paper I’m trying to finish up.  I’m really hoping that the Apple geniuses in NY will see fit to replace the adaptor so I can get up and running again (without shelling out $80 for a replacement).

 While I’d been planning to attend the SSSR meeting in Florida, funding didn’t work out and there’s a really promising conference on Islam in Turkey taking place at the same time at Columbia that I’ve opted to attend.  I’ll also be around Princeton for a few days before coming back to Istanbul, so I hope to see some of you there!