In my last posting, I promised to try to blog every day. HA! Clearly, I do not have the required discipline to be an online journalist. So much happens here every 24 hours, I can write as fast as it all comes in. I first discovered this time-dilation phenomenon when my wonderful,late father-in-law would take me fishing.

We would get into the water a few hours after my prefered bedtime and we would sometimes fish from six am to ten. When we got back, I felt as though I had been away from the house for days. I would bore my wife with stoires of every nesting osprey, every escaped sunfish, every stealthy amphibian and every successful cast I had experienced, seen or heard.

Likewise, here in the big city, every tramvay journey, every auto ferry ride and every mangled, pidgin conversation I have with a tourist or local expands in my imagination to a grand adventure.

Maybe if I start with today and work backward, I might get a handle on the blogosphere?

It is Sunday and I promised myself that I would cross the Halic (Golden Horn) to Beyoglu and find a Christian Church to attend. I've been to Moslem services with hundreds of worshippers praying as one person and I needed to know if other religions were thriving, surpressed, clandestine or tolerated.

Thre's a list of religious institutions in the Seres Hotel "Istanbul Forever" guest magazine. There were 14 churches, four synagogs, five palaces and I kept losing count of the number of mosques.

Picking the largest, closest cathedral from the choices, I memorized "Sent Antoine Kilisi Katolic nerede var mi?", I sped to Taxim on the Katabas tramvay and funicular and spent half an hour repeating the "Where is the St. Antoine Catholic Church?" phrase to every policeman I met.

There were dozens of officers and they were all very polite and helpful. I think refering to each of them as "Effendi" didn't hurt.

I arrived just as services were beginning. The two hundred or so congregants were roughly 45% Asian (Filipino, Malay, Indian and Chinese) 50% African, including 8 of the nine priests, and very few Westerners with light skin.

The church managed to be huge, magnificent, opulent and completely hidden from the main street, Istiklal Caddesi. Churches, like gays, are tolerated as long as they keep an extremely low profile on the outside.

Several folks were especially friendly to me, inviting me to next Sunday's African Mass. Francis and Ustus explained that they had moved here from Lagos, Nigeria a decade ago and they did not regret the decision.

I see this posting is already too long. I'll tell you about the Union Church of Istanbul (Protestant) in the next chapter.

Ken