I thought my flight was at 10:00 PM, but I was wrong. I guess my brain saw the actual flight time and tried to translate it into something considerably more reasonable. The flight actually leaves at 11:35 PM. The flight time is 1 hour, 45 minutes. And then it’s another 1 ½ - 2 hours to Gümüshane. So we’ll get there at like 3:00 AM, which seems a little insane to me. Thankfully we don’t start teaching the following day – now that would be madness!
The people running the hostel have been very generous with their space. I explained that my flight was very late at night and that I didn’t feel like going around town today, so they’ve allowed me to stay in the lounge and store my luggage until I’m ready to leave. It’s either stay here in the hostel, go sit in the airport or exhaust myself wandering around the city and also possibly getting lost. It takes like 2 hours to get to the airport by public transport and then I’m going to have to haggle with them over my bag, which I’m quite sure is way over weight.
=-=
I spent the better part of the afternoon bumming around the hostel lounge talking to my mom on Facebook. I taught her how to make emoticons! I took the tram and the metro to the airport, and I’d swear it took less time than the first time even though I had to make an extra switch on the way. I was probably so exhausted on the way in that it just seemed like an eternity, that’s all.
I’m departing from the domestic terminal for my flight to Trabzon. It’s…uh…well, less nice than the international terminal. There’s also no free WiFi. The security seemed incredibly reasonable compared to ours – I didn’t have to take anything out but my laptop and I got to keep my shoes on. When I stepped up to the Turkish Airlines counter, the lady flashed me a big smile! She asked where I was going, gave me my choice of seating and then asked about luggage. I said, “One piece…unh…it’s…quite heavy,” as I tried to lug it up onto the conveyer belt. The scale said 29 kg but she pushed a couple of buttons and suddenly it was 19.2 kg, 0.8 kg under the limit. Woot! That lady was made of win!
I grabbed a cheese sandwich (bad idea) and found that my anti-Coke campaign is being thwarted at every turn. Every café I went to didn’t have bottled water. Well, one had it but it was some outrageous price like 6 TL!
Sitting in the gate’s waiting area gave me an opportunity to observe another facet of Turkish transportation. I’ve seen how the Turkish people drive their cars (terrifying), operate their public transportation (also terrifying) and sail their boats (yes, terrifying). Sitting in a taksi as it careens through the streets of Turkey is…an experience. It reminded me of the boda boda motorcycles in Kampala that dart in and out of traffic, easily the most terrifying transportation encounter of my life. While taking the ferry in the Bosphorus and Sea of Marmara, I was convinced at no less than six points that we would either run into another ship or be rammed ourselves. And if you can believe it, the tram and metro drivers run them like they were taksis.
Air transportation is equally as amusing. The waiting area is pretty sparse before they make the first call for boarding. Then suddenly people rush headlong to security trying to get through. The first group of mad dashers crowds around the ticket counter shoving their tickets at the agent all at once. There is no line. The second group of people can’t be bothered to come yet, so they wait until the agent announces “last call” before they saunter through security and then run to the ticket counter. There were people boarding our plane 3 minutes before takeoff!
=-=
Whenever we arrived in Trabzon, we thought they’d lost our luggage. They made some announcement in Turkish that apparently said if you were coming from Istanbul as a domestic passenger then you should go to the domestic terminal. Thankfully our luggage was there waiting for us, as was a van with three jolly guys. They loaded our things up and off we sped to Gümüshane. It was 3:30 AM by the time we arrived, and I crashed in my room immediately. The call to prayer woke me up at 4:00 AM and I didn’t sleep as much as I thought I would. Still, it’s nice to finally be here!
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
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Days 3, 4 & 5: The Sights & Sounds of Istanbul
You can find my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/igiveuponhate/.
I’m somewhat divided about whether I love or hate Istanbul. There are 13 million people in the city, so that automatically makes it too big. It’s dirty and congested. People push and shove. If you’re anywhere near Sultanahmet (Old Istanbul) then you’re going to be pestered endlessly by carpet touts and every other jerk under the sun.
But then there are sides to the city that I love. You can have çay (tea) in any little café; there are historically significant and architecturally impressive buildings everywhere; the food is amazing; the city is alive and moving 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; and there are some quiet corners here and there where you can escape from the monstrous side of Istanbul.
When I returned from Edirne, I was wiped out. But I made arrangements to meet my university friend, Theresa, at 9:00 AM. It was so nice to see a friendly face! There were quite a few things in the city that she’d always liked to have done during her time in Turkey but was never able to, so I was more than happy to tag along to some lesser-known sites. The first thing we attempted was the Archaeological Museum but the admission was quite expensive, and we suspected once inside we’d run into something “typically Turkish”: Turkish museums love to charge you general admission and then charge you again for the best parts of the museum.
Afterward we decided to head to the Galata Bridge, which crosses the Golden Horn. The Golden Horn is like an estuary type body of water that breaks off from the Sea of Marmara and runs inland into the middle of European-side Istanbul. Along the way was a pretty impressive mosque but I declined to go inside. The Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya being exceptions, I always feel bad for going into mosques like a tourist. I know people don’t mind for the most part but it used to irritate me to no end when people would visit the Bahá'í House of Worship and go inside like tourists – talking loudly, taking photographs, using the flash, etc. – while I was trying to pray.
Next to Galata Bridge is an area called Eminönü where ferries depart for various points around Istanbul. It’s also home to these chintzy little boats where cooks fry up fresh fish and put them on sandwiches. There’s a little seating area on the pier because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to eat – the Golden Horn is a busy waterway, and the fish cooking boats rock like crazy! I’ll be honest and say I hate fish, so we moved on to take a peek at all the shops and restaurants that are under the bridge.
The bridge itself is hideous, but it’s a recent manifestation of a bridge crossing that’s been there…forever, I guess. The last one was preventing pollution from flowing out of the Golden Horn, I think, so they built the new one. For some reason, perhaps cost, the government didn’t see fit to make it attractive in any way whatsoever. I guess architectural appreciation died with the Ottoman Empire? Anyway, people fishing for these tiny fish line Galata Bridge the entire way across. We didn’t stick around to ask too many questions since…you know…it smelled like fish. Blech.
After that we headed to the Spice Market, which is also called the Egyptian Market. There was a disappointing lack of spice to be honest. There were some spice stalls, but the majority of it had been taken over by these ridiculous little tourist shops with all the chintzy crap being sold exclusively for tourists. That’s one thing I don’t care for in the city – there are too many shops selling the same kind of cheap junk for the same sorts of people. Frankly, I don’t know how they all manage to stay open! And the people running them can be kind of pushy. Too pushy, really.
Afterwards we headed over to the Taksim neighborhood, which is pretty upscale. There are a lot of shops and cafes, like a Heights/Hillcrest but urban style. We accidentally discovered a very beautiful Catholic church in the area, listened to a dulcimer player, stopped into a café for a bit of çay and fruit, shopped at a bookstore that actually had English language books, walked to the Galata Tower and stopped into another café for Turkish coffee. I learned how to “read” what’s left of the coffee, which is pretty fun. You take the saucer and place it over the top of the cup, then you flip it over and swirl it around in a circle, finally you set it down on the table with the saucer and wait for the top of the cup to cool. Then you remove it, leave the sediment on the saucer and give the cup to your companion. They look inside and tell you what they see – mine had a heart, geyser and volcano. I’m not entirely sure I want to know what that’s supposed to mean.
After Taksim we caught a ferry to the Asian side of Istanbul so that we could eat at a famous restaurant that was featured in The New Yorker, among other publications (including my guidebook). On the way, you pass this giant train station constructed by the Germans as a gift to the Ottoman Empire. For some reason they felt a train station built in German-style was an appropriate gift. I’m sure the Ottomans could have used money at the time. It’s like your grandma giving you socks and underwear instead of cash. Anyway, at the ferry landing the Asian side looks pretty…unimpressive. But once you wander inland a bit, it turns much nicer.
Theresa and I probably shouldn’t hang out –too- much because we seem to reinforce one another’s bad habits. At the restaurant, we went crazy ordering food! We spent too much money and ate too much food, but it was sooo worth it. We had a salad-type dish of marinated tomatoes; sausage stuffed into lamb’s intestines; stuffed grape leaves; bulgur wheat salad; a dish like Ghormeh Sabzi; sour cherries & meatballs; chickpeas & rice; hummus; kofte (a type of meat dish); spinach & yogurt salad; and an olive salad. Dessert was tea, a pistachio pastry, some kind of strange marinated whole walnut and what the wait staff described as “sauce” – a kind of marshmallow, gooey-like substance.
We wandered around the neighborhood for a bit taking pictures and then we went back to the waterfront to catch the sun setting over European Istanbul from a rooftop café. When our ferry landed back in Europe, we met one of Theresa’s Turkish friends, Hilal, and her friend, Burak. Hilal is a textile design student, and Burak is a graphic design student. They took us to an area of town called Ortaköy, which is apparently where the locals hang out late at night. We walked there from the ferry, and so we passed a number of palaces, the Four Seasons and a beautiful university along the way. The street was confined on both sides by tall walls but I still liked it – Istanbul is so lively at all hours of the day!
When we arrived in Ortaköy we walked around, observed some potato bars (you get a baked potato and select from a dozen different things to add to it) and finally settled down to have some çay together.
Burak told me he wants to be an illustrator and then he showed us a little comic book he drew in his sketchbook that’s him fighting zombies; it was very good! After experiencing Africa, where brilliant talent so often goes to waste, I was glad to see it was being cultivated in him. He said when he finishes with art school here, he wants to continue to study in England or Finland.
Hilal is studying the Ottoman language (it’s similar to modern Turkish except it uses Arabic script, which makes it a billion times more difficult) so she can understand their fashion techniques. She wants to combine Ottoman fashion with modern fashion, which I thought was amazing and ambitious. She seems pretty brilliant, so I have no doubt that she’s going to be successful. She seems like a very talented artist, and I have such an admiration for that since science has consumed by mind and kicked all the creativity out.
Both of them were somewhat shy with their English and self-conscious about it, but there weren’t any problems in communicating. I had a lot of fun hanging out with them, and I’m so glad I got to do something in Istanbul other than sight-seeing. I think I went to sleep around 2:00 AM that night. When I woke up in the morning, I realized I’m not 20 anymore. Something happens around 25. It’s like you hit a brick wall. If you try to live like you’re in your early twenties again, then you wake up feeling like you’ve been run over by something!
=-=
In the morning Hilal and Burak met Theresa and I for breakfast nearby in Sultanahmet, then we took the tram to the ferry. Theresa and I were going to Princes’ Island, and Hilal and Burak were going to hang out with a friend who was moving to the States the next day. We agreed to meet with them after we returned from the islands, which was supposed to be for dinner. But this is Turkey, so that went out the window.
The ferry took much longer than expected because it stopped at four other islands before going to the “Big Island,” Büyükada. The ferry terminal on the island was pretty impressive – it was built in the Ottoman style in 1899. We stopped in at a waterfront restaurant for lunch and paid a ridiculous price for calamari, the tomato salad thing and a shepherd’s salad. They tried to charge us for bread and water that they poured for us, as well as a “tax.” The man was getting quite belligerent about it and brought other receipts to show that they always charge for those things, as if ripping off other people made it okay to rip us off, too. There’s no such thing as a restaurant tax in Istanbul, you never pay for the bread and you pay for water only if you open it – not if they open and pour it for you when you sit down.
After we’d finished our meal and we were enjoying some çay and watermelon, we were joined by another American named Patricia. The poor thing. She comes scurrying over and in this longing voice says, “Are you Americans!?”. She asked if she could join us and we didn’t mind; on the one hand, I felt like she was cheapening her experiences by clustering up with other foreigners but then again no one likes to eat alone. We had some nice conversation with her before she went off to catch a ferry and we began to wander around the island.
There are no cars allowed on Büyükada, even though there are paved roads. The area near the waterfront is much like Istanbul, but when you move inland it instantly becomes a different place. The houses are historic, atmospheric and beautifully restored; the streets are quiet and tree-lined and the air is clean. It’s no wonder that many residents of Istanbul move to the island in the summer months in order to escape the city; I’d do it if I could afford it!
When Theresa and I stopped into a small art gallery, a little old Turkish lady comes up to us and starts talking to Theresa in a mixture of Turkish & German (Turman, if you will). It turns out she’s an artist and an author named Nur-Çin that lives on the island in the summer and in Istanbul in winter; she insisted that we come along with her to have çay. I won’t say this is a common occurrence, but the Turks are seriously friendly and hospitable. She took us to a beautiful little seaside café where we had çay and some biscuits she brought along. Theresa served admirably as translator and then she suddenly warned me, quietly, to slow down eating and drinking. If I finished, then I was going to get more. Sure enough, the next thing I know I’m having another cup of tea and more biscuits. She insisted that we take the biscuits with us and that she pay for our çay whenever we parted company. So sweet!
We wandered through the backstreets of the island for awhile and then headed back to the main waterfront area where we discovered a group of four musicians playing in a little town square. They were quite good, so we bought their CD and then headed to a nearby café for more çay (you drink like 50 cups of tea/coffee per day, no kidding). Two ferries left while we were there, but we didn’t take too much note of it until we tried to leave and we found out there was this bizarre gap in the ferries. The next one didn’t leave until 9:00 PM, which meant some shopping on the waterfront, watching the sunset and having MORE ÇAY at a seaside café.
Hilal was waiting for us at the ferry landing back in Istanbul; Theresa and I had discussed going to a Turkish hamam (bathhouse) while we were riding the ferry back to the city, so we broached the idea and Hilal agreed to come along. There are several of them in the city but it was approaching 11:00 PM by the time we set out, so we chose a particularly touristy one near the neighborhood I’m staying in, Çemberlitaş. The hamam was built in 1584 and it’s been preserved exceptionally well since then. We each ordered the mid-priced option, which included the standard bath, a scrubbing down by an attendant and a pseudo-massage. The ladies quickly vanished into their own area and left me standing in the lobby looking clueless.
I was finally led one floor up to a little room, told to undress and wrap myself in a towel called a peştimal. I’m a prude. I’ll admit it. I prefer to say I’m extremely modest, but I’m just not down with taking my clothes off in front of people. I don’t even like to swim without a shirt on (as much for fear of the sun as anything else)! The little room I was in had clear windows. As in if someone in the lobby looked up they would see me undressing so I had a hell of a time trying to maintain my modesty. I kept my boxers on underneath the peştimal only to learn that the attendant must have been watching me because he comes and bangs on the window and yells “TAKE IT ALL OFF!”. I started to tell him this wasn’t a peep show and if he shouted that again he’d better fork over some money, but I did as he said.
After all my dignity had been properly disposed of, I was lead downstairs and shown through a door into a little waiting room and then into the main chamber. It was huge and quite obviously well-restored and faithful to the original fixtures and such. It’s basically a sauna in there. The room is circular with an ENORMOUS heated marble slab in the middle of the room. You’re meant to lay on it and relax, or use the alcoves lining the room to wash yourself. Each alcove was somewhat enclosed and it had three basins for water. You’d fill the basin with water from an antique looking faucet and then use a bowl to sluice it over yourself. Thankfully you’re meant to keep the peştimal on, otherwise there was going to be a fistfight.
Suddenly my big, hairy, burly attendant, Yuri, stomps into the room, looking like the foreign villain in a bad action movie. He grunts, “English?” and when I reply in the affirmative he motions for me to lie down on the marble slab close to the edge. I guess his English didn’t exist, but Yuri stuck to one word commands: “Turn,” “sit,” “here,” “there” and “no” mostly. He put the scrubbing loofa thing on my stomach and then left me on the slab for what seemed like an eternity. When I was just about to fall asleep, Yuri comes out of nowhere and throws a big bowl of cold water on me. I’m not even kidding. I went “AH!” and he laughed. Then he soaps up the loofa and starts to scrub me.
I don’t know if he could tell that my legs were killing me from all the sudden walking (as opposed to driving everywhere in the US) or if he does it to everyone but when he began to wash my legs he also massaged them. Yuri has the hand strength of fifteen men combined. I thought he was going to rip the muscles out of my legs. I was actually very concerned about getting a cramp but I guess he knew what he was doing because not only did I not get a cramp but my legs felt amazing afterward. My shoulders and neck received similarly painful but gratifying treatment. When he washed me off, we moved to a nearby basin and he started shampooing my hair. At one point I thought his gentle giant hands were going to bore holes in my skull and I was convinced I would have a massive headache afterward but I guess he was working pressure points. He washed my hair, slapped my cheeks (gently…well…gently for Yuri) and then motioned to the marble slab where I was supposed to relax.
I can’t stand humidity. I felt like I was going to die in there, so I didn’t stay long. My idea of relaxation doesn’t involve being half naked with six other men laying on a piece of marble with 10,000% humidity after being roughed up by man-handling Yuri. If there hadn’t been so much steam, I would have actually been able to relax but it was making it hard for me to breathe, so I washed off, dried off, changed clothes upstairs under the watchful gaze of the creeper peeper attendant and then waited for the ladies.
We hadn’t had dinner yet, so we stopped in for Turkish fast food at like 12:30 AM. I don’t remember the name of the food, but it’s like a dry burrito with meat, lettuce, tomatoes and sometimes-random French fries. When we finished they accompanied me back to the area near my hostel and then caught a cab back to Hilal’s apartment where Theresa was staying. She had a 4:00 AM flight to meet her husband in Germany for holiday in Spain & Morocco, so she wasn’t going to sleep. I hope she’s having a great time!
=-=
After days 3 & 4, day 5 was bliss. I slept in; enjoyed my breakfast; uploaded my photos on Flickr; talked to Celia; wrote part of this blog; took a nap; went to dinner at a nearby restaurant; bought a decent razor because I forgot mine at home; and then spent the rest of the night bumming around on Facebook, going through my pictures and talking to Celia.
You might say to yourself, “Day 5 sounds like a bust.” But it wasn’t. I consider this a holiday and even though I’m in the amazing city of Istanbul, you don’t have to constantly be doing something to enjoy yourself. Sometimes you can sit around the hostel all day long and feel like you’ve had a perfectly wonderful and productive day.
But I did stay up too late. It was like 4:00 AM before I went to sleep. All of this çay and coffee keeps me awake too long! At around 2:00 AM last night, no one else in the hostel was awake except me down here in the lounge. The guy working the front desk during the night is really nice, so he suddenly appears with some coffee for me. And not Turkish coffee, just plain ol’ Western coffee, which I think was especially nice. It helped give me that extra oomph to stay up!
I’m somewhat divided about whether I love or hate Istanbul. There are 13 million people in the city, so that automatically makes it too big. It’s dirty and congested. People push and shove. If you’re anywhere near Sultanahmet (Old Istanbul) then you’re going to be pestered endlessly by carpet touts and every other jerk under the sun.
But then there are sides to the city that I love. You can have çay (tea) in any little café; there are historically significant and architecturally impressive buildings everywhere; the food is amazing; the city is alive and moving 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; and there are some quiet corners here and there where you can escape from the monstrous side of Istanbul.
When I returned from Edirne, I was wiped out. But I made arrangements to meet my university friend, Theresa, at 9:00 AM. It was so nice to see a friendly face! There were quite a few things in the city that she’d always liked to have done during her time in Turkey but was never able to, so I was more than happy to tag along to some lesser-known sites. The first thing we attempted was the Archaeological Museum but the admission was quite expensive, and we suspected once inside we’d run into something “typically Turkish”: Turkish museums love to charge you general admission and then charge you again for the best parts of the museum.
Afterward we decided to head to the Galata Bridge, which crosses the Golden Horn. The Golden Horn is like an estuary type body of water that breaks off from the Sea of Marmara and runs inland into the middle of European-side Istanbul. Along the way was a pretty impressive mosque but I declined to go inside. The Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya being exceptions, I always feel bad for going into mosques like a tourist. I know people don’t mind for the most part but it used to irritate me to no end when people would visit the Bahá'í House of Worship and go inside like tourists – talking loudly, taking photographs, using the flash, etc. – while I was trying to pray.
Next to Galata Bridge is an area called Eminönü where ferries depart for various points around Istanbul. It’s also home to these chintzy little boats where cooks fry up fresh fish and put them on sandwiches. There’s a little seating area on the pier because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to eat – the Golden Horn is a busy waterway, and the fish cooking boats rock like crazy! I’ll be honest and say I hate fish, so we moved on to take a peek at all the shops and restaurants that are under the bridge.
The bridge itself is hideous, but it’s a recent manifestation of a bridge crossing that’s been there…forever, I guess. The last one was preventing pollution from flowing out of the Golden Horn, I think, so they built the new one. For some reason, perhaps cost, the government didn’t see fit to make it attractive in any way whatsoever. I guess architectural appreciation died with the Ottoman Empire? Anyway, people fishing for these tiny fish line Galata Bridge the entire way across. We didn’t stick around to ask too many questions since…you know…it smelled like fish. Blech.
After that we headed to the Spice Market, which is also called the Egyptian Market. There was a disappointing lack of spice to be honest. There were some spice stalls, but the majority of it had been taken over by these ridiculous little tourist shops with all the chintzy crap being sold exclusively for tourists. That’s one thing I don’t care for in the city – there are too many shops selling the same kind of cheap junk for the same sorts of people. Frankly, I don’t know how they all manage to stay open! And the people running them can be kind of pushy. Too pushy, really.
Afterwards we headed over to the Taksim neighborhood, which is pretty upscale. There are a lot of shops and cafes, like a Heights/Hillcrest but urban style. We accidentally discovered a very beautiful Catholic church in the area, listened to a dulcimer player, stopped into a café for a bit of çay and fruit, shopped at a bookstore that actually had English language books, walked to the Galata Tower and stopped into another café for Turkish coffee. I learned how to “read” what’s left of the coffee, which is pretty fun. You take the saucer and place it over the top of the cup, then you flip it over and swirl it around in a circle, finally you set it down on the table with the saucer and wait for the top of the cup to cool. Then you remove it, leave the sediment on the saucer and give the cup to your companion. They look inside and tell you what they see – mine had a heart, geyser and volcano. I’m not entirely sure I want to know what that’s supposed to mean.
After Taksim we caught a ferry to the Asian side of Istanbul so that we could eat at a famous restaurant that was featured in The New Yorker, among other publications (including my guidebook). On the way, you pass this giant train station constructed by the Germans as a gift to the Ottoman Empire. For some reason they felt a train station built in German-style was an appropriate gift. I’m sure the Ottomans could have used money at the time. It’s like your grandma giving you socks and underwear instead of cash. Anyway, at the ferry landing the Asian side looks pretty…unimpressive. But once you wander inland a bit, it turns much nicer.
Theresa and I probably shouldn’t hang out –too- much because we seem to reinforce one another’s bad habits. At the restaurant, we went crazy ordering food! We spent too much money and ate too much food, but it was sooo worth it. We had a salad-type dish of marinated tomatoes; sausage stuffed into lamb’s intestines; stuffed grape leaves; bulgur wheat salad; a dish like Ghormeh Sabzi; sour cherries & meatballs; chickpeas & rice; hummus; kofte (a type of meat dish); spinach & yogurt salad; and an olive salad. Dessert was tea, a pistachio pastry, some kind of strange marinated whole walnut and what the wait staff described as “sauce” – a kind of marshmallow, gooey-like substance.
We wandered around the neighborhood for a bit taking pictures and then we went back to the waterfront to catch the sun setting over European Istanbul from a rooftop café. When our ferry landed back in Europe, we met one of Theresa’s Turkish friends, Hilal, and her friend, Burak. Hilal is a textile design student, and Burak is a graphic design student. They took us to an area of town called Ortaköy, which is apparently where the locals hang out late at night. We walked there from the ferry, and so we passed a number of palaces, the Four Seasons and a beautiful university along the way. The street was confined on both sides by tall walls but I still liked it – Istanbul is so lively at all hours of the day!
When we arrived in Ortaköy we walked around, observed some potato bars (you get a baked potato and select from a dozen different things to add to it) and finally settled down to have some çay together.
Burak told me he wants to be an illustrator and then he showed us a little comic book he drew in his sketchbook that’s him fighting zombies; it was very good! After experiencing Africa, where brilliant talent so often goes to waste, I was glad to see it was being cultivated in him. He said when he finishes with art school here, he wants to continue to study in England or Finland.
Hilal is studying the Ottoman language (it’s similar to modern Turkish except it uses Arabic script, which makes it a billion times more difficult) so she can understand their fashion techniques. She wants to combine Ottoman fashion with modern fashion, which I thought was amazing and ambitious. She seems pretty brilliant, so I have no doubt that she’s going to be successful. She seems like a very talented artist, and I have such an admiration for that since science has consumed by mind and kicked all the creativity out.
Both of them were somewhat shy with their English and self-conscious about it, but there weren’t any problems in communicating. I had a lot of fun hanging out with them, and I’m so glad I got to do something in Istanbul other than sight-seeing. I think I went to sleep around 2:00 AM that night. When I woke up in the morning, I realized I’m not 20 anymore. Something happens around 25. It’s like you hit a brick wall. If you try to live like you’re in your early twenties again, then you wake up feeling like you’ve been run over by something!
=-=
In the morning Hilal and Burak met Theresa and I for breakfast nearby in Sultanahmet, then we took the tram to the ferry. Theresa and I were going to Princes’ Island, and Hilal and Burak were going to hang out with a friend who was moving to the States the next day. We agreed to meet with them after we returned from the islands, which was supposed to be for dinner. But this is Turkey, so that went out the window.
The ferry took much longer than expected because it stopped at four other islands before going to the “Big Island,” Büyükada. The ferry terminal on the island was pretty impressive – it was built in the Ottoman style in 1899. We stopped in at a waterfront restaurant for lunch and paid a ridiculous price for calamari, the tomato salad thing and a shepherd’s salad. They tried to charge us for bread and water that they poured for us, as well as a “tax.” The man was getting quite belligerent about it and brought other receipts to show that they always charge for those things, as if ripping off other people made it okay to rip us off, too. There’s no such thing as a restaurant tax in Istanbul, you never pay for the bread and you pay for water only if you open it – not if they open and pour it for you when you sit down.
After we’d finished our meal and we were enjoying some çay and watermelon, we were joined by another American named Patricia. The poor thing. She comes scurrying over and in this longing voice says, “Are you Americans!?”. She asked if she could join us and we didn’t mind; on the one hand, I felt like she was cheapening her experiences by clustering up with other foreigners but then again no one likes to eat alone. We had some nice conversation with her before she went off to catch a ferry and we began to wander around the island.
There are no cars allowed on Büyükada, even though there are paved roads. The area near the waterfront is much like Istanbul, but when you move inland it instantly becomes a different place. The houses are historic, atmospheric and beautifully restored; the streets are quiet and tree-lined and the air is clean. It’s no wonder that many residents of Istanbul move to the island in the summer months in order to escape the city; I’d do it if I could afford it!
When Theresa and I stopped into a small art gallery, a little old Turkish lady comes up to us and starts talking to Theresa in a mixture of Turkish & German (Turman, if you will). It turns out she’s an artist and an author named Nur-Çin that lives on the island in the summer and in Istanbul in winter; she insisted that we come along with her to have çay. I won’t say this is a common occurrence, but the Turks are seriously friendly and hospitable. She took us to a beautiful little seaside café where we had çay and some biscuits she brought along. Theresa served admirably as translator and then she suddenly warned me, quietly, to slow down eating and drinking. If I finished, then I was going to get more. Sure enough, the next thing I know I’m having another cup of tea and more biscuits. She insisted that we take the biscuits with us and that she pay for our çay whenever we parted company. So sweet!
We wandered through the backstreets of the island for awhile and then headed back to the main waterfront area where we discovered a group of four musicians playing in a little town square. They were quite good, so we bought their CD and then headed to a nearby café for more çay (you drink like 50 cups of tea/coffee per day, no kidding). Two ferries left while we were there, but we didn’t take too much note of it until we tried to leave and we found out there was this bizarre gap in the ferries. The next one didn’t leave until 9:00 PM, which meant some shopping on the waterfront, watching the sunset and having MORE ÇAY at a seaside café.
Hilal was waiting for us at the ferry landing back in Istanbul; Theresa and I had discussed going to a Turkish hamam (bathhouse) while we were riding the ferry back to the city, so we broached the idea and Hilal agreed to come along. There are several of them in the city but it was approaching 11:00 PM by the time we set out, so we chose a particularly touristy one near the neighborhood I’m staying in, Çemberlitaş. The hamam was built in 1584 and it’s been preserved exceptionally well since then. We each ordered the mid-priced option, which included the standard bath, a scrubbing down by an attendant and a pseudo-massage. The ladies quickly vanished into their own area and left me standing in the lobby looking clueless.
I was finally led one floor up to a little room, told to undress and wrap myself in a towel called a peştimal. I’m a prude. I’ll admit it. I prefer to say I’m extremely modest, but I’m just not down with taking my clothes off in front of people. I don’t even like to swim without a shirt on (as much for fear of the sun as anything else)! The little room I was in had clear windows. As in if someone in the lobby looked up they would see me undressing so I had a hell of a time trying to maintain my modesty. I kept my boxers on underneath the peştimal only to learn that the attendant must have been watching me because he comes and bangs on the window and yells “TAKE IT ALL OFF!”. I started to tell him this wasn’t a peep show and if he shouted that again he’d better fork over some money, but I did as he said.
After all my dignity had been properly disposed of, I was lead downstairs and shown through a door into a little waiting room and then into the main chamber. It was huge and quite obviously well-restored and faithful to the original fixtures and such. It’s basically a sauna in there. The room is circular with an ENORMOUS heated marble slab in the middle of the room. You’re meant to lay on it and relax, or use the alcoves lining the room to wash yourself. Each alcove was somewhat enclosed and it had three basins for water. You’d fill the basin with water from an antique looking faucet and then use a bowl to sluice it over yourself. Thankfully you’re meant to keep the peştimal on, otherwise there was going to be a fistfight.
Suddenly my big, hairy, burly attendant, Yuri, stomps into the room, looking like the foreign villain in a bad action movie. He grunts, “English?” and when I reply in the affirmative he motions for me to lie down on the marble slab close to the edge. I guess his English didn’t exist, but Yuri stuck to one word commands: “Turn,” “sit,” “here,” “there” and “no” mostly. He put the scrubbing loofa thing on my stomach and then left me on the slab for what seemed like an eternity. When I was just about to fall asleep, Yuri comes out of nowhere and throws a big bowl of cold water on me. I’m not even kidding. I went “AH!” and he laughed. Then he soaps up the loofa and starts to scrub me.
I don’t know if he could tell that my legs were killing me from all the sudden walking (as opposed to driving everywhere in the US) or if he does it to everyone but when he began to wash my legs he also massaged them. Yuri has the hand strength of fifteen men combined. I thought he was going to rip the muscles out of my legs. I was actually very concerned about getting a cramp but I guess he knew what he was doing because not only did I not get a cramp but my legs felt amazing afterward. My shoulders and neck received similarly painful but gratifying treatment. When he washed me off, we moved to a nearby basin and he started shampooing my hair. At one point I thought his gentle giant hands were going to bore holes in my skull and I was convinced I would have a massive headache afterward but I guess he was working pressure points. He washed my hair, slapped my cheeks (gently…well…gently for Yuri) and then motioned to the marble slab where I was supposed to relax.
I can’t stand humidity. I felt like I was going to die in there, so I didn’t stay long. My idea of relaxation doesn’t involve being half naked with six other men laying on a piece of marble with 10,000% humidity after being roughed up by man-handling Yuri. If there hadn’t been so much steam, I would have actually been able to relax but it was making it hard for me to breathe, so I washed off, dried off, changed clothes upstairs under the watchful gaze of the creeper peeper attendant and then waited for the ladies.
We hadn’t had dinner yet, so we stopped in for Turkish fast food at like 12:30 AM. I don’t remember the name of the food, but it’s like a dry burrito with meat, lettuce, tomatoes and sometimes-random French fries. When we finished they accompanied me back to the area near my hostel and then caught a cab back to Hilal’s apartment where Theresa was staying. She had a 4:00 AM flight to meet her husband in Germany for holiday in Spain & Morocco, so she wasn’t going to sleep. I hope she’s having a great time!
=-=
After days 3 & 4, day 5 was bliss. I slept in; enjoyed my breakfast; uploaded my photos on Flickr; talked to Celia; wrote part of this blog; took a nap; went to dinner at a nearby restaurant; bought a decent razor because I forgot mine at home; and then spent the rest of the night bumming around on Facebook, going through my pictures and talking to Celia.
You might say to yourself, “Day 5 sounds like a bust.” But it wasn’t. I consider this a holiday and even though I’m in the amazing city of Istanbul, you don’t have to constantly be doing something to enjoy yourself. Sometimes you can sit around the hostel all day long and feel like you’ve had a perfectly wonderful and productive day.
But I did stay up too late. It was like 4:00 AM before I went to sleep. All of this çay and coffee keeps me awake too long! At around 2:00 AM last night, no one else in the hostel was awake except me down here in the lounge. The guy working the front desk during the night is really nice, so he suddenly appears with some coffee for me. And not Turkish coffee, just plain ol’ Western coffee, which I think was especially nice. It helped give me that extra oomph to stay up!
Friday, June 25, 2010
0
Day 2: To Edirne! (Istanbul/Edirne)
I guess I’m adjusting to the time difference because I only woke up once last night, and I could hardly drag my ass out of the bed this morning (just like home!). When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was the sound of rain through the open window. And not just a little rain, either. Briefly I thought about just cancelling my Edirne trip altogether but that would have been being too lazy even for me.
So down the stairs I went to eat breakfast, catch up on the news, check e-mails and chat a bit. I was hoping that the rain would ease up, but no such luck. I stopped in next door to the grocery store to buy some credit for my phone on the way to the bus station. I’m still not entirely sure how this system works. The man pulled out a little machine, took my phone number, put it into the machine and then printed me a receipt. There’s a lot of Turkish on the receipt, and I don’t know if I have to enter a code or something. Oh well. I’ll figure it out later, probably amidst some dire emergency when I absolutely need the phone.
This morning I took the tram to the metro, except the tram stop and metro stop are somewhat far away from one another so I had to walk quite a distance in the rain. The metro conveniently drops you smack in the middle of the Otogar, or bus station, in Istanbul. It’s somewhat of a mad house even in the rain. I went to the first bus company I saw that was from my trusty guidebook only to learn that the first bus to Edirne was full, so I was bumped to the 12:00 Noon. God bless the woman at the ticket counter, she didn’t speak a lick of English so we used pictograms and gestures to explain things. She told me to go to “Peron 127,” which I thought was some kind of Argentine dude but it turns out that on the other side of the station there are numbers indicating different bus lines and destinations. It took me about half an hour of wandering around until I finally broke down and asked the lady at the information desk, who responded the best she could with “There” and “Straight” and “Close.”
It’s a good thing that I like lentil soup, because that seems to be the breakfast of choice around here. I stopped in a local eatery for a bowl since I knew I wouldn’t be eating until arriving in Edirne at 2:30-ish. The soup is a yellowish color with flecks of…I don’t know what. Lentils, I guess. It’s like a thin lentil puree. It’s always served with a lemon wedge and a big bowl of sliced bread, which you dunk into the soup and eat along with it. Even though I like it I’m pretty sure I’m going to get sick of it if I can’t find a little more diversity in breakfast foods.
I guess I’ve only been in areas where people are accustomed to tourists, but so far people have been really friendly and helpful. Smile at them and they smile back, ask a question and they’ll give you some kind of answer even if it’s in Turkish and they don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. And for the most part, you don’t detect any insincerity – people really do want to help you, and they feel bad that you might be experiencing a slight bit of distress.
=-=
Whenever I arrived at Edirne, I was concerned about getting a ticket back on the same day so I immediately went to the ticket office. They told me there was a bus at 6:00 PM and 10:00PM; worried that if I left at 6 it wouldn’t be enough time, I opted for the later one. Although I was rushing, whenever I came back outside I found that the “servis” had left me. The bus station in many towns is far away from the city centre, so the classy bus companies run a shuttle into the city called a “servis.” So without the convenience of the servis, I was forced to take the dolmus. The dolums is like dala-dala in Tanzania, as in raggedy, broke-down and operating with a questionable safety record. They run on pre-defined routes and you pay a low fee to use it.
The directions I received from the Department of Holy Places said I was supposed to get on the #5 dolmus. Naturally, I got on the #3. It’s a well-known and established fact that I don’t know WTF I’m doing when it comes to city buses. Put me within the proximity of a city bus and something will go wrong. So the conductors of these buses are about as helpful as they are in Tanzania, which means you just try to figure things out on your own. I knew that the House of Baha’u’llah was near to the largest and most famous mosque in Edirne, the Sulemiye Camii, so I was peering out the window the entire time looking for its minarets. Eventually I realized that, as it turns out, every mosque built during the Ottoman period has the same type of minaret and there are only about, oh, a BILLION of them around.
Eventually we arrived in a very busy section of town, and I decided I’d had enough of dolmus #3. When I alighted, I studied the map provided in my guidebook. I got pissed off at the map, pissed off at myself, pissed off at the piece of pavement I was standing on…basically I was pissed off. I hate being lost. So I opened my laptop and got the name of the street that’s nearest to the House of Baha’u’llah. I asked a nearby shopkeeper where “Kucuk Arasta Street” was and he mumbled something about the bazaar. I didn’t realize at the time that he was trying to tell me to walk through the bazaar and the street was on the other side; rather, I thought he thought I was a stupid tourist that just wanted the bazaar.
Whenever I walked to the bazaar, I saw the Sulemiye Camii there in all its glory. It had been right next to me the entire time. All I had to do was look up. Just freaking look up! So anyway, I telephoned the caretaker and gave her a description of where I was. She asked me to walk into the bazaar and look for a bread shop; I didn’t realize that she meant the bread shop on the other side of the bazaar. While I was walking through the bazaar, I thought I saw the Greatest Name out of the corner of my eye inside a jewelry shop. Then again, there’s a lot of Arabic-looking script stuff around, I thought. But I went back to see, and there was the Greatest Name and a picture of `Abdu’l-Baha inside the shop. Glory be!
I hesitantly stepped inside and said, “Allah’u’abha?”. The man jumped up and grinned at me, extended his hand, said “Allah’u’abha!” and then started jabbering away in Turkish. I asked for the bread shop but whenever I say the word for bread, I guess it sounds like kebap. He makes a quick phone call and the next thing I know this little boy, dressed in a suit, shows up at my side. He leads me to a kebap restaurant, and then I start protesting. A waiter sidles up next to me and says, “Allah’u’abha?”. It seems we’re everywhere in the town!
I called the caretaker and gave the waiter the phone. They communicated…something…and then the little kid suddenly began leading me somewhere else. Along the way we met the caretaker, who lovingly guided me to the visitor’s house. Shortly after we arrived, the place fills up with about ten people. The caretaker tells me they’re also visitors but from Turkey.
No matter what else I do in this country, this experience will be near the top. These other Bahá'ís…it’s hard to describe. It’s hard to explain how you can travel to another country where you don’t speak the language, you don’t know a soul, 90% of the time you don’t have a clue what’s going on around you and then you meet these people and you say, “Allah’u’abha” to them and their faces light up. There’s an instant connection between hearts. An instant bond. You’re overwhelmed with the feeling of the true oneness of humanity; you really feel that you are a global citizen where national boundaries fade away and language and understanding become irrelevant because there’s that spiritual love between you. I’ll admit, I cried a little bit after I left because it touched me so much. Wherever you go, wherever you are, if you wander around shouting “Allah’u’abha!” enough someone is going to find you and take care of you.
The people were from two families on vacation together. They were from a town called Meksin in the southern part of the country on the Mediterranean. At first their kids began to speak to me in snippets of English, mostly identifying animals, but then the father of one of the families began to talk to me. We’re immediately like brothers, laughing and joking and trying our damndest to understand each other. Using the map in my guidebook and my Turkish phrasebook, we worked out a lot of things. I began to understand that they come to Edirne once a year on their vacation and that they live in a house on the sea near Meksin. They were so enthused to meet me and to find out I’m sticking around to teach in Gumushane.
Because the kids were restless, they departed early but not before they gave me their phone number, directions to their house, sentences in Turkish to ask at the otogar (bus station) for people to direct me to their house and a very firm directive that I WILL be their guest in Meksin before I leave Turkey. Okay, hakuna matata!
=-=
The actual House of Baha’u’llah was pretty amazing. The caretaker, apologizing for her English (for no reason, it was fine), explained to me that the Holy Family lived in several places near each other. She pointed out the first one and the place where Mirza Yahya administered the poison and then we visited the actual House and the garden down the street where they moved afterwards. Apparently while in Edirne, He revealed the Tablet of Ahmad, the letters to the Kings and Rulers of the world and quite a few other things. I was able to pray in the House before we all went down to the garden area. Once there, I had sour plums, ripe plums and mini-apples with the others.
Taking the 10:00 PM bus was probably a bad idea. I mean, I know it was a bad idea but I didn’t want to feel constantly rushed about being here. So now I’m typing this up in a kebap restaurant while waiting for the servis to take me to the otogar. Then it’s about 3 hours back to Istanbul at which point I have to get back to my hotel…”somehow,” as we say in Tanzania. I think the public transport will have stopped working by 1:00 AM, so I might have to track down a “taksi” (taxi). Or just sleep in the gutter, which is probably what I’m going to feel like doing once I get there.
But here’s the bright spot in all of this: Turkish buses are amazing. Yes, amazing. That’s right, you heard me say it. I never thought I’d say “bus” and “amazing” in the same sentence, but there it is. Each seat has its own television with 15 channels; there’s a video-game control where you can play games (I played Tekken 2); and there’s a steward on board who serves you your choice of beverage, water, a snack, a newspaper and tea/coffee. The seats are large and comfortable, and there’s plenty of air-conditioning for everyone! No chickens, no goats, no people who forgot to bathe for 3 weeks, no crazies, no luggage in the aisle. It’s like I died and went to transportation heaven!
=-=
I've given up on maintaining my dignity. We arrived in Istanbul just prior to 1:00 AM, but not at the main otogar. We were at some auxiliary otogar, but the bus company ran servis to various places around the city. So I stumbled out of the bus muttering "Aksaray servis?" asking about servis to the nearest place I assumed they would go. The driver was very patient with me, and I caught a taksi the rest of the way. However, whenever we arrive at the place I told him (Cemberlitas) I started arguing with him that it wasn't the right place. Then suddenly it dawned on me...uh, this is the right place. It just looked radically different at 1:00 AM, so different that I couldn't even recognize it.
I'm supposed to meet my friend Theresa tomorrow at 9:00 AM for some touristing. I expect to be absolutely dead by the end of the day. I'll rehash my brief experience with the wrestling festival in Edirne tomorrow; now it's bed time.
So down the stairs I went to eat breakfast, catch up on the news, check e-mails and chat a bit. I was hoping that the rain would ease up, but no such luck. I stopped in next door to the grocery store to buy some credit for my phone on the way to the bus station. I’m still not entirely sure how this system works. The man pulled out a little machine, took my phone number, put it into the machine and then printed me a receipt. There’s a lot of Turkish on the receipt, and I don’t know if I have to enter a code or something. Oh well. I’ll figure it out later, probably amidst some dire emergency when I absolutely need the phone.
This morning I took the tram to the metro, except the tram stop and metro stop are somewhat far away from one another so I had to walk quite a distance in the rain. The metro conveniently drops you smack in the middle of the Otogar, or bus station, in Istanbul. It’s somewhat of a mad house even in the rain. I went to the first bus company I saw that was from my trusty guidebook only to learn that the first bus to Edirne was full, so I was bumped to the 12:00 Noon. God bless the woman at the ticket counter, she didn’t speak a lick of English so we used pictograms and gestures to explain things. She told me to go to “Peron 127,” which I thought was some kind of Argentine dude but it turns out that on the other side of the station there are numbers indicating different bus lines and destinations. It took me about half an hour of wandering around until I finally broke down and asked the lady at the information desk, who responded the best she could with “There” and “Straight” and “Close.”
It’s a good thing that I like lentil soup, because that seems to be the breakfast of choice around here. I stopped in a local eatery for a bowl since I knew I wouldn’t be eating until arriving in Edirne at 2:30-ish. The soup is a yellowish color with flecks of…I don’t know what. Lentils, I guess. It’s like a thin lentil puree. It’s always served with a lemon wedge and a big bowl of sliced bread, which you dunk into the soup and eat along with it. Even though I like it I’m pretty sure I’m going to get sick of it if I can’t find a little more diversity in breakfast foods.
I guess I’ve only been in areas where people are accustomed to tourists, but so far people have been really friendly and helpful. Smile at them and they smile back, ask a question and they’ll give you some kind of answer even if it’s in Turkish and they don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. And for the most part, you don’t detect any insincerity – people really do want to help you, and they feel bad that you might be experiencing a slight bit of distress.
=-=
Whenever I arrived at Edirne, I was concerned about getting a ticket back on the same day so I immediately went to the ticket office. They told me there was a bus at 6:00 PM and 10:00PM; worried that if I left at 6 it wouldn’t be enough time, I opted for the later one. Although I was rushing, whenever I came back outside I found that the “servis” had left me. The bus station in many towns is far away from the city centre, so the classy bus companies run a shuttle into the city called a “servis.” So without the convenience of the servis, I was forced to take the dolmus. The dolums is like dala-dala in Tanzania, as in raggedy, broke-down and operating with a questionable safety record. They run on pre-defined routes and you pay a low fee to use it.
The directions I received from the Department of Holy Places said I was supposed to get on the #5 dolmus. Naturally, I got on the #3. It’s a well-known and established fact that I don’t know WTF I’m doing when it comes to city buses. Put me within the proximity of a city bus and something will go wrong. So the conductors of these buses are about as helpful as they are in Tanzania, which means you just try to figure things out on your own. I knew that the House of Baha’u’llah was near to the largest and most famous mosque in Edirne, the Sulemiye Camii, so I was peering out the window the entire time looking for its minarets. Eventually I realized that, as it turns out, every mosque built during the Ottoman period has the same type of minaret and there are only about, oh, a BILLION of them around.
Eventually we arrived in a very busy section of town, and I decided I’d had enough of dolmus #3. When I alighted, I studied the map provided in my guidebook. I got pissed off at the map, pissed off at myself, pissed off at the piece of pavement I was standing on…basically I was pissed off. I hate being lost. So I opened my laptop and got the name of the street that’s nearest to the House of Baha’u’llah. I asked a nearby shopkeeper where “Kucuk Arasta Street” was and he mumbled something about the bazaar. I didn’t realize at the time that he was trying to tell me to walk through the bazaar and the street was on the other side; rather, I thought he thought I was a stupid tourist that just wanted the bazaar.
Whenever I walked to the bazaar, I saw the Sulemiye Camii there in all its glory. It had been right next to me the entire time. All I had to do was look up. Just freaking look up! So anyway, I telephoned the caretaker and gave her a description of where I was. She asked me to walk into the bazaar and look for a bread shop; I didn’t realize that she meant the bread shop on the other side of the bazaar. While I was walking through the bazaar, I thought I saw the Greatest Name out of the corner of my eye inside a jewelry shop. Then again, there’s a lot of Arabic-looking script stuff around, I thought. But I went back to see, and there was the Greatest Name and a picture of `Abdu’l-Baha inside the shop. Glory be!
I hesitantly stepped inside and said, “Allah’u’abha?”. The man jumped up and grinned at me, extended his hand, said “Allah’u’abha!” and then started jabbering away in Turkish. I asked for the bread shop but whenever I say the word for bread, I guess it sounds like kebap. He makes a quick phone call and the next thing I know this little boy, dressed in a suit, shows up at my side. He leads me to a kebap restaurant, and then I start protesting. A waiter sidles up next to me and says, “Allah’u’abha?”. It seems we’re everywhere in the town!
I called the caretaker and gave the waiter the phone. They communicated…something…and then the little kid suddenly began leading me somewhere else. Along the way we met the caretaker, who lovingly guided me to the visitor’s house. Shortly after we arrived, the place fills up with about ten people. The caretaker tells me they’re also visitors but from Turkey.
No matter what else I do in this country, this experience will be near the top. These other Bahá'ís…it’s hard to describe. It’s hard to explain how you can travel to another country where you don’t speak the language, you don’t know a soul, 90% of the time you don’t have a clue what’s going on around you and then you meet these people and you say, “Allah’u’abha” to them and their faces light up. There’s an instant connection between hearts. An instant bond. You’re overwhelmed with the feeling of the true oneness of humanity; you really feel that you are a global citizen where national boundaries fade away and language and understanding become irrelevant because there’s that spiritual love between you. I’ll admit, I cried a little bit after I left because it touched me so much. Wherever you go, wherever you are, if you wander around shouting “Allah’u’abha!” enough someone is going to find you and take care of you.
The people were from two families on vacation together. They were from a town called Meksin in the southern part of the country on the Mediterranean. At first their kids began to speak to me in snippets of English, mostly identifying animals, but then the father of one of the families began to talk to me. We’re immediately like brothers, laughing and joking and trying our damndest to understand each other. Using the map in my guidebook and my Turkish phrasebook, we worked out a lot of things. I began to understand that they come to Edirne once a year on their vacation and that they live in a house on the sea near Meksin. They were so enthused to meet me and to find out I’m sticking around to teach in Gumushane.
Because the kids were restless, they departed early but not before they gave me their phone number, directions to their house, sentences in Turkish to ask at the otogar (bus station) for people to direct me to their house and a very firm directive that I WILL be their guest in Meksin before I leave Turkey. Okay, hakuna matata!
=-=
The actual House of Baha’u’llah was pretty amazing. The caretaker, apologizing for her English (for no reason, it was fine), explained to me that the Holy Family lived in several places near each other. She pointed out the first one and the place where Mirza Yahya administered the poison and then we visited the actual House and the garden down the street where they moved afterwards. Apparently while in Edirne, He revealed the Tablet of Ahmad, the letters to the Kings and Rulers of the world and quite a few other things. I was able to pray in the House before we all went down to the garden area. Once there, I had sour plums, ripe plums and mini-apples with the others.
Taking the 10:00 PM bus was probably a bad idea. I mean, I know it was a bad idea but I didn’t want to feel constantly rushed about being here. So now I’m typing this up in a kebap restaurant while waiting for the servis to take me to the otogar. Then it’s about 3 hours back to Istanbul at which point I have to get back to my hotel…”somehow,” as we say in Tanzania. I think the public transport will have stopped working by 1:00 AM, so I might have to track down a “taksi” (taxi). Or just sleep in the gutter, which is probably what I’m going to feel like doing once I get there.
But here’s the bright spot in all of this: Turkish buses are amazing. Yes, amazing. That’s right, you heard me say it. I never thought I’d say “bus” and “amazing” in the same sentence, but there it is. Each seat has its own television with 15 channels; there’s a video-game control where you can play games (I played Tekken 2); and there’s a steward on board who serves you your choice of beverage, water, a snack, a newspaper and tea/coffee. The seats are large and comfortable, and there’s plenty of air-conditioning for everyone! No chickens, no goats, no people who forgot to bathe for 3 weeks, no crazies, no luggage in the aisle. It’s like I died and went to transportation heaven!
=-=
I've given up on maintaining my dignity. We arrived in Istanbul just prior to 1:00 AM, but not at the main otogar. We were at some auxiliary otogar, but the bus company ran servis to various places around the city. So I stumbled out of the bus muttering "Aksaray servis?" asking about servis to the nearest place I assumed they would go. The driver was very patient with me, and I caught a taksi the rest of the way. However, whenever we arrive at the place I told him (Cemberlitas) I started arguing with him that it wasn't the right place. Then suddenly it dawned on me...uh, this is the right place. It just looked radically different at 1:00 AM, so different that I couldn't even recognize it.
I'm supposed to meet my friend Theresa tomorrow at 9:00 AM for some touristing. I expect to be absolutely dead by the end of the day. I'll rehash my brief experience with the wrestling festival in Edirne tomorrow; now it's bed time.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
0
Day One: First Impressions (Istanbul)
First, an important note: the Turkish government is big on Internet censorship. For some reason I can post to my blog, but I can’t view it or view comments on it because it triggers the censorship blocker thingy. I guess I can post seditious material, I just can’t view it myself?
Aside from my confused brain waking me up a couple of times in the middle of the night, I slept very well. Breakfast this morning was fresh bread from the bakery next door; two types of delicious olives; goat’s cheese; sour cherry jelly; hard-boiled eggs; tomatoes; cucumbers and Turkish tea. It was raining this morning, meaning I was in no hurry to get out and about, so I took my time with breakfast. Then I logged online and managed to spend 3 hours chatting with Celia. Maybe I was jet-lagged or maybe it was the weather or maybe it was the company, but I just didn’t feel like going out.
But go out I did. As I emerged on the main street from the hotel, I was infuriated to see that I had needlessly spent forever and a day yesterday trying to find the place when it’s quite nearly on the main road. I went down every street in the neighborhood except the one I needed. My first stop was to buy a phone and then visit the ATM. Then I walked down into the Sultanahmet section of Old Istanbul and started my day with the goal to see three things: the Blue Mosque, the Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia) and the Topkapi Palace. Otherwise I decided to take it easy.
I spent the majority of the day hanging out with carpet sellers. I bought a carpet for Henry & Bushra as a wedding present (it’s hideous but it was practically the only thing within my price range even with substantial haggling) just to get that out of the way. If you have a sense of humor, carpet sellers are a lot of fun. They will approach you EVERYWHERE in Sultanahmet. Sometimes you’re just &*@&!*& sick and tired of them and you can tell them very firmly to go away (sometimes works, sometimes not) but for most of the day I was in a good mood. They will always begin by either asking where you’re from or trying to direct you to some major site, which apparently is an invitation to follow you. Today I have been British, Dutch, German and Canadian – everything but what I actually am. For the most part I went with the story that I’m from Chicago, and I’m teaching in Gumushane. This helped dispense with a lot of the nonsense since they assumed I had quite a bit of experience in the country (why else would you be teaching in a village like that?).
Everyone wants to comment on my accent. “Why do you not sound like an American?” When I tell them that I lived in East Africa, they’re generally not sure what to say. In fact, it takes them so off guard that if I needed to this was the point where I could force my escape. I told them all upfront I wasn’t going to buy anything, but they all had faith in their salesmanship. Fine by me.
So off they whisk you to “their” nearby carpet shop, which is more often than not owned by an entirely different person. I kid you not when I say I visited at least 10 shops. They offer you a choice of Turkish tea, apple tea or Turkish coffee. You sit down on a nice sofa and the salesman seats himself in a chair beside you. They chat amicably, occasionally interjecting comments about carpets – it’s like a fun game. I talked about the weather, life in the Turkish military, Syrian-Turkish relations, Iranian-Turkish relations, US-Turkish relations, Israel, the American military base…and nearly everything else under the sun. I’m so wired up on caffeine from all these shops that I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to!
Aside from the carpet sellers, I accomplished all three goals plus the underground Roman cisterns. The Aya Sofya was the most awe-inspiring; the Blue Mosque was the most beautiful; the Topkapi Palace was the biggest; and the Roman Cisterns were the most unbelievable!
So the Byzantines built the Aya Sofya, and I’ve been confusing it my entire life with the Blue Mosque. But anyway, the moment you walk inside the building you’re struck by the immensity of it. The spaces are enormous, and there are beautiful mosaics throughout most of the building. It was converted into a mosque after Constantinople fell to the Turks, and there are somewhat tacky reminders of the building’s ownership in the form of giant signs in all four corners with large Arabic script on them.
The Blue Mosque has to be the most iconic Turkish monument, and it’s breathtaking. There are some buildings where you’ve seen so many pictures of them that you feel a little let down when you’re actually there but not the Blue Mosque. The huge domes and six minarets (an oddity in mosque construction) are really something to behold but the inside is more magnificent. As with all mosques, you have to remove your shoes before you enter but they provide you with a plastic bag to keep them in. Inside, every square inch is decorated in some manner, generally with small painted tiles. About half the mosque is reserved for actual prayer. I know it’s mildly intolerant, but it still irritates me to see the women relegated to praying in the back of the mosque behind a sort of little wall-like enclosure.
Topkapi Palace was the seat of the Ottoman government. It just goes on and on. Really, there’s seemingly no end to it. There’s the Sultan’s Stables, the Sultan’s Treasury, the Sultan’s Clothes, the Sultan’s Fax Machine, the Sultan’s Toilet Paper, the Sultan’s Glove, the Sultan’s Used Kleenex…. Most of the palace is actual very nice, and they do a great job of maintaining the gardens. There are pretty amazing collections of jewelry and things that belonged to the Empire – I can recall one gold box just full of emeralds, probably 100 of more of them. And then you move on to the slightly ludicrous portion of the exhibits, which feature historical pieces belonging to significant religious figures such as Moses. Yes, seriously. They claim to have Moses’ walking cane. THE Moses, as in Old Testament. Somehow the Ottoman Empire acquired the walking cane, magically preserved it for hundreds of years and then forked it over to the Turkish Republic. Among the other ludicrous things are King David’s sword; St. John’s sword; and Joseph’s turban (no, it was not technicolored). There’s also the sword of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as his tooth, beard and footprint (he had a huge footprint). The thought of a decaying tooth in a box kind of weirded me out, so I left after that.
Those Romans… I don’t know how they constructed the cisterns you see. You go underground and there are a ton of huge columns holding up the roof. Fresh water used to flow in from some nearby source but it’s sense been shut off. The bases of two columns inside are made from statues of Medusa supposedly plundered from a temple. People seemed to think it was fun to come along and rub the chin of the upside-down Medusa but I couldn’t bring myself to molest 1,500-year-old ruins.
I had kebap for dinner (a very Turkish thing to do) and hoofed it back up to the hotel. I discovered that you should never buy water from your hotel: they charge 2 Turkish lira, whereas the grocery store RIGHT NEXT DOOR charges 0.40 Turkish lira. I also discovered that I have taken two showers and used the bathroom innumerable times in the poorly marked women’s bathroom. No wonder all those women looked at me funny when I cheerily said, “Good morning!”.
Aside from my confused brain waking me up a couple of times in the middle of the night, I slept very well. Breakfast this morning was fresh bread from the bakery next door; two types of delicious olives; goat’s cheese; sour cherry jelly; hard-boiled eggs; tomatoes; cucumbers and Turkish tea. It was raining this morning, meaning I was in no hurry to get out and about, so I took my time with breakfast. Then I logged online and managed to spend 3 hours chatting with Celia. Maybe I was jet-lagged or maybe it was the weather or maybe it was the company, but I just didn’t feel like going out.
But go out I did. As I emerged on the main street from the hotel, I was infuriated to see that I had needlessly spent forever and a day yesterday trying to find the place when it’s quite nearly on the main road. I went down every street in the neighborhood except the one I needed. My first stop was to buy a phone and then visit the ATM. Then I walked down into the Sultanahmet section of Old Istanbul and started my day with the goal to see three things: the Blue Mosque, the Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia) and the Topkapi Palace. Otherwise I decided to take it easy.
I spent the majority of the day hanging out with carpet sellers. I bought a carpet for Henry & Bushra as a wedding present (it’s hideous but it was practically the only thing within my price range even with substantial haggling) just to get that out of the way. If you have a sense of humor, carpet sellers are a lot of fun. They will approach you EVERYWHERE in Sultanahmet. Sometimes you’re just &*@&!*& sick and tired of them and you can tell them very firmly to go away (sometimes works, sometimes not) but for most of the day I was in a good mood. They will always begin by either asking where you’re from or trying to direct you to some major site, which apparently is an invitation to follow you. Today I have been British, Dutch, German and Canadian – everything but what I actually am. For the most part I went with the story that I’m from Chicago, and I’m teaching in Gumushane. This helped dispense with a lot of the nonsense since they assumed I had quite a bit of experience in the country (why else would you be teaching in a village like that?).
Everyone wants to comment on my accent. “Why do you not sound like an American?” When I tell them that I lived in East Africa, they’re generally not sure what to say. In fact, it takes them so off guard that if I needed to this was the point where I could force my escape. I told them all upfront I wasn’t going to buy anything, but they all had faith in their salesmanship. Fine by me.
So off they whisk you to “their” nearby carpet shop, which is more often than not owned by an entirely different person. I kid you not when I say I visited at least 10 shops. They offer you a choice of Turkish tea, apple tea or Turkish coffee. You sit down on a nice sofa and the salesman seats himself in a chair beside you. They chat amicably, occasionally interjecting comments about carpets – it’s like a fun game. I talked about the weather, life in the Turkish military, Syrian-Turkish relations, Iranian-Turkish relations, US-Turkish relations, Israel, the American military base…and nearly everything else under the sun. I’m so wired up on caffeine from all these shops that I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to!
Aside from the carpet sellers, I accomplished all three goals plus the underground Roman cisterns. The Aya Sofya was the most awe-inspiring; the Blue Mosque was the most beautiful; the Topkapi Palace was the biggest; and the Roman Cisterns were the most unbelievable!
So the Byzantines built the Aya Sofya, and I’ve been confusing it my entire life with the Blue Mosque. But anyway, the moment you walk inside the building you’re struck by the immensity of it. The spaces are enormous, and there are beautiful mosaics throughout most of the building. It was converted into a mosque after Constantinople fell to the Turks, and there are somewhat tacky reminders of the building’s ownership in the form of giant signs in all four corners with large Arabic script on them.
The Blue Mosque has to be the most iconic Turkish monument, and it’s breathtaking. There are some buildings where you’ve seen so many pictures of them that you feel a little let down when you’re actually there but not the Blue Mosque. The huge domes and six minarets (an oddity in mosque construction) are really something to behold but the inside is more magnificent. As with all mosques, you have to remove your shoes before you enter but they provide you with a plastic bag to keep them in. Inside, every square inch is decorated in some manner, generally with small painted tiles. About half the mosque is reserved for actual prayer. I know it’s mildly intolerant, but it still irritates me to see the women relegated to praying in the back of the mosque behind a sort of little wall-like enclosure.
Topkapi Palace was the seat of the Ottoman government. It just goes on and on. Really, there’s seemingly no end to it. There’s the Sultan’s Stables, the Sultan’s Treasury, the Sultan’s Clothes, the Sultan’s Fax Machine, the Sultan’s Toilet Paper, the Sultan’s Glove, the Sultan’s Used Kleenex…. Most of the palace is actual very nice, and they do a great job of maintaining the gardens. There are pretty amazing collections of jewelry and things that belonged to the Empire – I can recall one gold box just full of emeralds, probably 100 of more of them. And then you move on to the slightly ludicrous portion of the exhibits, which feature historical pieces belonging to significant religious figures such as Moses. Yes, seriously. They claim to have Moses’ walking cane. THE Moses, as in Old Testament. Somehow the Ottoman Empire acquired the walking cane, magically preserved it for hundreds of years and then forked it over to the Turkish Republic. Among the other ludicrous things are King David’s sword; St. John’s sword; and Joseph’s turban (no, it was not technicolored). There’s also the sword of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as his tooth, beard and footprint (he had a huge footprint). The thought of a decaying tooth in a box kind of weirded me out, so I left after that.
Those Romans… I don’t know how they constructed the cisterns you see. You go underground and there are a ton of huge columns holding up the roof. Fresh water used to flow in from some nearby source but it’s sense been shut off. The bases of two columns inside are made from statues of Medusa supposedly plundered from a temple. People seemed to think it was fun to come along and rub the chin of the upside-down Medusa but I couldn’t bring myself to molest 1,500-year-old ruins.
I had kebap for dinner (a very Turkish thing to do) and hoofed it back up to the hotel. I discovered that you should never buy water from your hotel: they charge 2 Turkish lira, whereas the grocery store RIGHT NEXT DOOR charges 0.40 Turkish lira. I also discovered that I have taken two showers and used the bathroom innumerable times in the poorly marked women’s bathroom. No wonder all those women looked at me funny when I cheerily said, “Good morning!”.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
0
Departures & Arrivals (Houston/Frankfurt/Istanbul)
Departures & Arrivals (Houston/Frankfurt/Istanbul)
This is a terrible airport. It’s not like I want to start off with a complaint, but O’Hare apparently really spoils you. Houston’s international terminal is kind of dead. When I arrived from Little Rock this morning, it was a ghost town. It was creepy. The shops were closed and the passengers were gone – it was just me and a few employees wandering around aimlessly.
The man next to me is talking on the phone about some people he met that were from Switzerland. According to him, the mother spoke to the children in “Swiss.” It reminds me of the ordeal I went through with a customer service agent at Bank of America when I tried to notify them of my departure from the United States. I don’t exactly know my travel plans after I finish teaching , so I told him every country I might possibly visit: Syria, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. He repeated back to me: “Sierra, Greece, Bull-jeer-ia, and uh…Roman…Romania…is that like a state?” I had to spell the names of the countries for him. I’ll admit that Bulgaria and Romania might be a little obscure but he should have known about Syria. In fact, since he worked in the department specifically dedicated to handling issues about using your account overseas he should have known all of them!
While waiting on my flight, I’ve completed a few assignments for the online class I have, read and responded to long-neglected e-mails and caught up with my friends Roxanne and Samir. Talking to Samir, my best friend from high school, made me realize how much of a crap friend I can be. Every scrap of news we discussed was like a revelation to me because of how long and how much I’ve been out of contact with him. I just suck at picking up the telephone and calling someone. It’s like I have an aversion to the phone. It makes me wonder what’s happened to me over the years that’s made me hate the phone.
I’m probably being tough on myself. It’s hard to constantly maintain friendships over long distances, and the truly great, strong friendships endure anyway.
I don’t like saying goodbye. If there’s any part of me that’s unwilling to go to Turkey, it’s that part. The part that says you shouldn’t leave people behind, even though it’s not really leaving them behind. No matter how many times you say “Goodbye!” or “I’ll miss you!” or “I’ll be back in only two months!” it still doesn’t seem like it’s really enough. So you hope they read this and they know how much you’ve truly come to care for them. And though intercontinental travel is irritating in how it can interrupt things, it’s only a temporary interruption. You really will be back soon, and then things move on again!
For whatever reason, my phone was continually acting up in Houston. I don’t mind AT&T’s crappy network dropping my calls every once in awhile, but it always makes a habit of dropping them when I really, really need to make the call. I can BS with someone on the phone for 2 hours but then the second that I need to make some sort of pressing call, it’s all “beep, beep, beep”s. I was forced to resort to texting, which is a poor substitute.
=-=
The flight would have been fine if I didn’t have a family of eight split up with half in front of me and half in back of me. I have never seen such poorly behaved children in all my life. They were crawling on the seats, they’d run up and down the aisles, they’d stop and literally yell into your ear in Arabic and they’d make an awful habit of using our armrest for a balance beam. A few hours into the flight, I just couldn’t take it anymore so I went to complain to the flight attendants. The first one just smiled and nodded, then his colleague asked what was going on. After a brief explanation in German, she comes over to me and says quietly: “Yes, we would like to kill them, but we cannot. We are over the ocean, and we cannot remove them! Please, take these chocolates for your stress. You go back, you sit down put on your headphones, you turn to channel 3 – very nice classical music – and we will be in Frankfurt soon.” They gave me business class meals and special treatment, so I guess it made up for it!
My layover in Frankfurt was just long enough to feel bothersome but not long enough to be able to leave the airport. I have a slightly longer layover on the way back, so maybe I can take a quick 2 hour tour of the city. I’m already slamming up against the language barrier in Germany of all places – what’s Turkey going to be like!? Also, I’ve become so accustomed to using the Internet at will that my non-working iPhone is flipping me out. The nice thing about Frankfurt is the European take on security scanning: try to stuff as much stuff as possible into those trays rather than being forced to use a separate one for each item.
=-=
I don’t know what I was doing on the flight to Istanbul. I wasn’t sleeping, but I was awake. I think I was just unconscious in my seat. Customs was a madhouse! It was like ten different flights had arrived at the same time. I changed some money and headed to the Metro, Istanbul’s version of a subway. This is where I hit the first of many language speed bumps (let’s not call them barriers). The lady they had stationed at the help desk for the subway at the INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT didn’t speak a lick of English. I know as an American and an English-speaker I can’t just go around demanding everyone in the world speak English, but it’s the closest thing we have to an international language!
I switched from the subway to the tram (they’re two different systems – don’t ask me) and finally arrived at the nearest stop to my hotel. This is where all my advanced planning crumbled like…I don’t know…some Byzantine ruin (you can throw a rock in this city and expect to hit something historic). Here are the directions I wrote for myself: turn right and go south. Those are the worst directions in the world. Turn right from what, Bryan? How can you go south when you don’t know which direction is which because the sun has gone down? Cursing myself, I asked about 5 different shopkeepers, hit 5 language speed bumps and they sent me in 5 different directions. Finally I found an Internet café where the owner spoke English and he directed me to a kebap restaurant that was three buildings down from the hotel. However, not bothering to look around, I just asked and got a good laugh from a owner. Yes, sir, I am blind.
The place I’m staying is like a combination of a hotel & hostel. There are dorm rooms and things and then private rooms. I have a private room with a shared bath, which I don’t mind. However, there seem to be a few things I may have forgotten about hostels. Here are some tips for if you ever find yourself in a hotel/hostel:
Tip #1: Always bring a towel, otherwise you’ll be drying yourself with your own clothes.
Tip #2: In the late afternoon/evening, the young person manning the desk does not care about you. The owner has gone home, and there’s no one to hold this young punk accountable for his poor customer service. So arrive in the morning or midday.
Tip #3: Whichever adaptor plug you didn’t bring is going to be the one that you need, even if it says it’s only used in Indonesia or some ridiculous place like that. Because by God you better believe that there’s a strong chance the building you’re in has some freak backstory for why they have Indonesian electrical outlets.
Tip #4: There will be only one electrical plug to use for your laptop, fan, medical device, camera charger and phone charger, and no one within a 5 block radius will be selling one or be capable of understanding what the hell a multi-plug adaptor is. So bring your own.
Tip #5: Keep things in perspective. Even if you’re in the middle of a warzone, at least you have a bed and a pillow. And sometimes sheets. But sometimes not. Perspective, man.
Tip #6: Backpackers and the like should be taken in small doses.
Tip #7: Don't travel alone!
Tomorrow, Insha'Allah, I go to Edirne. Pray for me!
This is a terrible airport. It’s not like I want to start off with a complaint, but O’Hare apparently really spoils you. Houston’s international terminal is kind of dead. When I arrived from Little Rock this morning, it was a ghost town. It was creepy. The shops were closed and the passengers were gone – it was just me and a few employees wandering around aimlessly.
The man next to me is talking on the phone about some people he met that were from Switzerland. According to him, the mother spoke to the children in “Swiss.” It reminds me of the ordeal I went through with a customer service agent at Bank of America when I tried to notify them of my departure from the United States. I don’t exactly know my travel plans after I finish teaching , so I told him every country I might possibly visit: Syria, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. He repeated back to me: “Sierra, Greece, Bull-jeer-ia, and uh…Roman…Romania…is that like a state?” I had to spell the names of the countries for him. I’ll admit that Bulgaria and Romania might be a little obscure but he should have known about Syria. In fact, since he worked in the department specifically dedicated to handling issues about using your account overseas he should have known all of them!
While waiting on my flight, I’ve completed a few assignments for the online class I have, read and responded to long-neglected e-mails and caught up with my friends Roxanne and Samir. Talking to Samir, my best friend from high school, made me realize how much of a crap friend I can be. Every scrap of news we discussed was like a revelation to me because of how long and how much I’ve been out of contact with him. I just suck at picking up the telephone and calling someone. It’s like I have an aversion to the phone. It makes me wonder what’s happened to me over the years that’s made me hate the phone.
I’m probably being tough on myself. It’s hard to constantly maintain friendships over long distances, and the truly great, strong friendships endure anyway.
I don’t like saying goodbye. If there’s any part of me that’s unwilling to go to Turkey, it’s that part. The part that says you shouldn’t leave people behind, even though it’s not really leaving them behind. No matter how many times you say “Goodbye!” or “I’ll miss you!” or “I’ll be back in only two months!” it still doesn’t seem like it’s really enough. So you hope they read this and they know how much you’ve truly come to care for them. And though intercontinental travel is irritating in how it can interrupt things, it’s only a temporary interruption. You really will be back soon, and then things move on again!
For whatever reason, my phone was continually acting up in Houston. I don’t mind AT&T’s crappy network dropping my calls every once in awhile, but it always makes a habit of dropping them when I really, really need to make the call. I can BS with someone on the phone for 2 hours but then the second that I need to make some sort of pressing call, it’s all “beep, beep, beep”s. I was forced to resort to texting, which is a poor substitute.
=-=
The flight would have been fine if I didn’t have a family of eight split up with half in front of me and half in back of me. I have never seen such poorly behaved children in all my life. They were crawling on the seats, they’d run up and down the aisles, they’d stop and literally yell into your ear in Arabic and they’d make an awful habit of using our armrest for a balance beam. A few hours into the flight, I just couldn’t take it anymore so I went to complain to the flight attendants. The first one just smiled and nodded, then his colleague asked what was going on. After a brief explanation in German, she comes over to me and says quietly: “Yes, we would like to kill them, but we cannot. We are over the ocean, and we cannot remove them! Please, take these chocolates for your stress. You go back, you sit down put on your headphones, you turn to channel 3 – very nice classical music – and we will be in Frankfurt soon.” They gave me business class meals and special treatment, so I guess it made up for it!
My layover in Frankfurt was just long enough to feel bothersome but not long enough to be able to leave the airport. I have a slightly longer layover on the way back, so maybe I can take a quick 2 hour tour of the city. I’m already slamming up against the language barrier in Germany of all places – what’s Turkey going to be like!? Also, I’ve become so accustomed to using the Internet at will that my non-working iPhone is flipping me out. The nice thing about Frankfurt is the European take on security scanning: try to stuff as much stuff as possible into those trays rather than being forced to use a separate one for each item.
=-=
I don’t know what I was doing on the flight to Istanbul. I wasn’t sleeping, but I was awake. I think I was just unconscious in my seat. Customs was a madhouse! It was like ten different flights had arrived at the same time. I changed some money and headed to the Metro, Istanbul’s version of a subway. This is where I hit the first of many language speed bumps (let’s not call them barriers). The lady they had stationed at the help desk for the subway at the INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT didn’t speak a lick of English. I know as an American and an English-speaker I can’t just go around demanding everyone in the world speak English, but it’s the closest thing we have to an international language!
I switched from the subway to the tram (they’re two different systems – don’t ask me) and finally arrived at the nearest stop to my hotel. This is where all my advanced planning crumbled like…I don’t know…some Byzantine ruin (you can throw a rock in this city and expect to hit something historic). Here are the directions I wrote for myself: turn right and go south. Those are the worst directions in the world. Turn right from what, Bryan? How can you go south when you don’t know which direction is which because the sun has gone down? Cursing myself, I asked about 5 different shopkeepers, hit 5 language speed bumps and they sent me in 5 different directions. Finally I found an Internet café where the owner spoke English and he directed me to a kebap restaurant that was three buildings down from the hotel. However, not bothering to look around, I just asked and got a good laugh from a owner. Yes, sir, I am blind.
The place I’m staying is like a combination of a hotel & hostel. There are dorm rooms and things and then private rooms. I have a private room with a shared bath, which I don’t mind. However, there seem to be a few things I may have forgotten about hostels. Here are some tips for if you ever find yourself in a hotel/hostel:
Tip #1: Always bring a towel, otherwise you’ll be drying yourself with your own clothes.
Tip #2: In the late afternoon/evening, the young person manning the desk does not care about you. The owner has gone home, and there’s no one to hold this young punk accountable for his poor customer service. So arrive in the morning or midday.
Tip #3: Whichever adaptor plug you didn’t bring is going to be the one that you need, even if it says it’s only used in Indonesia or some ridiculous place like that. Because by God you better believe that there’s a strong chance the building you’re in has some freak backstory for why they have Indonesian electrical outlets.
Tip #4: There will be only one electrical plug to use for your laptop, fan, medical device, camera charger and phone charger, and no one within a 5 block radius will be selling one or be capable of understanding what the hell a multi-plug adaptor is. So bring your own.
Tip #5: Keep things in perspective. Even if you’re in the middle of a warzone, at least you have a bed and a pillow. And sometimes sheets. But sometimes not. Perspective, man.
Tip #6: Backpackers and the like should be taken in small doses.
Tip #7: Don't travel alone!
Tomorrow, Insha'Allah, I go to Edirne. Pray for me!
Sunday, June 20, 2010
2
Pre-Departure (Little Rock)
In two days, I'm leaving Little Rock for Turkey (the country, not a sandwich so magnificent that it's worthy of being capitalized). I'm somewhat of a nervous wreck. I just started packing in earnest today, although I always leave things like that until the last minute. My nervousness and apprehension don't come from the rigors of travel; in fact, I've become old hand enough at international travel that I'm not concerned about long flights, ridiculous security procedures or the horrors of delayed/cancelled flights.
Some very recent changes in my life have given rise to a small but naggingly persistent voice that says I shouldn't go, that I should stay here to see after things on the domestic home front. But all that's generally been silenced by intense wanderlust and the prospect of the thrill and excitement that will be Türkiye. My nervousness and apprehension are more directly about my own abilities and facing the unknown again, as I once did when traveling to Africa.
In Turkey, I'll be working at the Cebeli Summer School in a town called Gümüşhane, which is about an hour and a half south of the more famous city of Trabzon. The town is nestled in a mountainous area, and its name derives from the rich silver deposits in the surrounding mountains. The summer school is a sort of partnership with my university (University of Arkansas at Little Rock) thanks to one of our faculty members, Dr. Coskun Bayrak, and every summer a small group of university students travel to Turkey to teach at the school. The school focuses primarily on improving English language skills but also on technical and other instruction. I'll be teaching international studies/relations to three sets of students grouped by their command of English: beginners, intermediate and advanced.
And herein lies one source of my anxiety: I don't know how to "dumb down" the material to students with only a rudimentary grasp of the English language. I'm sure I'll figure it out as I go along. The good thing is that we're paired up with a Turkish instructor, so I'm hopeful that between the two of us we can work things out. In case you're curious, here's the outline I've created for my classes borrowing a bit heavily at points on my favorite instructors at UALR:
Week One: Introduction to International Studies/Relations; World Geography; the International System (United Nations, Regional Mechanisms [EU, Arab League, etc.])
Week Two: The Developed & Developing Worlds
Week Three: Energy Security; Poverty; and the Environment
Week Four: Israel-Palestine Issue; Conflict & International Security
Week Five: Turkey & the International Community; Turkey & the European Union; Turkey & the Middle East/North Africa
Week Six: Model United Nations Simulation
I arrive in Istanbul on Wednesday, June 23, and I have roughly five days before I need to catch a flight east to Trabzon (and thereafter a bus to Gümüşhane). I've booked a hostel room in the middle of the Sultanahmet neighborhood where most of the main sites are located, and I plan to make a day trip to the city of Edirne to see the House of Baha'u'llah there. I had planned to spend at least one day and evening in Edirne but it turns out my arrival coincides with the famous Kırkpınar Oil-Wrestling Championship. Yes, oil-wrestling - a bunch of oiled up men wrestling around and competing with one another (sounds like the Jersey shore, right?). Since all of the rooms are booked up, I'm going to have to day-trip it.
The summer school concludes on August 6, and I'll be traveling around until I leave Istanbul on August 24 to come back to the United States. I plan to visit at least Cappadocia and make a big circuit of the southern and western coasts of Turkey. If there's time remaining, I'd like to go to Bucharest, Romania by train via Sofia, Bulgaria. My brand new passport feels naked, so I've got to fill it up with visa after visa after visa!
[[ Note: You might be wondering about the name of the blog, Take Your Dishes to the Kitchen. I'm notorious for not taking my dishes to the kitchen, and this is a phrase my mother has repeated so much over my life that it's seared into my mind. I did it for you, ma! ]]
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