Skip to main content

A week in Istanbul

Ömer Aşık had a decent season in Houston Rockets and my wife's best friend is getting married in Turkey. Therefore Yilin, my wife and I decided to spend a week in Istanbul, which turned out to be the most amazing and memorable vacation we ever had.

Way too many things to do

If I ever going to visit Istanbul again, I would definitely reserve at least a month. There are way too many interesting things to do in Istanbul for a week-long vacation.


Heaven of food

Restaurants cover every inch of the old town. I wonder if people here ever need to cook at home. The restaurants look good and cheap. Then later we asked a Turkish friend if she cooks, she said not really since restaurants are good and cheap.

Being a Chinese picky eater, I felt dubious about the quality of food from these "good and cheap" restaurants. Finally we had chance to have a bite, from which point we couldn't stop. If I were born in Turkey, I would be a happy Turkish programmer who never cooks.




Kind, kid-loving people

It's a shame how much U.S. defames Muslim for all the time. By far Turkish people are the kindest people I've met. Every time my car stops and opens window, people walk to me and ask if I need help. Every 5, 10 minutes Yilin walks on a street, people hug, kiss her, take photo with her or give her gifts. During the stay Yilin received free gifts from random people every single day.


Here's another story about how nice Turkish people are. We were walking down a street with a dozen restaurants where people sell food aggressively. To pass through the area, we told a guy that we just finished lunch, maybe we could come back for dinner later. The person was nice enough and gave us his card, saying he would gave 15% discount if we back. We did back to the area again at dinner time and this time a different man came to us to sell food. We showed him the card and said someone promised a 15% discount. What surprised me was, instead of convincing me how good his food is or giving me a price match, this man took us to the address on the card and said "have a good lunch". Can this happen in U.S. or China? Hard to imagine.



Jaw dropping wedding ceremony

My friend's wedding ceremony took place in Sait Halim Pasa Yalisi. For people who don't know what it is, like myself, it's a big waterfront house with about 20 rooms, a separated 6000-squarefoot ball room and granite lions at gate. Big shots used to live here, obviously. Now it's mostly for events like wedding ceremony. The level of luxurity here is absolutely jaw-dropping. Guests dressed up in the way I've only seen in Oscar, not in Golden Globe. Again, Turkish strangers showed great hospitality to me, the only person in jeans, the only yellow family in ceremony.

The ceremony was about 6 hour long, during which bride and broom spoke, ate and danced all the time until midnight. Only marathon runners have competency to do what they did. I kept telling my self, getting married is for young people.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Publish Maven site with Amazon S3 and CloudFront

Amazon S3 now supports static website hosting . As a 10 years Maven user, I wonder how easy it is to deploy Maven generated site to Amazon S3 and let the rock-solid storage provider to host my project websites. There are several existing s3 wagon providers , which all seem to have the same problem, not supporting directory copy. This is understandable since before S3 new website hosting feature, I guess people mostly expect to deploy artifacts rather than website to S3. So my first task is to write an AWS S3 wagon that supports directory copy. With AWS Java SDK , task becomes as simple as one single class . I made my S3 wagon available in Maven central repository at org.cyclopsgroup:awss3-maven-wagon:0.1 . The source code is hosted in github:jiaqi/cym2/awss3 . The next thing is to create an S3 bucket in console . To avoid trouble, bucket name is set to the future website domain name according to this discussion . Website feature needs to be explicitly enabled. I also created an...
5 comments
Read more

Customize IdGenerator in JPA, gap between Hibernate and JPA annotations

JPA annotation is like a subset of Hibernate annotation, this means people will find something available in Hibernate missing in JPA. One of the important missing features in JPA is customized ID generator. JPA doesn't provide an approach for developer to plug in their own IdGenerator. For example, if you want the primary key of a table to be BigInteger coming from sequence, JPA will be out of solution. Assume you don't mind the mixture of Hibernate and JPA Annotation and your JPA provider is Hibernate, which is mostly the case, a solution before JPA starts introducing new Annotation is, to replace JPA @SequenceGenerator with Hibernate @GenericGenerator. Now, let the code talk. /** * Ordinary JPA sequence. * If the Long is changed into BigInteger, * there will be runtime error complaining about the type of primary key */ @Id @Column(name = "id", precision = 12) @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.SEQUENCE, generator = "XyzIdGenerator") @SequenceGe...
4 comments
Read more

1300ms to 160ms, tune Spring/Hibernate on slow MySQL

I write this article to remember the different behaviour various JDBC connection pool displays when they work with slow JDBC connection(to MySQL database, in this case). It starts with a typical Java application on Spring, Hibernate, Jetty, ApacheCXF and MySQL like following code. Version 1: without correct pooling //... service code @Transactional(isolation=Isolation.READ_COMMITTED) public void foo() { //... do something with database } //... connection pool configuration ... class = "com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlConnectionPoolDataSource"; url = "jdbc:mysql://mysql.far-far-away.com/mysystem"; user = ... //... transaction management configuration in spring ... <tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="transactionManager" order="100" /> <bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTransactionManager"> <property name="sessionFactory" ref="mySessionFact...
2 comments
Read more