in northern Minnesota, on a lake near Callaway at a strange place called Maplelag Resort with 25 indigenous nation rebuilders…held in a landscape that is turning red as the maples and the oaks show their colours., and reflecting blue in the northern lakes, water pooled on beds of granite, the oldest skin of mother earth…rocks 3 billion years old at our feet and fall coming in…

Istanbul is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, and it’s not surprising why. The city holds so much history of importance to both Europe and Asia that people come from all over to touch it and see it. Although there are lots of Europeans and some North Americans wandering around the Sultanahmet district where we are staying, there are also lots of tourists from Central Asia and Turkey itself visiting during Ramadan. So of course staying in the tourist district it’s hard sometimes to glimpse the important things to local people, but two stood out yesterday.

This is the first time I have been in a country with a significant Muslim population during Ramadan. Of course during the daily fasting, that makes it easy to get a restaurant seat, although it means there is a lot less street food for sale. But yesterday as sunset approached, hundreds of families began to gather outside the Blue Mosque with picnic baskets,or table stoves, huge tea pots and containers full of flat bread and fruit. Everything was laid out and waiting for sunset. We decided to watch as the moment approached when the acting would begin. It was beautiful. There was a palpable sense of anticipation and as the daylight waned, the energy increased. Having avoided eating all day, people started cracking open containers, getting seats in nearby restaurants and the buzz increased. Street vendors appeared and we bought a watermelon to eat while we watched. I fact the moment was so powerful, it felt hard to actually eat anything until everyone else did, such was the field of anticipation.

And then the call came out from the minarets which towered over the scene and every began to eat at once. In a nearby restaurant plates of food hit the table all at the same time, and the fast was broken. It was incredibly moving to be among thousands of people who were eating together, so grateful to finally be able to get some nourishment after a long hot day. A sense of togetherness and bubbling joy lit up the Hippodrome and the little parks around the Mosque. A rain storm shortly opened up and even that failed to dissuade many from just sitting with each other, eating and laughing and sharing.

We fled to a restaurant to escape the rain and sat for a while watching people come and go until we realized that his was the evening of the Turkish Suoer Cup between Galatasaray and Fenerbahce, the two biggest teams in Turkish football. This is one of the most intense sports rivalries in the world, and as evidenced by the number of Galatasaray shirts we saw in the crowds during the day, we knew which territory we were in. Galatasaray took an early lead in the match on a goal that you hear acknowledged in the bars and restaurants around us. Everyone was tuned in on radios and by catching glimpses as they could from TVs. We walked back to our hotel to watch the match, at one point passing a car full of six or seven men, all crammed in trying to stay dry and listening on the radio. The game was vicious and dirty and exciting with fights in the terraces and at one point the referee, who was way out of his depth, even considered calling it off. Fireworks and other missiles were being thrown at players, freight train tackles came in, smoke flares were sparked up for each of the five goals, and in the end, after a Galatasaray sending off and despite Fenerbahce hitting a cross bar in time added on top of injury time, Galatasaray won 3-2.

I live in a tourist town myself, so I know how it is when there are two things going on at the same time – the world the visitors see and the world you live in despite them. It was cool to catch a glimpse of real life of local ritual and passion yesterday even as we borrowed their city for our travels.

I think it’s fair to say that the expression “I’m writing from a rooftop terrace in the old part of Istanbul” has a certain romantic appeal to it.

And this is where I am, having travelled on a short red eye flight from Copenhagen last night, to arrive with my family in a lovely hotel in the centre of Istanbul’s most ancient downtown, in the shadow of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, and with the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara in front of me. It’s a quiet Sunday morning, and the family are all sleeping. We’ve started our two week holiday here together with a nap, a little breakfast and a cursory flip through some guidebook and wikipedia pages.

We’re on a one month European voyage. Our first leg was in Jutland in Denmark, spending six days with our dear friends Monica Nissen and Toke Moeller at their place in the lake district of central Jutland. On Friday Toke and I headed out to the west coast of Denmark, to a remote old hunting lodge near Tarm to work a little with key voices from The Natural Step International and the MSLS program in Karlskrona. It was good work and always fun jamming with Toke and good friends. Cool to see a countryside that reminds me so much of southern Ontario – rolling hills, woods and streams, farm fields and windmills. The whole landscape was changed by Danish farmers (and convict labour) starting at the end of the 19th century. It was previously heath lands and peat bogs, but in a remarkable national project following a war with Germany in the 1860s the whole countryside was repurposed for agrarian purposes and planted with beech and evergreen forest. Now it is mostly fields of corn and wheat and sugar beats and potatoes, with small patches of heath preserved where we gathered chanterelles and other forest delicacies.

Last night we left the open sandwich breakfasts and delightfully robust cheeses of Denmark for the sour yoghurt, strong coffee fresh fruit and olives of Turkey. We’re ensconced here in the big city for a few days and then heading to Capadoccia and the south coast for sightseeing, visiting sacred sites and chilling on the ocean. Our trip will end at a learning village event in Slovenia hosted by the Art of Hosting worldwide community. There may be a little harvest along the way, touch ins and reflections. But mostly I’m taking it easy, reading rather than writing, sitting rather than walking, sleeping rather than eating.

Feels good.

It sometimes boggles my mind, how easy it actually is to cross an entire continent.

Yesterday I woke up at 6am in the Beaver Valley, on the shores of Georgian Bay in Ontario where a beautiful crisp spring day greeted me.  I set off to Toronto, now knowing what condistions the roasd were in on the high country between Lake Huron and Lake Ontario.  In between thos Great Lakes is the Niagara Escarpment and the oak Ridges Moraine, two incredible heights of land that received a lat winter beating this week from a cold front that scoured the whole area.

All was well with me though, on a good drive along Highway 26 which hugs to Bay from Thornbury to Collingwood and on to Wasaga Beach and Stayner.  From there the road turns south becoming Airport Road and takes a bee line across the rolling countryside, up and down the esacarpment, and over the 700 foot high folds of glacial till that are now covered with farmland, pine forest and maple woods.  For two hours, the bright sun, spring bird song and beautiful southern Onatrio countryside fill my senses.

Once through Caledon, the country changes radically.  The land flattens out and all around are the sprawling McMansion suburbs that litter the edge of Toronto.  Along Airport Road, whole sections of farmland have been converted to a monoculture of boring, treeless housing.  Nothing is human scale.  A small sidewalk is hardly ever used and the four lanes of road feeds commuters to the city and large transport trucks to the distribution centres, warehouses and factories of Malton and the other northwestern suburbs.  A large Sikh community lives near the airport, and so the few commercial plazas in the area are devoted to saris, curries and Bollywood video rentals.  Here and there, old Victorian famhouses stand surrounded by all of this development, a last echo of the previous wave of immigrants that lived there.

I dropped my rental car, boarded a plane for Vancouver and instantly fell asleep.  I woke up over Kelowna just in time for our descent into Vancouver.  The coast was grey and cold and pouring rain.  Grabbed my bag, jumped on teh Canada Line, stopped long enough at Granville and Georgia Streets for a La Brasserie Chicken Sandwich and then caught the Express bus to Horseshoe Bay.  The 330pm ferry delivered me back to Bowen Island.

It is odd standing on the deck of a ferry crossing a small channel in the Pacific Ocean having woken up a mere 12 hours earlier some 4300 kms away.  This is a journey that until the last century would have taken years of my life.  Instead, I walk off the ferry, shaking a little of the remaining Ontario rain from my suitcase, home before my kids arrive back from school.

Magic.