Hello again, Blogonauts! Istanbul is indeed lovely, and among its charms are the various mosques and minarettes of the old city. Unfortunately, sometimes jarringly, from these minarettes comes a pre-dawn Arabic alarm clock. At precisely 5:36 AM, the loudspeakers on the nearby Blue Mosque sprang into surprisingly sonorous action as the muezzin urged the millions of Muslims within earshot to kneel for a bit and say a few ritualized words to Allah. Sleep, for the rest of us, was a casualty of auditory shrapnel.  This is the Ezan (or in anglicized Arabic, Adhan), the 5-times daily exhortative eruptions from atop the minarets. The practice is a part of daily life in Muslim societies. The Turks have even written the Ezan into their national anthem to warn heathen from trying to remove it. Turks value their language so intensely that the government tried in the mid-20th century to replace the Arabic versions of the Ezan with a Turkish one. The more conservative religious parties, however, quashed that idea after only 18 years. So now all the calls to prayer pouring from the Minarets are in Arabic, a language spoken by less than 2% of the Turks. Go figure. That's all for this early moment. Blog to you later!