I’m up by 5:30am and stand on the balcony, listening to the morning prayers from the mosques on the other side, the Asian side of the Bosperus river. Then swimming the hotel’s pool from 7:00am until 7:45am. Breakfast with Jon at 8AM.

Later we get a guided tour of the wonderous Suleyman Mosque, then a visit of the incredible, ancient, underground water-storage-system, and the Topkapi Palace.

I start thinking of the programming of a people, which is basically a country’s Constitution. In Europe the oldest son would almost always inherit the throne, and he was often not the most talented ruler of the king’s children. The Ottoman empire didn’t have a rule like that. Any child of the Sultan could inherit the throne and sometimes a son would kill 9 others to inherit the throne and become Sultan himself. The programming: Only the fiercest survive. And many didn’t survive for long, because the average rule of a Sultan was only 10-15 years. The result of this was, that the empire was very aggressive and expanded to a rule three times the size
of the USA.

Our, democratically elected, President has only 4 years to steer the country in a direction. That’s a brief time. And because of that we all want to see instant results all the time. We don’t build places of prayer that take 350 years to complete, we don’t build Monuments to our society that take hundreds of years to finish. Instead we complain when our internet access is less that 33.6k, or we have to wait half an hour for a meal. We have no long-term vision.

In the evening our hosts have arranged a private ferry across the Bosphorus to a dinner in Fish restaurant in Asia. The fresh fish is brought to the table and shown and we pick which fish we would like and get it prepared to order. After dinner we go to a nightclub. They are playing our music, from the album “Borrasca”, and we think it is a set-up, but our hosts assure us the nightclub plays our music all the time. After less than an hour at the club the music becomes unbearably loud and we beg to leave.