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Anadolu Medical Center<\/strong> is a new-ish hospital (five years old) out in the far suburbs of Istanbul. It’s so far out in the burbs that it’s basically the countryside. They are working hard to attract an international clientele. It is a half-mile off the Sea of Marmara, my new favorite place, and every room and pretty much every window has a fantastic view out over the hills and islands and water.\u00a0 It the morning with the sun just right one can see snow on the mountains to the southeast.<\/p>\n Got this cool little map from Wikipedia.<\/p>\n There is an office here – the International Services<\/b> section – whose function is to attract people like me. They do get a few Americans, but most of the clientele comes from around the Black Sea – Romanians, Bulgarians etc. Also Azerbaijanis and a smattering of\u00a0 Arabs.\u00a0 Right now the halls are alive with the sound of a bunch of cute little Iraqi Kurdish kids who are getting sponsored heart repairs from some international agency. The pride of the hospital (other than Dr Cicek :) is the Oncology Department (cancer) that attracts a lot of Brits for some state-of-the-art procedure they don’t even have in Britain.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s pretty clear that they haven’t had that many Americans come over by themselves and do what I’m doing. I guess the Americans mostly go to India because … what where all the other Americans go.\u00a0 With my usual perversity I ended up making the out-of-the-mainstream choice, and I’m glad I did.<\/span><\/p>\n It turns out that the people I dealt with in America – WorldMedAssist and Janet – basically just interfaced with the International Services office to get me here, which I could’ve done directly of I had known then what I know now. But I would have never heard of this place without them, so they deserve whatever finder’s fee that was factored into my $1,800.<\/p>\n Anyway, Asli, the very nice woman who runs International Services has been super-kind to me. She decided to treat me to a day on the town on the day between pre-op day and operation day, which was just wonderful! So on Saturday morning, good ole Erhan the driver picked me up at my room around 9 AM, and by a mere 11:30 we had satisfied all the hospital red tape and had escaped the bubble!<\/p>\n We started out doing official touristy things, but thankfully we realized that neither one of us was particularly into that, so we just instead cruised around pretty parts of the city and hung out, which is what I do BEST!<\/p>\n I have a very nice room. Not quite as nice as pictured on the website, but pretty darned nice. I have my own bathroom and shower, and one of those fully articulated beds that they can adjust any which way. There is a plug close enough that I can use my European adapter and plug in the laptop in bed.<\/p>\n I have a big windo that faces west, looking over some kind of cultivated fields and beyond the fields low hills where one day there were tanks driving around!<\/p>\n The oddest is the Georgian channel, they have some of the usual game shows and talk shows, but mostly it’s angry people yelling at each other, marches on the street where the drivers yell at the people, and folks march up to buildings carefully holding their containers of eggs and throw eggs at the buildings.\u00a0 Political unrest indeed.<\/p>\n NBA is strange experience, it’s the TNT feed with the sound turned down and a coupla overweight Turkish sports nerds yakking about the game as they sit in a studio in Istanbul and watch the feed with you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Saturday May 23 (still working on the travelogue part of this below) Anadolu Medical Center is a new-ish hospital (five years old) out in the far suburbs of Istanbul. It’s so far out in the burbs that it’s basically the … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kt_blocks_editor_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Sea](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/7\/70\/Sea_of_Marmara_map.png\" "\\"Sea")
<\/a>Geography digression<\/h3>\n
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The Hospital<\/h3>\n
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\nI was also starting to feel like the Hobbits, when they are talking about “second breakfast<\/strong>” and “elevensies<\/strong>“.\u00a0 As we know, hobbits are appreciators of fine lifestyles.<\/li>\nSunday, May 24<\/h5>\n
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