Upon My Last Visit to Arikan Ranch

.
I went to the Ranch twice more, both times as a chaperone for a free day for the middle schoolers who chose that activity. During the last week of classes at MEF, there are no classes. Students choose activities and field trips. So on Tuesday, I was among the teachers overseeing a football tournament in the morning, and a swimming tournament in the afternoon. The football tournament consisted of mixed-gender teams that played in a gym on a basketball court. Each team had five players. There were no off-sides, and balls could be played off of the walls. It is much more exhausting than regular soccer, because there is seldom a time when the ball is not close to one of the four forwards. Tired players would switch off at goalie. Games lasted 15 minutes. The level of play was intense; the sixth-grade boys made it into the semi-finals, losing to the eventual winners. The swimming tournament was just a bunch of silly games.
.
Next day I was back at the Ranch. I decided to really explore the facility, so I started walking around the perimeter next to the high stone walls. Here’s what I saw (in order of appearance):

• A concrete basketball court
• A rose garden with many different varieties
• A double tennis court
• A man-sized chess board
• Staff apartments -- the building looked like a two-storey motel
• Flowering shrubs along all paths -- all paths featured large, flat pieces of marble embedded in the ground
• Chickens, ducks, geese and peafowl wandering free
• 16 sheep and lambs in a pasture with 8 miniature deer (4 each by gender)
• 4 fruit orchards
• Several large horse stalls, no horses in sight
• A duck pond
• The concrete lake mentioned earlier, with a fake waterfall that flowed under a stone bridge
• 2 black swans swimming in the fake lake
• 2 large greenhouses. The first featured short, broad-leafed palms, various herb gardens, and potted trees. Two covered women were working in the room, one hoeing around the palms, the other planting herbs. The second green house was dedicated solely to tomatoes. Arikan sells these to his schools.
• A field of grapes
• A cherry orchard
• A crowed artichoke patch -- they grow up on long stems, reminding me of Brussel sprouts
• 2 smaller green houses dedicated to herbs
• A mint patch with brilliant blue flowering tops
• A helipad -- I surmised that this must have been the spot from which I had seen Saturn during my first visit
• A large arboretum dedicated mainly to evergreen trees
• The Arikan Palace, a huge dwelling with a central tower emblazoned with a bold IA for Ibrahim Arikan. Another huge rose garden
• Another guard house, the guards sipping tea and watching me closely in case I decide to storm the Palace
• A man with a weed-eater, buzzing out grass and weeds from between the bricks in the parking lot in front of the Palace. It is clear these people live here year-round maintaining the grounds for a family that lives there only during the summer months.

Meanwhile, the kids were running around, playing basketball, football and cricket in the tennis courts, swimming in a square pool in the middle of an open, square entry building. Lunch featured barbecued meats, various salads, and lots of soft drinks. We were there for about four hours. Each of the kids paid 20 Turkish Lira. Arikan made money.
.

Upon My First Visit to Arikan Ranch

.
Ibrahim Arikan is the founder of MEF Schools. He made a small fortune selling supplies to schools, then started building schools so that they would buy only his supplies. Smart cookie. The reason he his so fond of schools, other than as a source of income, is that he attributes his success to a former teacher. Little Ibrahim was a stutterer. He was told that he had very little future of success because of this problem. But one teacher had faith in him and coached him and he overcame his disability. I can look out the window from the room in which I am writing and see a double statue -- little Ibrahim dressed in suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, and curly-haired, professionally dressed teacher lady holding a large book in her left hand while her right hand rests on the boy’s shoulder. Kind of creepy-looking at night.
.
The Arikan Ranch is a huge estate west-south-west of Istanbul in a place called Silivri. It is a fortress surrounded by huge brick walls, and protected by armed guards and dogs. This was my third visit, and I am astonished by the opulence. The reason for the first visit in September, 2009, was a huge party thrown for all the teachers and staff at both the National and International Schools. Hundreds of employees sat with spouses at rows of long tables that lined a large artificial lake, at the end of which arose a small, covered island that featured a band stand. (This looked ominous for the future of the evening -- my apprehensions were proven to be well-founded.) It had been a long teaching day and the drive to the Ranch had taken over an hour. I was hot, thirsty and hungry.
.
Soon after being seated each person was served a ceramic plate of meze (appetizers: olives, cheeses, tomatoes, cucumbers, different diced vegetables in sauces, with bread, of course -- Turks cannot conceive of any meal without bread, the staff of life and all that). I didn’t know that what lay in front of was just an appetizer, so I ate everything, even the stuff I didn’t particularly like. Since I knew barely anyone at my table, I decided to take a walk and check out the nearby area (I will describe what I saw in another Istanbullet). When I got back, there was another ceramic plate at my seat, and people were lining for the main course. Unfair! I was too full to eat anymore. Wine and beer was served, and after dessert out came the raki (pronounced “rock-uh”). This is Turkey’s national alcoholic beverage. It is identical to the Greek national drink, ouzo, as far as I can tell. Both are strong, aniseed-flavored spirits that are clear until mixed with water, then they become cloudy.*
.
Almost everybody got drunk in a hurry. Most Turks don’t drink much, not because they’re Muslims but because the stuff is so expensive. So they get tipsy quickly.** The band started playing traditional music and soon there was a huge line of people holding hands above their heads and undulating around the pool in a counter-clockwise motion. This was amusing to watch until Arikan decided to take the mic and sing cheesy Dean Martin songs, like “When the moon hits your eye like a large pizza pie, that’s amore.” I soon had enough of that and got up for another walk. I found some steps that led up to a path. There were several people moving on up the path so I followed, wondering what the draw was. Soon we reached a flat concrete area where Arikan had placed a large, portable telescope. The skies were perfectly clear and when I got my turn I was delighted to see that it was pointed at Saturn. The rings were clearly visible; I could even detect some color, but maybe that was from my tears. It was a truly awesome sight.
.
* I took one sniff and was confirmed in my decision to decline. I had tasted ouzo once when I was a kid, aboard a Greek freighter in the Port of Longview, where I was begging for some Greek coins to add to my growing collection of foreign money. (See, I was already thinking internationally!) I would ride my bike about a mile down to the docks, ask permission to come aboard and then politely ask for spare change. I knew when foreign ships were arriving because it was listed in advance in the Longview Daily News. When the Japanese ships came in, I would sell them carp that I would catch fresh in the nearby sloughs on the way to the docks.
.
** On the way home, well after 1:00 AM, one Turkish teacher was so intoxicated that when traffic slowed to a crawl, which it always does when trying to get into the city, that she got out of the van and walked in the four-lane road, talking to fellow stalled travelers. I never saw her again, so I think her antics were punished.
.

Istantidbitx VI

.
Turkish Men
.
In Istanbul, they never wear shorts except when exercising, hats and backpacks are rare, and they rarely walk fast. They sit for hours drinking many hour-glass-shaped cups of sweet, hot tea, no matter what the temperature is, smoking, talking, arguing, gesturing, playing backgammon, and another board game featuring bronze dice. They walk or sit with their arms linked or around one another, like lovers. They greet one another with a stylized kiss: press right cheek to the other’s right cheek, then repeat left. (Women do the same, but they make a kissing, “smooch” sound with their lips.) Men generally do not shave for about two weeks, whereupon they have a barber do it. I have adopted this practice. It is a most pleasurable Turkish custom that I will miss very much.
.
MEF International School
.
Turkish pencils have no erasers. Students must provide their own rubbers (unlike in America, where they are handed out by the school nurse. This is a pun.). Classrooms have no pencil sharpeners. Students must sharpen their pencils with little plastic hand-held sharpeners that they carry in a bag shaped like a burrito, which is full of pens, pencils and, other school related paraphernalia.
.
Students in the Turkish National School can pass with a 50% average. In the International School, if a student is at 58%, teachers are "encouraged" to find ways to bring the score up to 60%. These kids are worth a lot of money -- we can’t let laziness and stupidity get in then way of them passing. That would obstruct profits!
.
Bus Duty
.
Breakfast and lunch are provided for student and faculty every day. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, there are snacks at the bus tables. All Primary School students are required to be assembled and led to their 16 passenger bus by a faculty member. I am in charge of Bus 62. I am responsible for the largest group of PS bus riders in the school (kids from China, Korea, Pakistan, Russia, USA). Luckily, Bus 62 is the last in line, placing it right next to a MEF playground with swings, slides, etc., so I let my kids scamper around until the "get on board" whistle sounded. All the other Bus Duty staff had to try and keep their charges corralled in or around their bus.
.
This spring, the rules changed, and all Primary School students were to get on the bus, take their seats and fasten their seat belts, then wait for 15 minutes before the buses left. That worked fine as long as the weather was bad. But when it started getting warm, I said "No way," and I let my kids stand or sit outside close to the bus. The other Bus Duty staff resented my action, but my kids were happy, and all the other kids wanted to go home on Bus 62.
.
Upon Finally Being De-Greased
.
The Middle School production of Grease is now just over three months behind me, and I have finally recovered from Post Traumatic Distress Syndrome. The shows went well, there were few embarrassing moments or pauses, and the students felt good about their performances. The cast consisted mostly of 6th graders.
.
I had hoped that the karaoke CD I had ordered the previous spring would serve for the accompaniments of the well-known songs, freeing me up be the vocal coach and prompter. However, the CD worked only for the solos; in the large ensemble numbers, the singers couldn’t feel the beat, so I had to play (i.e., pound on) the piano much more than I had anticipated. In addition, we only had enough boys to fill out the roles of the Burger Palace Boys and the nerd, Eugene. So I became Johnny Casino, sitting at the piano onstage with my back turned to the audience, shouting a few lines and singing “Hand Jive” at the top of my lungs. The music wasn’t difficult, but the playing of it was -- pounding '50s rock. My arms ached after each rehearsal. Meanwhile, "Beauty School Drop-Out" was done in pantomime because our Teen Angel’s voice broke in January and he could no longer sing the climactic falsetto passages.
.
Check out the names and nationalities:
.
Leads: Sandy – Aylin (‘eye-lin’, Russia), Danny – Jimmy (USA)
Burger Palace Boys: Kenickie – Anar (‘ah-nar’, Russia), Roger – Danny (Korea), Doody – Kayhan (‘kye-hahn’, Turkey), Sunny – Fuzuli (‘foo-zoo-lee’,Uzbekistan)
Pink Ladies: Rizzo – Suzan (pronounced ‘Suzanne’, USA), Marty – Abisheree (‘ah-bee-shree’, Pakistan), Jan – Erin (USA), Frenchy – Ana (Spain)
Others: Patty – Joanna (France), Eugene – Atif (‘ah-teef’, India), Miss Lynch – Antonia (Germany), Vince Fontaine – Rashad (Turkey), Teen Angel – Allejandro (Spain)
Chorus : Leoni (‘lay-oh-nee’, Holland), Natia (‘nah-ti-ah’, Georgia), Melina (‘me-lee-na’, Italy), Olga (pronounced ‘Olya’, Russia), Lara (USA)
.

Upon Walking Along the Golden Horn

.
Last Saturday, May 21, I walked almost the entire length of the Golden Horn. My goal was to visit a village of Muslim pilgrimage, Eyüp, and check out some interesting sites along the way. To get there, I would pass through the neighborhoods of Fatih, Fener and Balat. These districts are a reminder that for centuries after the Muslim conquest, Christians and Jews made up about 40% of Istanbul’s population. It was a beautiful, clear day with a light breeze that made the walking easy. (OK, what made the walking easy was because the sidewalk is absolutely flat, free of dogs and tourists, and the traffic was light.)
.
The Golden Horn looks great on maps, but it is very sad when seen in person. It is a flooded river valley that flows southeast into the Bosphorous, a natural harbor that first attracted settlers over 9,000 years ago. The Horn eventually enabled Constantinople to become a powerful and very rich port. Quote: "According to legend, the Byzantines threw so many valuables into it during the Ottoman conquest that the waters glistened with gold." Now, it resembles the Seattle Ship Canal, polluted and lined by empty, rusting ships, warehouses, bridges and docks. Seagulls perch and preen in serene boredom upon these modern, iron-oxide relics.
.
I began my walk in Karakoy ("dark village"), on the northern side of the estuary. I crossed the Galata Bridge for the first time on foot. This bridge was constructed approximately where the chain was laid across the Horn to protect the Italian ships during the siege of 1453. It offers a splendid view of Istanbul’s seven hills, each bristling with minarets. It was a good day for fishing -- all the plastic buckets I passed contained suffocating anchovies hauled in by poles stout enough to tame tarpon.
.
Once I had reached the end of the bridge and turned northwest, and had fought my way through the crowds of tourists surrounding the New Mosque and Spice Bazaar, I entered a shadowy valley created by walls of rusty corrugated tin on my right, mounted by spirals of concertina wire, and over 40 tour buses parked on my left. (Walking Brain: Why the concertina wire? There’s nothing but dilapidated warehouses over there. [Perhaps to keep out the non-existent homeless people.] And why is it called concertina wire? I thought a concertina was a small accordion. [Maybe the wires holding open the folds of the bellows mechanisms are interwoven.] Did Vivaldi compose a concerto for concertina? [Probably not.] But I bet Hindemith did! [Walking Brain does not have a sidewalk to follow, like I do.])
.
The district of Fatih was named after Mehmed II, the Conqueror (Fatih). Its crowning monument is a mosque originally built in 1470, destroyed in an earthquake in 1766, and immediately rebuilt in baroque style. It is one of the largest kulliye (collection of buildings surrounding a mosque) in the city, with 8 medresses (Muslim theological schools), a hammam (Turkish public bath), a han (office block) and a hastane (hospital). For being such an impressive holy site, I was intrigued by the number of roaming roosters and hens and the amount of graffiti. (Walking Brain: Why is there so much graffiti? One of the first things that struck me upon arriving in Istanbul was the lack of graffiti compared to other large cities. Why here in this profoundly Muslim site? [Perhaps there is neither money nor incentive for removal.])
.
I walked on into the Fener ("lighthouse") district. A shoe-shine guy brushed past me and accidentally dropped a brush. I called to him, picked up the brush and handed it back to him. He thanked me profusely, shook my hand, called me "a gentleman," and offered to give me a free sandal shine. I was feeling pretty good about myself by that time, so I thought, 'Sure, why not?' Then he told me that he was a Kurd from Ankara and couldn’t get a break in Istanbul, and that his wife was still in Ankara with his five children, one of whom was in the hospital. Then he asked me to pay for the shine. Duped again! I gave him my pocket change and continued on.
.
My next stop was the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. Nominally the head of the whole G.O. church, the Patriarch is now shepherd to a diminishing flock in and around Istanbul. The Patriarchate is all that remains of what was once a thriving Greek enclave, where many wealthy residents rose to positions of prominence in the Ottoman Empire. I walked up a steep incline and entered the Patriarchate through a side door. The main door was welded shut in memory of Patriarch Gregory V (I am not making this up -- there are famous dead Gregories all over the place), who was hanged here for treason in 1821 after encouraging the Greeks to overthrow Ottoman rule. The Patriarchate centers on the basilica-style Church of St. George, which was built in 1720, but which contains many older artifacts, gilded icons and furniture.
.
I walked back downhill and visited a really unusual building, the Church of St. Gregory -- just kidding, St. Stephen of the Bulgars. This entire church is constructed in cast iron, even the internal columns and galleries. (I have never been in a church before where, if you flick your finger against a column, it goes 'bong!') The history of its construction mirrors the whole dead Gregory thing. Gregory V was executed at the beginning of the Greek War of Independence, 1821-32. Later, the Bulgarian community broke away from the authority of the Greek Patriarchate just up the hill. The Bulgarians were issued an ultimatum by the sultan: if you want a separate church, you must build it in one week. Pre-fabricated sections of cast iron were created in Vienna in 1871, shipped down the Danube to the Black Sea to the Bosphorous, and St. Gregory’s, sorry, St. Stephen’s was assembled in one week.
.
It is really quite an astonishing building, an all-metal church. The echo is perfect for (dare I say it?) Gregorian chant and Orthodox hymnody. The church still serves the Bulgarian community today. The congregation keeps the tombs of the first Bulgarian patriarchs permanently decorated with flowers. The church stands in a park which runs down to the Golden Horn, dotted with trees and flowering shrubs. As I was walking back down to the waterfront, a shoe-shine guy brushed past me. He dropped a brush. I instinctively picked it up. Without me calling to him, he spun around, looked surprised and called me "a gentleman." In the immortal words of George W. Bush, "Fool me once ... uh ..."
.
I have to report that Eyüp was a disappointment. Historically, it is the burial place of the standard bearer of the Prophet Mohammed, Eyüp Ensari. The wealthy elite established mosques and street fountains in the village but, above all, they chose Eyüp as a place of burial. Basically, Eyüp is one huge cemetery. Yet it is a place of pilgrimage for Muslims from all over the world. I heard many languages that I did not recognize, and saw no casual tourists.
.
Whereas most Americans consider cemeteries to be spooky places, the Ottoman graveyard is a garden where the living stroll among the dead without morbid inhibitions. The gravestones are often symbolic: from their decorations, one can determine the gender, occupation, rank and even the number of children of the deceased. For instance, the size of turban reflected a gentleman’s status; a differently shaped turban indicated a member of the Sufi order; women’s gravestones have a flower for each child.
.
I took a ferry back down the Horn, sun-burnt, footsore and oxygen-hazed. The boat zigzagged slowly from one iskele (dock) on the south shore to the north shore of the Horn, back and forth like a giant grandmother doing somnambulant aquatic needlework, until I was finally deposited in Eminönü (umlauts on the, oh hell, who cares?) Trying to get from the ferry dock back to the Metro was actually frightening. A turgid torrent of humanity slowly struggled down the steps that led underground. One hesitant step at a times, I became gradually encased in a lava-like wall of humanity, oozing downward. Anxious shopkeepers tried to serve as foot-traffic cops, shouting and waving, but the living stream had a mind of its own. I was glad I was taller than most so that I could see potential openings, but they always seemed to close before I could get to them. I became worried that if someone were to lose it and start screaming, there would be a deadly stampede. I became worried that it might be me who would start screaming.
.
Then I was hit on the head by the eagle. The shops that line the sides of this sluggish underground passage feature cheap clothes and noisy, plastic battery-powered toys. At ground level, toy police cars, tanks and trucks flash, whiz and whirl, while plastic airplanes and birds circle above, tethered to hooks in the ceiling. One of the circling eagles lost its mooring, fell and hit me on the head. I am proud to report that I did not scream, hence preventing the potential public panic. Being able to write this paragraph is proof of my (if I may so humbly say) heroic power of self control.
.

Fun with Mavis and Herm: Part Two

.
It was the Sunday morning one week after my return from Cappadocia. I was despairing that I may have boggled the dates when Mavis and Herm would return to Istanbul. I thought they were coming back on Saturday, so I had spent that whole time sleeping on the couch in avid anticipation of their return. Come Sunday morning, my only consolation was Total Rugby. Then the phone rang -- it had to be them! I had a difficult choice to make: rugby or ... I chose my friends (= free lunch).
.
It was another beautiful spring day. I charged downhill. (OK, I lurched.) Upon entering the bus, even though empty seats were available, I chose to stand because there was an open window slat above me that drew in the fragrant April morning air. Before we had even reached the next stop, however, a stern hooded woman in a heavy, tan, ankle-length, buttoned-at-the-throat Islamist uniform slammed the window shut with an emphatic bang. She must have felt the dreaded coolness of the air and had courageously acted to prevent its threatening the endangered Turks behind me.
.
I knew it was going to be a fun day when the driver honked at an errant motorist and the horn stuck, blaring at the impassive walls of the ill-fated Ciragan (Turkish ‘g’) Palace, a restored residence of the last Ottoman sultans, now a 5-star hotel. Both Driver and Change Maker leaped heroically through the front door, thrust open the hood and yanked at random cables until the horn stopped, but we passengers could not know this because of the cacophony of car horns protesting from behind our vehicle. During this distraction, I reopened the window, and enjoyed fresh air until I disembarked in Besiktas, whereupon I met the Hermodsons.
.
Our first stop was the Dolmebahce (pronounced Dole-meh-BAH-jeh) Palace, meaning filled-in garden. The palace was constructed in 1856 in what had been a garden created over land recovered in the 16th century. The line of tourists was huge, and after a short wait (made shorter when an usher informed the crowded line that it would be at least an hour and a half before we even made it to the entrance booth), we decided that this was a site we would not be visiting today.
.
We caught a bus to my neighborhood, Ortakoy, and visited the Saturday open market and took pictures of the neo-baroque mosque, then caught a taxi up to Kurucesme and visited the neighborhood where Nancy and I had lived for several months (described in loving terms in previous Istanbullets). We walked downhill to the church built over the dry well from whence the village derived its name, and M & H scrambled through the ancient tunnel to the underground source of the holy water. We then walked along the Bosporus to Arnavutkoy (“Armenian Village” -- I’m sorry that I originally called it a Greek settlement). This is where I go to get my hair cut by Adil, but my favorite restaurant, Abracadabra, was closed for renovations. We walked around until we found a place that was open but not crowded, and was sending off a lot of take-out food, which meant the locals liked the cooking there. (Busy restaurants in Istanbul maintain small fleets of motorcycle serfs who will speedily deliver their culinary products to your doorstep, wearing unfastened helmets while smoking en route.)
.
After lunch, we continued our walk along the water and passed through Bebek (in Turkish, “Baby”). This place reminds me of Rodeo Drive (“Yeah, baby”) -- international high-end shops abut one another, while yacht-brought wealthies jog along the sidewalks with their designer dogs. Once we reached the northern end of the village, we caught a taxi to Rumeli HisarI -- Rumeli (meaning Roman, but really meaning Christian, the enemy the place was built to thwart) Fortress.
.
This huge fortification was constructed in 1452, under the direction of Sultan Mehmet II Fatih (“The Conqueror”), one year prior to the conquest of Istanbul. Mehmet II’s aim was to block any support which might have come south from the Christian nations that nestled along the northwestern shores of the Black Sea to assist the Byzantines. It was erected on the narrowest point of the Bosphorus, facing another smaller Ottoman fortress that already existed on the Asian side. Amazingly, in an age lit only by fire and powered only by slaves and animals, Rumeli HisarI was completed after only 4 months: Mehmet II designed the first tower and created a competition between his Pashas (Generals) to complete a tower each and a connecting wall to the next tower.
.
Now, Rumeli HisarI is a huge museum, displaying many of the ancient stone-throwing cannons that were used during the conquest. It has a large, open-air amphitheater that is used during the summer months for concerts, and the views from the battlements above the Bosporus are among the most spectacular in Istanbul. I always take my foreign guests there. However, I find each visit more harrowing, personally, as I am developing vertigo. To get to the battlements, one must climb ancient stone staircases, each step of which is irregular in composition and height between steps. There are no guardrails, and the steps get narrower the higher up you go. Also, the gusts of wind off the Bosporus get more erratic and forceful. I cling to the walls like a starfish on Haystack Rock, inching upward while my heart and breath rates enter the red zone. But once on top, it is exhilarating!
.

Thanks for the visit, Mavis and Herm! I hope to see you at my next international gig!

.

Upon Attending an Armenian Mass

.
I just got back from the first Eucharist in which I have been a communicant in almost two years. I attended Saturday Mass at the Church of St. Gregory the Savior (I am not making this up), an Armenian Catholic church built in Ortakoy in 1839, making it older than the iconic Ortakoy mosque. I have walked past the walls surrounding this church for almost two years and never seen them open. I have pressed the buzzer outside the doors many times and never received a response. Today, I attended Mass thanks to the first friend I made in Istanbul, Gail Chandyok.
.
Gail lived with her husband and son one floor above me in the apartment complex owned by MEF Schools in Umraniye, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, where I originally resided; this is where Nancy and I lived before she found the apartment in Kurucesme. During the weeks before Nancy arrived, Gail was my sanity anchor. She is a native Indian and teaches math (they call it "maths" here). She is always well dressed and organized -- my polar opposite. The Chandyoks are devout Catholics, and now live in the MEF apartments in which I reside in Ulus next to the school.
.
Today was the second time I have participated in worship with them this year. On Good Friday past we, purely by chance, if one believes in coincidences, attended a Stations of the Cross service together in a Greek Orthodox church in Ortakoy. On Friday the 13th (gasp!), Gail and I happened to be sitting across from one another at lunch, and somehow the topic of prayer came up. (Since I am leaving Turkey in six weeks, and do not have a job awaiting me, I’ve been spending a lot of time praying.) Gail asked if I knew of the church mentioned above and I replied in the positive. She told me about Saturday’s Mass, so I came at 3:00 pm and there were she and Francis.
.
The service took place in an intimate chapel aside from the main church. It lasted about an hour, and was attended by the Chandyoks, seven women and myself. The priest wore an elegant white silk cloak adorned with a beautiful embroidered cross on the back. Since he spent most of the service facing east, away from us, I saw more of his backside (like an audience sees a conductor) than otherwise. Francis passed me his missal so I could read the lesson of the day in English. During the Eucharist, we communicants got the wafer, but only Hayk took the water-mixed wine. One woman came late and left early (I thought only Lutherans did this).
.
Afterward, in a shaded area between the church and the walls that protected it from the street, we had a tea party. There were eleven women and four of us of the other gender, including the priest. Slices of bread (of course), and unsweetened biscuits were served with constantly-refreshed small hourglass-shaped glasses of tea. Everyone but the Chandyoks, the priest and myself smoked cigarettes.
.
I soon realized that I was the main topic of conversation because 1) I am different looking; 2) I am from America; 3) I am Christian -- not Catholic, but still present for Mass; 4) I am associated with Gail and Francis (both of whom speak Turkish), and; 5) I was able to communicate with the priest, Hayk Aram, a handsome 70-something fellow, who happens to speak German much better than I do.
.
I learned that St. Gregory, according to legend, had been imprisoned in a well for 12 years, and had survived during that time solely on the bread and wine of the Eucharist. After excusing myself, I went back into the church to investigate the architecture, icons and the upper layers of the structure. The building is a small basilica with four faux marble pillars on each side of the nave, all with false capitals. The ceiling frescoes resemble recessed marble hollows such as in the Pantheon in Rome, and were painted by the artists who decorated the interior of the Dolmebahce Palace. In addition to a few representations of the Virgin, the wood-framed paintings that hung at intervals around the nave dealt with scenes from the life of St. Gregory. Interestingly, Jesus only appeared on the processional crucifixes.
.
The church boasts two balconies, the only such feature of any church in Istanbul, I was told. Both balconies have raised platforms—the first possibly for additional seating, although there were no pews, as there were on the ground floor. The second balcony has two raised platforms, which I would like to believe were intended for a large choir. All the windows, from top to bottom, feature metal bars on the outside, and metal shutters that could be bolted from the inside. Hmm.
.
Outside, near where the tea party took place, stands a silent wooden belfry with a large corroded bell. Behind the church is a barred stairway that leads to an underground recreation of St. Gregory’s well, now sadly considered unsafe for visitation.
.

Upon Visiting Cappadocia, Day Two

.
On Friday morning, while taking breakfast outside (to the amazed horror of Omar because the temperature was OMG! cool), I was delighted to observe a huge, yellow-and-orange striped hot-air balloon pass overhead, huffing and wheezing. The basket must have held over 30 people. The winds in this area change direction as the air warms, so the balloons follow a circular path over this incredible landscape and return close enough to home for the tourists to land and be driven back to their hotels, while the balloons are deflated and returned by pickup truck to their starting sites.
.
When the tour van arrived, it contained two couples from Brazil, another mother/daughter combination (Germans -- mom from Freiburg, daughter from Berlin, a history major), a guy from Nigeria working for a petroleum company in Turkey, two male Canadian companions from Quebec, who conversed in French, a hooded woman from Uzbekistan (who spoke perfect American English and lives with her mother in Doha, home of Aljazeera TV), me and Ali, the guide.
.
(SIDE-NOTE: There is a peculiar territoriality that occurs when a group of people first enters an enclosed space, such as a classroom or a bus. Once a person initially chooses a place to sit, that becomes the place where they tend to sit whenever they return. During my school days, and extending into my college years, I liked to disrupt this silliness by taking one of the popular people’s seats whenever I arrived before them. The ensuing confusion was very amusing to observe. But, on a tour bus, where people tend to leave personal belongings on or below their seats, this was not possible. I sat in a single seat behind the Uzbeki woman.)
.
After driving past many of the geological marvels I had seen the day before, we disembarked and began a 3km hike up to a plateau above the Rose Valley. (On tours, I like to stay as close to the guide as possible so I don’t miss any information, and so s/he might like me enough at the end to not expect a tip.) I was dismayed at how quickly I was gasping for air. My muscles were fine, but my respiration and heart-rate were desperate. The trail left no opportunities to stop and rest as we trudged upward through towering V-shaped walls of tuff. I was gasping for oxygen, but was not about to suffer the indignity of halting the progress of the serpentine line of tourists following me by collapsing on the trail. (This possibility, however, did enter my mind.) Once we finally reached an open space, I realized that there was no one behind me—I could have stopped at any time. I had been keeping pace with the guides who do this for a living, and the Germans who, like the Austrians and Swiss, think hiking up mountains is fun. Now that I had some time for wheezing cogitation, as the rest of the group finally managed to catch up to us, I realized that I had been scrambling uphill at over 10,000 feet above sea level. Gasping up here is OK.
.
I was not impressed by the Rose Valley, so-called because of the layers of reddish pigmentation in the sedimentary walls of the cliffs. It was small beer compared to the Badlands of South Dakota. We walked on past, into and through many dwellings and chapels that had been dug out of the tuff, revealed now because of centuries of erosion, or still intact with weathered frescoes inside. Back in the van, we drove to a site that allowed tourists to enter one of the several underground cities created by the early Christians to protect themselves from the Romans and, later, the Turks. These people literally crawled into the embrace of the rock, emulating non-aggressive ants—they were communal, everyone had a specific job to do, and they were hard to wipe out.
.
They protected the entrances to these underground cities in a very ingenious way. A large, circular stone was rolled into the entryway--a vertical aperture tall enough for a person of the period to enter easily. This stone was then rolled to the side of the entrance into a space carved out of the tuff, allowing easy access for the inhabitants. When danger approached, the stone was rolled into place and buttressed against ramming.
.
Along the way, I noticed that most of the mosques did not have domes (autistics like things to be the same). I mentioned this to the Uzbek woman who sat in front of me, and she was similarly puzzled. After a while, she posited that they may be Sufi mosques, Sufis being the Muslim sect from which the famous “whirling dervishes” derive. I asked her how the Sufis had managed to escape the internecine struggles that are still plaguing the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. She replied that the Sufis believe that they have a unique connection with Allah (the dance of the dervishes is an expression of this spiritual connection) and if others choose another path to Him, that is fine with the Sufis. They only fight in self-defense.
.
Once we entered the human ant hill, I knew I could not descend deeper than far enough to see what it offered at the upper levels -- defensive ante-chambers, living and storage spaces, temporary cemeteries, wineries and chapels. Every room was teeming with tourants, mostly Japanese. By the 2nd level down, my claustrophobia was screaming and I returned to the daylight. My fellow companions later reported that they wished they had followed my example, because after the 2nd level the dark corridors became smaller and smaller, warmer and warmer, and began to reek of nervous perspiration, and there was nothing new to see but smaller examples of what had been carved out nearer the surface.
.
The next stop was a factory featuring semi-precious stones, but specializing in onyx. We were ushered into a workshop where an elderly smith sat before a stone lathe. He locked a rectangular block of onyx into the device, and then began noisily scaling away layers of stone chips. Eventually, he created a beautiful stone egg the color of thick honey, polished to perfection, standing on a coarse pedestal, this being the only remnant of the original block of onyx. I was very impressed because it was all done manually -- no buttons were pushed other than On and Off.
.
After this demonstration, we were herded into a large jewelry store, with precious stones displayed in every fashion -- necklaces, earrings, etc. Our group was led to another demonstration intended to whet our appetites so that we would buy something. My rug merchant antipathy was on high alert. However, after having given her spiel, the hostess asked if anyone could answer the question, “What does ‘Cappadocia’ mean?” Since I had been making taking mental notes for this Istanbullet all day, I immediately blurted out the answer that Ali had said that very morning, “Place of beautiful horses.” I now own the onyx egg described above.
.
Our last stop was Pigeon Valley. Because Cappadocia is basically a bunch of volcanic rocks, the inhabitants had to create food. To do so, they needed fertilizer. Hence the pigeons. There are thousands of pigeon coops carved into the hillsides. Anyone who has ever visited a major metropolitan area knows that pigeons = poop. In Cappadocia, pigeon poop was encouraged. Now, the wines from Cappadocia are considered Turkey’s finest, all due to guano.
.
Back at the hotel, while sitting reading outside in the cool (meaning I was alone) fading evening light, two workmen arrived. Their job was to attach rope lights to the metal latticework that held grape vines above where I was sitting. I can imagine that the eventual effect will be quite lovely. During this procedure, Omar brought them tea, then a plate of biscuits, and then a plate of orange slices -- Turkish hospitality. Turks are lovely people I will miss very much.
.

Upon Visiting Cappadocia, Day One

.
It was another solitary Sunday morning. I was listening to, but not watching, the live television broadcast of the opening race of the Formula One automobile competition season in Abu Dhabi, waiting for Total Rugby to come on, while playing Buddhist Solitaire (to win, you have to lose)*, when I remembered that the Australian girl I had met on the first day of my tour in Cappadocia was a fan of Formula One racing and would be at the race I was currently not watching. Also, the next leg of the racing circuit would take place in Istanbul. Therefore, I took these presentiments as signs that providence was telling me it was now time to set down my reminiscences of that trip.
.
Cappadocia is spelled and pronounced Kapadokya by the Turks. It is a region of fantastic geological and historical wonders in the very center of Turkey, truly unique in the world. (Google “Cappadocia” for images and history -- you will be astounded.) For my Washingtonian readers old enough to remember, the ash-fall from the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 was mere mist compared to the deluge of ash that covered this region.
.
I had arranged my time in Cappadocia to coincide with when Mavis and Herm (see previous Istanbullet) were scheduled to be there, in the unrealized hope that we might possibly meet. I arrived at the airport in Kayseri at around 6:00 am on an April Thursday. Kayseri (pronounced KIE-sa-ree) was known as Caesarea during the Roman times. By the fourth century AD, it had become a focal point of Christian life and faith. St. Basil the Great, who defended church doctrine against heretical movements, was once its leading cleric.
.
Due to the early hour, the only choice for getting to my hotel in Urgup (pronounced with umlauts) was an expensive taxi ride. The Urgup Inn Cave Hotel is a small, family run affair, the kind that Rick Steves advocates. (Sorry, Steve, but I discovered it on my own.) After several inquiries by the taxi driver, it was found up a steep, cobbled, one-lane side street. I was greeted by the owner, Omar (who resembled the villain in Nicholas Cage’s 2010 vehicle, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”). Omar was so mortified that my travel agent had not contacted him so that I could have taken a much cheaper shuttle van from the airport to the hotel, he gave me the best room in the ancient establishment.
.
The premises had originally been a monastery carved out of the side of a hill, long since eroded away, of which my room had been the chapel. It had a high, stone, barrel-vaulted/pointed-arched ceiling, and a huge double bed, the head of which abutted the stonework of a small, recessed altar space. The entrance to the bathroom consisted of a small stone archway that required me to duck upon entry. I cannot remember the number of times that I bashed my head against these stones upon exiting, but they were many.
.
After a typical Turkish breakfast (cucumber and tomato slices, white cheese, a freshly boiled egg, warm white bread with butter and a selection of toppings, washed down by way of a pot of tea), I was picked up by the tour van for my first day of being a tourist in a long while. Aboard were six Australians,** (two Muslim couples from Melbourne, and a mother/daughter pair from Sydney -- the daughter being the Formula One fan mentioned above), a Turkish couple, a taciturn American woman, a Canadian from Ontario, myself, and the guide, Ali (female).
.
Our morning adventure was the Open-Air Museum outside Goreme (pronounced GOO-re-meh). Summarized quote: “The Goreme Valley holds the largest concentration of rock-cut chapels in Cappadocia. Dating largely from the 9th century onwards, the valley’s 30-some chapels were (carved) out of the soft volcanic tuff.” (Insert: “Tuff” is solidified volcanic ash -- you can scrape it away with a finger.) “Many of the churches feature superb Byzantine frescoes depicting scenes from the Old and New Testaments, and particularly the life of Christ and the deeds of the saints.” Most of these frescos were literally defaced after the Muslim conquest.
.
After lunch, we were taken to a rug factory, where we were subjected to a promotional tour. We watched tiny hooded women sitting cross-legged on a cold marble floor tying countless knots into rugs that could take many months to finish, while an overweight, mustachioed and wigged swell in a silk suit, wearing pointed leather shoes, extrapolated on the superiority of Turkish rugs, “which feature two knots at every junction, instead of the single knots of rugs made in other nearby countries.” (I detest these rug hawkers. In Istanbul, they prowl the tourist areas and prey upon old people who are too polite to tell these well-dressed pests to go away. Instead, the victims are followed and badgered until they are intimidated into wasting their valuable touring time among the ancient sites, and are cajoled into a shop where they are given sweet tea, the knot story, etc. Once I figured out this game, I created a solution: when approached and asked, “Where do you come from?”, I reply, “So, you speak English?” “Yes, sir.” “Then, fuck off!” It works every time.)
.
There was one part of this exhibition that I found elucidating, however, and that was when we were shown how silk is mechanically removed from the cocoons—it reminded me of the way fishing line is retrieved on a spinning reel. The final stop of the tour was atop a ridge with an awesome (I never use this word casually) view of the region. I slept soundly that night because this was a lightly populated and historically Christian area. There were no police or ambulance sirens, no honking car horns, nor muezzin (the calls to prayer by the Imams, broadcast loudly from speakers atop the minarets that adorn every mosque).
.
* It’s a very simple, mindless game I invented as a kid. You are playing YOU against HIM. YOU always play first (I was a kid, OK?). Thoroughly shuffle the cards six times, using different shuffle patterns, but always use the same order of shuffle patterns. (Do you see why I’ve always thought I am mildly autistic?) Lay down 4 cards in an overlapping line. If the 4th card matches the number, face or suit of the 1st card, remove the 2 cards in between. If you get 4 cards of the same suit in a row, remove all 4, unless, by removing cards in twos you can remove more (it will make sense when you try it). Continue laying down/removing cards until they are all gone. If you have 16 or fewer cards left, you “win” and get to repeat the process until you end up with a line of over 16 cards. YOU then add up the total number of points YOU amassed. Now, HE repeats the process. Since the ultimate winner is the one with the fewest points at the end, the ideal hand is 18. The Buddhist aspect which I, of course, did not understand at the time, is that every time YOU “win”, YOU are adding more points to your total. Each win brings YOU ultimately closer to losing.
.
** Australians, Germans and New Zealanders are among the most common tourists in Turkey, a by-product of World War I. Turkey sided with Germany because of her ancient antipathetic relationship with Imperial Russia; the Australians and New Zealanders fought against the Turks because they were members of the British Commonwealth. Thousands died. Churchill lost his position as Lord of the Admiralty due to the naval losses in the Dardanelles. Eventually, the Allies withdrew in one of history’s most remarkable retreats: thousands of soldiers were evacuated without a single casualty due to hostile action. History calls the Gallipoli campaign a failure, yet out of it rose three modern, independent nations: Australia, New Zealand and Turkey.
.

Fun with Mavis and Herm: Part One

.
Over twenty-odd years ago, Nancy, Matthew and I moved from Los Angeles to northwestern Wisconsin, to a city named Eau Claire. Eau Claire is, duh, French, and means “clear water,” a misnomer since the river is the color of strong tea. This is due to the tons of bark that were shed from the millions of acres of pine trees that were harvested and rafted down the river past the town during the 19th century. The disintegrating bark continues to release tannin, hence the color of the water. Julia was born in Eau Claire.
.
The reason we were in Eau Claire is because I landed my first university teaching position there. Soon, I also took on the job as choir director/organist at Trinity Lutheran Church. That’s where I met the Hermodsons, Mavis, alto, and Warren (Herm), tenor. Warren was a teacher of reading at one of the local junior high schools, and Mavis was establishing a driving school. Most of Mavis’ students were Hmong immigrants. If you have seen the Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino, you have been introduced to these Laotian immigrants, mountain people who backed the US effort in Vietnam, and left en masse to save their ass to the northern Midwest when the communists took over.
.
Warren and Mavis are tourists now in Turkey, and we spent most of an early April day together. I met them at their hotel on a brisk Saturday morning and we set off to see some interesting sites that were not on their Istanbul itinerary. We began with a short walk down Barbaros Bulvari (Barbarous Boulevard) then caught a bus to Kabatas (pronounced “Cobatosh,” meaning “rough rocks”) where we took the Metro (urban rail) to Sultanahmet (named after Sultan Ahmet I, who built the Blue Mosque) and their first visitation site, the Basilica Cistern. This underground marvel dates from 532 AD, and is an amazing example of Byzantine engineering. Its existence was unknown for centuries. It wasn’t until over 100 years after the Ottoman conquest (when Constantinople became Istanbul in 1453) that the cistern was rediscovered -- people were found to be collecting water and fish by lowering buckets through holes in their basements. The cistern’s vaulted brick roof is supported by 336 columns, each over 26 feet tall, each capped with an ornately carved capital, each looted from Roman ruins. The two most unique columns rest on huge Medusa head bases. One of the heads is upside down. Tourists gape and ponder why. Why not? The columns were going to be underwater and underground for centuries. Which of the Byzantine engineers could have ever imagined they would be seen by anyone, much less millions of tourists?
.
Next, we walked through the huge courtyard of Yeni Camii (pronounced “Yenny Jommy,” meaning “New Mosque”), which dates from the 17th century, making it, by Istanbul standards, new. Then we passed through the Spice Bazaar, an L-shaped collection of crowded, aromatic stalls under a high ceiling, built as an extension of the New Mosque complex. It was originally called the Egyptian Bazaar because it was built using money from spices imported from Egypt.
.
Then, we used a Metro/taxi combination to visit the Chora Museum. This remarkable building takes its name from the Greek word “chora,” meaning an area outside of a city or in the countryside. A former monastery, later called the Church of St. Savior, later again called Kariye Camii, Chora originally lay outside the city walls built by Constantine, but was later contained within the massive Theodosian walls built in 423 AD, walls which protected Constantinople from invasion for over 1000 years. The church was destroyed by earthquakes and fires several times, but was always rebuilt. The present church-turned-mosque-turned-

museum dates from the 11th century. Its world-famous mosaics date from 1315-21, and depict the genealogy, infancy, and ministry of Jesus. My favorites are those depicting the life of the Virgin, stories taken from the Gospel of St. James written in the 2nd century, subject matter that was extremely popular in the Middle Ages, but later judged as inauthentic (apocryphal).
.
We returned to Sultanahmet for an outdoor lunch, where we were protected from the predicted rain (which arrived almost exactly on time) by a sturdy plastic canopy. Full, footsore, but not fatigued, we walked downhill to the Archeological Museum. This enormous musem includes artifacts spanning over 5,000 years. The most amazing thing to me is that this collection of antiquities was only begun in the mid-19th century! It now contains one of the world’s richest gatherings of classical and pre-classical artifacts. I have visited it three times, and have still not seen all the exhibits. In fact, when I visited it this latest time with Mavis and Warren, a whole new wing was open in an area that had been closed before.
.
We taxied back to Besiktas (pronounced “Beshiktosh,” meaning “five rocks”), where I got out, sent the Hermodsons on the way back to their hotel, and caught a bus home, in the happy knowledge that we would be back together in two weeks for more Adventures.
.

Upon Kumpir and LOSEV

.
Kumpir
.
Driven by a demanding urge for fajitas, and not having eaten Mexican food for many months, and knowing that there was a restaurant in Ortakoy that served them, and having the time and means to obtain them, I was hungrily bustling downhill. (I don’t bustle uphill. It’s simple physics: gravity determines the rate of bustle, and uphill bustling requires muscle, and I swore off on muscles years ago. Aince my rugby days, my philosophy on fitness has been, “No pain, no pain.”) Also it was a windy, misty Saturday and I knew the booksellers and craft tables would be out under the creaking tarpaulins that would be swaying and creaking ominously in the Bosporus breezes, and I was looking forward to obtaining another used book and watching the tourists spend money on junk.
.
I thought about stepping into the mosque -- a beautiful, relatively new structure (built in 1853), set right beside the water -- but it was too wet to take off my shoes. So I headed straight for the restaurant. It was closed. Not just for the day. Defunct! Disappointed, I walked over to the used-book vendors and bought a copy of Tristram Shandy, which is one of those books I have always meant to read but never got around to doing so. Then I went to the water’s edge and watched the white-capped Bosporus. The wind was gusting so forcefully that I had to hold onto my hat. Two drenched, crippled guys were peddling purse-sized packets of tissues; I didn't need any but I bought some. At the water's edge, a group of Indian youths were shooting pellet rifles at balloons in the water, getting soaked in the windy mist, laughing hysterically. It looked like fun.
.
Hunger took me to my favorite kumpir stand. Kumpir are not my favorite meal, but they are cheap and warm. A kumpir is a large potato that has been baked in aluminum foil. It is placed in a sturdy paper boat, sliced open but not cut through, then slathered with butter and grated mild, white cheese. The customer then chooses from several toppings that are dolloped on: wiener (sans pork) slices in tomato sauce, potato salad (that’s right, potato salad on top of a potato), corn, peas, diced dill pickles, sliced black or green olives, red hot sauce, sliced pickled mushrooms, diced pickled red lettuce, orange bulgar wheat with parsley accents, a pungent black olive paste, and some slimy pink goop I have never seen before nor tasted. This can all then be topped by a squirted line of ketchup or mayonnaise. My stand is the only one that offers small, hot, yellow peppers.
.
There are nine kumpir stands in a row here, connected by common walls. Each stand sells almost the identical product--the only noticeable difference is in the presentation. (NOTE: This is a common practice in Istanbul shopping malls. There will be entire floors dedicated to shoes or women's clothing, etc. To my untutored shopping eye, the only noticeable difference is in the presentation. Another echo of this practice can be seen on street advertisements, in which the same ad will appear on four adjacent billbords.) In the kumpir stands, behind glass screens, mounds of pickles, olives, bulgar, etc. are displayed with a very creative flair using carrot slices shaped into flowers, stars, faces, or rhythmic patterns similar to the wall and ceiling tiles adorning the interiors of mosques. On the one hand, it is very decorative and pleasing to the eye (Istanbul is a delightful place for practitioners of the photographic arts). On the other hand, everything is almost identical--an apt metaphor for the Turkey I have experienced.
.
LOSEV
.
On a Saturday in late March, I was faculty supervisor for three MEFIS International Baccalaureate students who gave an English lesson at the Losemili Cocuklar Vakfi (Home for Children with Leukemia), or LOSEV. The first such home was established in Ankara, the Turkish capital, and the Istanbul house opened in 2005. The children were all healthy, with all their hair, but had missed so much school while they were hospitalized that they come to LOSEV on the weekends for tutoring provided by volunteers, such as my students: Rony Alp (Alp meaning “hero” -- most Turkish names have a meaning), Dilara (½ Turk, ½ German), and Tina (½ Turk, ½ Italian, Jewish -- an interesting name for a Jewish girl, Christina).
.
At any given time, there were between 10-20 children in the room There were not enough chairs so the latecomers had to sit on the heaters or friends’ laps. The number of students constantly fluctuated because the kids would just get up and walk out without notice. The lesson took 45 minutes and covered the prepositions “in, on, under, between, and next to” (I would have used “beside”). Large, laminated pictures of things one might find in parks were held aloft (trash can, fountain, duck pond, zoo, playground, rest rooms, picnic table, swings, statue). The teacher would show the picture and say the word in Turkish; the children would respond in English. I sat next to a boy named Erdem (“virtue”). He left twice and did not return the second time until sandwiches (cold chicken chunks with shredded carrots and lettuce, no mayo) were served for lunch.
.
After the lesson, my students disappeared immediately, giving me some time to read in a nearby park until my ride arrived. I passed a Turkish man sleeping loudly on a bench in midday, and saw a rare black man walking two German Shepherds. Having given up on Tristram Shandy—too obtuse, even for a random/chaotic like myself -- I am reading Snow, by the Nobel Prize winning Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk. If you ever become interested in modern Turkish history and like well-written novels, start with Birds Without Wings, then read Snow.
.

Istantidbits V

.
More Turkish Delights
.
Crepe, Swing = Men's apparel shops
Gluttoni, TENT = Apparel shops for large men
FitFlops, Crash = Men's shoes
ZEN = An air conditioning and heating company
.
Differences I noticed between Sophia and Istanbul last Christmas
.
Although only 480 km apart, there are distinct physical differences between the humans inhabiting these two major population centers. Where Turks are generally short and thin, Bulgarians tend to be tall and stout. The women are bustier, and only too happy to show one the difference (sartorially speaking, of course). My finely-honed investigative instincts tell me that this is due to religion: one culture believes that drinking beer and eating pork is okay; the other does not. You guess which is which.
.
Traffic. The streets in Istanbul are generally narrow and choked with vehicles: trucks frequently party in the opposite lane while the driver drinks tea and/or plays backgammon with friends; cars are parked on the sidewalks, and motorbikes weave among them while we pedestrians are frequently forced to walk in the streets among the honking vehicles; stop/go lights are rare. In other words, it's a jostling, friendly chaos. In Sophia, the streets are very wide, every intersections has stop/go lights, and the sidewalks are free of cars. But so are the streets. The few cars that chugged by were old and worn (like the author, but he still chugs -- just ask anyone who has had the misfortune to sit next to him too long on a bus), and crossing the street was eerily safe. In Sophia, I waited 25 minutes for a taxi, during which time I was turned down by three drivers because they did now know where my hotel was, even when given the address and telephone number. I have never waited over two minutes for a Taxi in Istanbul.
.
Turkish TV: The Cigarette Smudge
.
I believe I have previously mentioned the monumentally unsuccessful Turkish anti-smoking campaign. Large No Smoking posters adhere to the walls of every public building, with threats of inconsequential fines. On TV, whenever a character appears with a nicotine delivery system in his or her hand or mouth, it is invisibilated by an oval smudge or, in earlier versions, a cartoon flower. So, in Casablanca, Bogie tells Sam to play it again while he broods over the piano with a flower covering his hand while smoke rises in a cinematic wreath of incense around his head.
.
It's so silly. The majority of the adult population in Turkey smokes. (Islam forbids drinking alcohol, maybe because alcohol came to the desert peoples carried and abused by the marauding Crusaders. Tobacco hadn't reached the Middle East when the Koran was written. Go figure.) Where I come from, we say of a heavy smoker, "He smokes like a chimney." The Italians have another aphorism: "Fumare della Turka."
.
Language
.
Turkish is a very economical language. One sees this best when signing bifurcated official documents that have the Turkish text on the left side of the page and the English translation on the right. There is much more white space (fewer words) in the Turkish column. In other words, the original Turks did not waste time creating or absorbing unnecessary words. I know very little Turkish, but my favorite example is in naming the days of the week. The Turks do not have names for Saturday or Monday. They simply call these days after the days they follow: Cuma (Friday) becomes Cumartesi (the day after Friday); Pazar (Sunday) becomes Pazartesi (The day after Sunday. While efficient, a language such as this does not lend itself well to the ambiguities and nuances that create great poetry and plays. For instance, the subtle humor of the Country-Western title, "I Gave Her the Ring, and She Gave Me the Finger," would be lost on the Turk.
.

In My Room at MEF International School

.
Autobiographical songs are the usually the very definition of maudlin -- tearfully sentimental screeds. (For all you Dan Brown Da Vinci Code fans, the term derives from the Old French word Madeleine, describing the weeping of Mary Magdalene.) Brian Wilson’s song, “In My Room,” an early Beach Boys hit, touchingly portrays a boy describing how his bedroom is a haven from his teenage angst, but does not mention the Playboy magazines under his mattress.
.
MEF: Model Educational Facility, or Marble Educational Farce. Here’s why I have come to this sad conclusion:
.
MEF International School (MEFIS) was an afterthought, possibly intended to bring in more money to the MEF National School or, hopefully, some prestige. MEFIS is therefore the stepchild. Like Cinderella, we get the leftovers. My Room is nested on the third floor of the National School’s Music Building. When I must meet with administrators or colleagues, or even need to make photocopies, I face a long, uphill, exposed-to-the-weather walk to the building where the other MEFIS classrooms are located, as well as the cafeteria.
.
My Room is actually located on the fourth floor by American standards, since in Turkey the ground floor is the bottom one and the first floor is the next one up (amazing concept!). However, to get to the ground floor, I have to walk down a flight of marble stairs before I can begin climbing the three flights of marble stairs to My Room. Each flight of stairs consists of 20 marble steps. There is no elevator, hence no wheelchair access. But then, of course, there are no handicapped people in Turkey, as well as no homeless people, no homosexuals, no radicals, etc. In Islamotropolis, these aberrations only occur among the infidels.
.
My Room originally consisted of two L-shaped piano practice rooms. To create My Room, MEF simply removed the dividing wall. Get a piece of graph paper. Starting at the upper left, [1] draw a line down 6 squares; [2] now go horizontally to the right 12 squares; [3] go up 6 squares; [4] go left 4 squares; [5] go down 2 squares; [6] go left 4 squares; [7] go up 2 squares; [8] from there, draw a line to your starting point. You now have a crow, pigeon and seagull view of my room if the roof were removed (which, if such were to occur, would rapidly fill up with guano, since these birds are always swooping by or landing on window sills during the daylight hours).
.
My desk with its circa 1995 computer faces the entryway [7]. On the opposite side of My Room is a mauve “Pearl River” Yamaha upright piano (just tuned today!). Behind the piano, the walls are filled with 3-tiered open wooden cabinets containing six guitars with broken strings, six dusty, unused electronic keyboards, boxes full of discarded drama texts, some ridiculous metallic, so-called Turkish drums, two nice conga drums and, closer, a freestanding cabinet containing my music theory packets and a CD player so old it does not have a pause function. Imagine trying to explain the significance of the six-note French horn transition between the major theme groups in the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 without being able to pause! I knew you would understand my frustration.
.
My Room has two large windows at stages [1] and [3]. The window at stage [1] has protective metal bars to prevent someone from entering my room from the adjacent roof. The window at stage [3] has no such bars, so that a child could fall four stories to certain death by gravity + marble. So, by MEF thinking, it is more important to protect the unusable guitars and dusty electronic keyboards than the children. For reasons obvious to me but not to MEF, I have positioned my piano in front of this window.
.
Position [2] consists of a solid wall of window panes, with a magnificent view of an escarpment of apartment complexes that rises higher than the school, looming above an under-developed valley adorned with serpentine, broken-linked waves of attractive, modern stone walls separated by waste dumps and hungry dogs. Somebody spent a lot of lira to put up those pretty walls, but nothing has yet to come of this speculative investment.
.
Into My Room come children from grades 5 through 9, winded from the climb up the flights of marble stairs. There are not enough chairs for the students in grades 8 (24) and 9 (22) to sit, so the late-comers have to plunk down on the floor or squeeze in onto the heaters. I have to buy pencils and sharpeners to give to those students who arrive without them. Turkish pencils do not have erasers, and classrooms do not have wall-mounted pencil sharpeners. Every student is expected to carry from class to class a zippered cloth bag the size and shape of a Taco Del Mar burrito containing the equivalent of the contents of a competent secretary’s right-hand desk drawer: pencils, pens, erasers, pencil sharpeners, highlighters, adhesive tape, white out, permanent markers, post-its, paper clips, rubber bands, you name it. In the meantime, since I received no classroom supplies this year (I even had to buy my own printer and ink cartridges), I provide my students anything extra or lost from the above categories from a mobile cabinet, a three-drawer knee-banger on coasters with broken knobs that fits under my desk and slides away at the slightest nudge so that I frequently have to disappear under my desk to pull it back into sight, usually bumping my head in front of my bemused students. (Actually, I always do that on purpose to make them laugh.)
.
I am going to miss these kids, and my fellow ex-pat teachers. But I will not regret leaving MEF International School.
.

Upon My Second Birthday in Istanbul (February 10, 2011)

.
"‘I’m more likely to get hit by a motorcycle on this sidewalk than I am by crossing the street," I thought as I made my way to the bus stop. It was a beautiful Thursday, cold and clear. I was on my way to visit an exhibit that had caught my interest over a year ago, but which I had yet to see. It was billed as the "1453 Panorama", 1453 being the year that Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks and became Istanbul. The exhibit was just outside a stretch of some of the remaining Theodosian walls, magnificent structures that had protected Constantinople for centuries until the Turks finally created cannons powerful enough to bring them down, while the Western Christians refused to provide any reinforcements.
.
The bus was, as usual, quite warm, but today it felt good. After a while it filled up to a point that someone had to sit beside me. Turks do not like to invade the space of foreigners until there is only one choice: stand or sit. They know I am a foreigner because of my mutton-chop beard and the fact that I wear Birkenstocks with socks in cold weather. (They stare at my feet. If my feet were breasts, maybe I could understand better how women must feel when trying to carry on a conversation with a lusty male.) Also, women do not sit next to men until the same choice has to be made. A well-attired woman chose to sit next to me. After a reasonable time, not wanting to appear over-eager or aggressive, I asked if she spoke English. She said “No.”
.
I turned my attention to the ever-changing city. I noticed that Doritos was offering heart-shaped chips in honor of Valentine’s Day (never mind that Valentine was a Christian martyr, sainted in 500 AD). I noticed for the first time that there were huge nests high up in the trees inside the Topkapi Palace complex, big enough for herons. (Topkapi means "cannon ball," which is pertinent to our 1453 theme). I noticed that there were no guards stationed in the Plexiglas cubicles outside Dolmabahce Palace, probably because it was too cold. Normally there would be two formally attired guards with polished steel helmets and ceremonial automatic weapons, no matter how hot it was in direct sunlight, stationed outside the Dolmebahce (pronounced dole-meh-BAH-jeh, meaning a garden built on reclaimed land) Gate, a vigorously ornate barrier that couldn’t stop a motorcycle that had accidentally jumped the curb and had actually come down onto the street for a change. My mind wandered. My current students think Glee is real. They refuse to believe that American high schools are not inhabited by 20-somethings with perfect teeth, nor that all schools do not have million dollar budgets for stage productions.
.
I asked the woman still seated next to me, auf Deutsch, if she spoke German. She said “Nein.” My keenly honed interpersonal skills alerted me that she didn’t want to talk.
.
Upon arriving at the exhibit, I was surprised to see that there was a cue of people outside. That was fine, because I always carry a book (currently "Invictus" -- history and rugby, the perfect combination) just for such contingencies. The entry fee was 10TL, but my teacher pass got me in for 5. Once in the building, I spent the other 5 on an electronic device that would speak to me in English. I slipped it around my neck and went to stand in another line and reopened my book. I then slipped my valise over my shoulder so that it wouldn’t get jostled off when the line finally moved forward.
.
When the line finally moved forward, we ascended a dark, winding staircase and came out under a large dome painted with scenes depicting the glorious Turks killing the infidels. I struggled to get the English translating device to my ears, but its cords had become so entangled in the straps of my valise that they had created a macramé on my chest. I knew that there was a time limit to my visit, having seen previous crowds being ushered out en masse. I had to work fast. My disentanglement struggles were heightened by Turkish children head-butting my private regions. I finally got the cords free and the speaker phones onto my ears in time to hear a brilliant, succinct description of the actions depicted on the huge, convex mural in TURKISH!
.
There was a large fellow standing beside a control panel wearing the costume of a Janissary (the Sultan’s personal guards -- slaves, formerly Christian children). I gestured at the device, said “Ingilizce” (English) and he calmly punched some buttons, each of which I had just pushed to no effect, and English flooded into my ears. I had made it to the second station when the announcement to exit sounded. UNFAIR! I hung in there. One scene depicted the interior of Constantinople, and the narrator said I should be able to see Hagia Sophia in the background. I looked and looked. Then I realized that I didn’t recognize it because it did not have minarets yet! It was just a distant bulge on the horizon. I lingered for as long as I could, then I cautiously dribbled down the stairs like the last drop swirling down a drain.
.
On the way home, I got off the tram in Gulhane (meaning "place of roses"), just outside the North Shield Pub, a venue that carries international rugby on TV. The paper announcements that were adhered to the brick exterior informed me that I now have birthday presents awaiting me this weekend: on Saturday, England vs Italy, and Scotland vs Wales; on Sunday, Ireland vs France.
.
Then I walked on to Sirkeci (pronounced SEER-keh-jee, meaning something to do with a circus) Main Station, which was the last stop of the Orient Express. The foundation stone was laid in 1888 (one year before Washington became a state, and Germany became unified under Bismarck). The station opened in 1890. The first voyage of the Orient Express departed from Paris to the sounds of Mozart’s "Turkish March" (which Nancy plays so well, but which I can no longer stand, since it seems to be the only piece by Wolfgang that Turks know or play. It is constantly ringing in my music building, making me long for “Chopsticks” or “Heart and Soul”). The train passed through Strasbourg, France; Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Ulm and Munich, Germany; Vienna, Austria; Budapest, Hungary; Bucharest, Romania; Rousse and Varna, Bulgaria; and terminated in Sirkeci, Istanbul. The Orient Express stopped running in 1977, the year my son, Matthew, was born (I think). [EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes, that's correct. -- MV.]
.

Upon Visiting Dr. ENT

.
Ears are a musician’s best friend. Unless one is a titanic genius like Beethoven, hearing loss can be a career-ending disaster. So, recently, after a morning shower, when I removed the cotton swab I had been using to clean my right ear and noticed that the stem of the swab no longer held a small ball of cotton on the end, I became concerned. Sure enough, after many, many years of cleaning my ears with cotton swabs (a very pleasurable experience, I find), the dreaded warnings of my parents, siblings, teachers and friends had finally come true -- I had a wad of cotton jammed up against an ear drum.
.
It was like when I was hit in the face by a basketball last fall, and one of the lenses of my glasses was knocked out, without my being aware of it at the time, as I was, understandably, slightly dazed. (I don’t play basketball, never have. I can appreciate the athleticism of the sport, especially when played at the higher levels, but I hate being in an over-heated gym, and I always flinch when that horrid klaxon goes off to announce someone is entering/leaving the floor. As a former rugby player, I also dislike sports that have so many time outs—just play the game and have your meetings afterward.) Anyway, this annoyingly long analogy refers to the fact that, during the remainder of that basketball-dazed day, I wondered if I had received a slight concussion, because my vision was blurry. It wasn’t until I casually took off my glasses to rub the lenses clean that I discovered that the left lens was missing. Now I was dealing with blurry, better yet, fuzzy hearing.
.
I tried to remove the wad of cotton myself using first wooden toothpicks (stupid, yes, but I’m a guy), then the sharp, curved end of a device intended for flossing teeth. No luck, and, luckily, no damage. So I went to the school doctor in hopes that he could help. I took a clean cotton swab from which I had removed the cotton from one end (Why take the original? Who wants a ball of day-old ear wax in their breast pocket for a couple of hours? Shrek?). Using the open-ended swab, I mimed the action and the doctor got the idea. He probed my ear with a light, and tried to extract the wad with the smallest pair of tweezers he had—a surgical clamp (you know, the kind that, so I’ve heard, makes a good roach clip). He shoved a roach clip down my ear canal! Needless to say, it didn’t work.
.
He recommended me to Dr. ENT who works in a clinic in Besiktas, and wrote me a note with all the necessary information. A Turkish friend told me that the doctor’s note would be easily understood by any taxi driver, and that I should arrive in the morning so as to avoid a crowd and not have to wait a long time. So I followed her advice and slept in until 11:00. I didn’t want to take a taxi from my apartment all the way to the clinic (too expensive), and my friend had warned that the clinic was a top of a very steep hill, but if I took a bus all the way to Besiktas the taxi drivers wouldn’t take me because the trip was too short for them to make a decent fare.
.
So I took a bus to Ortakoy, then walked half the way to Besiktas. It’s level, along the Bosphorous, and the weather outside wasn't frightful (doot-da-doot-doot-da-DOO-doot ). The taxi driver drove me right up to the building that I assumed housed the clinic. To do so, he made a sharp left turn from the middle lane of a busy, six-lane Boulevard (not an unusual tactic by Istanbul driving standards), cutting off a passenger car which had to brake suddenly and was immediately rammed from behind by another vehicle. Undaunted, my taxi driver continued his multi-lane U-turn, leaving behind the honking, swearing occupants of the vehicles damaged by this maneuver. We both understood his situation: he needed to get out of there, fast. I paid quickly, laughed as he sped away, and entered the building.
.
After climbing two flights of stairs, I was told that I was in the wrong building, and I needed to go back outside and turn left at !@#$%^&* Street. Which I did. !@#$%^&* Street consisted of a stairway of 186 concrete steps. Once I reached the top, I faced even more climbing up a very steep street. But wait! There was a guard kiosk that protected an upper entrance to the same building I had just left. I could have taken an elevator! The guard looked at my note and started laughing. I was too winded to join in the jocular ribaldry. He pointed me back down the stairs to one building farther to the left. He was still laughing as I started down.
.
Once I entered the correct building, I had to climb 36 more stairs to get to the clinic. So my morning step aerobics regimen included 222 ascending and descending stairs, all accomplished without breakfast and while half deaf. I checked in, hung up my hat and coat and waited for a seat to open. The place was packed, mostly with families of small children. Turks are very fecund. But why is there so much illness of the ears, noses and throats of the young, especially since they bundle the children up so tightly at the slightest hint of coolness? Today, the temperature was in the 40’s (F), yet anyone with a fur-lined hood had it tightly winched around their head, zipped parkas and ski gloves were everywhere. Maybe it’s because, oh, what the hell, I don’t care.
.
Dr. ENT saw me after a mere 20 minute wait. The wad was out in seconds. He repeated the warnings of my parents, siblings, teachers and friends. I now have 20/20 hearing again. So, I have learned a valuable later-in-life lesson: when it comes to showers and cotton swabs -- no more showers!
.

Istantidbits IV

.
More About Turkish Toilets
.
When one needs to do Number Two, the Turks have a simple system to deal with the occasional skid mark. (Actually, unless your stool is as hard as a dog turd, there is always a skid mark; the toilets are made by a national monopoly, EGEseramik, and the base of the toilet does not line up with the human "nether throat.") To deal with this problem, every Turkish toilet is provided with a small plastic brush that is placed in a small plastic brush house that sits beside every Turkish sit-down toilet. When needed, one simply waits for the tank to refill while pulling up and refastening one's pants, then one flushes the toilet again while scrubbing away the skid mark. Simple + disgusting = simply disgusting, but a good life lesson: we all need to regularly scrub away the shit we have created.
.
Parking Meters
.
I have never seen an inanimate parking meter in Istanbul. As I have reported before, the parking here is as random and chaotic as the driving. So, when there is organized parking along the streets, it is handled by the Parking Meter Guys. These Guys (always men) wear a distinctive, all-weather uniform, and patrol a small beat, usually no longer than a single city block. They carry a device that records whenever a vehicle is parked in their turf. When the driver returns, the device has recorded how much time has expired, the required fee is paid, and a receipt issues from the device. Nifty system.
.
Mall Security
.
Anytime one goes to a large shopping mall in Istanbul, one must pass through a security system that resembles what one would find in a national airport. One must remove all metallic objects -- for me, coins, keys, and my ever-present mechanical pencil (Never Forget: choral musicians ALWAYS have a pencil). They also check automobile trunks.
.
Guns at Lunch
.
MEF International School has only two entrances, both manned by at least three armed guards 24/7. Every vehicle entering the campus is checked by these men. During the lunch hours, which are separated between Primary and Secondary schools, these armed guards sit and eat among the students. I find this obvious presence of weapons unsettling, but the children, innocent as birds, do not notice.
.
Turkish Delight
.
Ufuk = A local high school
.
Fonetik Spelinj
.
Bale = Ballet
Baraj = Barrage
Bulavar = Boulevard
Burjvazi = Bourgeoisie
Caz = Jazz
Cografy = Geography
Diyalog = Dialogue
Egzersiz = Exercise
Eksper = Expert
Esens = Essence
Frikik = Free Kick
Kokteyl Sosic = Cocktail Sausage
Koleksiyon = Collection
Oksijen = Oxygen
Opsiyon = Option
.
Add/Change One Letter to a Turkish Word and What Do You Get?
.
At = Horse; Ata = Father
Bashka = Other, Different; Bashkan = President
Bora = Hurrican; Boran = Trumpeter
Defile = Fashion Show; Define = Buried Treasure
Divan = Council of State; Divane = Crazy
Emek = Work; Emmek = Suck
Fen = Art; Fena = Awful
Hac = Pilgrimage to Mecca; Hace = Crucifix
Hasar = Loss; Hasat = Harvest
Haya = Testicle; Hayal = Imagination
Idrak = Intelligence; Idrar = Urine
Iflah = Improvement; Iflas = Bankruptcy
Ikrah = Disgust; Ikram = Honor
Istek = Wish; Istem = Demand
Kerim = Gracious; Keriz = Sucker
.
Does Anyone Actually Read My Blog?
.
I am struggling with the concept of "To and Fro." For instance, which direction is To? Left? Right? Up? Down? Diagonal? Zig-zag? Wibbeldy-wobbeldy? Obviously, Fro is To's opposite, but must To always come first? Is the concept of "Fro and To" even possible? Would this cause a space/time warp? I would appreciate your help.
.
My inclination is that To is stage left. Am I right about that? But what if To is stage right? What's left? I don't have a clue. Do you? Because when one thinks about it, left is just left of right, and right is just right of left, and then we're just going around in a circle, clockwise or counter. So, what's left? Right?
.
Don't you just LOVE philosophy?
.