Photo post: A walk at dawn

As usual, I was up at dawn this morning, and I took a short walk, not forgetting the importance of having the camera with me at all times. There were just a couple of things I saw that I thought exemplified the atmosphere… and I got decent photos of both.

According to my magical Turkish reading skills, this says something along the lines of “road expropriation border.” I don’t even understand what that means in English. According to my dictionary, the word istimlak (“expropriation”) is primarily a law term, so that might explain why I don’t get the overall meaning. On the other hand, it’s also very possible that there’s a simpler translation from the Turkish and I’ve just done it wrong and/or made things more difficult than they actually are (I do that a lot). In any case, the lonely, rusting sign amongst the long grass at the end of a country road said a lot about how I was feeling this morning, even without considering the words on the sign.

You wouldn’t believe how often I run across stray roses just growing in the middle of nowhere. This fine specimen looked fantastic standing all by itself in the middle of a field, and it smelled heavenly. I don’t know if Turks scatter rose seeds haphazardly or if they just grow wild or what, but I come across random roses quite frequently. It has a particular poignancy for me, because my father used to have a rose garden, one which he took over from my grandmother, so roses (especially strongly scented ones) hold a lot of bittersweet childhood nostalgia for me. Again, this fit in perfectly with the mood of my morning.

I hope your morning was amazing.