I feel horrible at the moment. For reasons I'm not even sure of, I got another bout of gastroentiritis and was up all night while my body tried to get rid of every last bit of fluid inside me. Not fun, but as this is my fourth in two years, they get a little easier to deal with each time.
I've had a crazy couple weeks with Sarah (who left Saturday morning) and when I wasn't working, she and I were tearing up Zhytomyr. Haven't gotten any of that up on the blog, though, 'cause I've been a bit busy. I only have three weeks of work left. It's odd. I realize I need to start packing up and stuff, but I haven't even begun thinking about it. Mostly I'm trying to get this last cycle of teaching done and get my lesson plans in order to turn over to the next batch of teacher trainers.
Anyway, one cool thing that has gone on is that the Deputy Director of Peace Corps (as in, the whole world-wide program) was visiting Ukraine and came to see the wall. I was told I should have a training session going at 3:00 PM on a Thursday. This is the time when everyone is at work or at school and it's a little hard to get a group of kids there. Panicked is not the right word, but stressed is.
Luckily, one of the teachers I have trained agreed to bring her class. I called in a few favors to Polissya, ACET and my climbing friends and everyone was good enough to take the afternoon off from work or skip their university classes and the whole thing went off without a hitch. The Director of Peace Corps Ukraine was with her, along with two guys from the Peace Corps communication department who were taking photos, one of which also took a stab at climbing the wall.
Here's the email I just recieved from the Deputy Director:
***
Dear Daniel,
Thank you for welcoming me and my staff to the Zhytomar Climbing Wall. I was so impressed to see how you managed to combine elements of fun with HIV/AIDS education. It was very clear that under your guidance, kids who visited the wall received important life lessons, as well as a boost in self confidence (this became abundantly clear when our own Chris Harnisch made it to the top of the wall and was smiling for the rest of the day!). I applaud you for your can-do attitude and the determination that you have instilled in much of the youth of Zhytomyr. You represent the highest ideals of a Peace Corps Volunteer.
I wish you the best of luck for your final month in Ukraine.
Sincerely,
Jody Olsen
Deputy Director of the Peace Corps
***
Kinda cool, huh?
Monday, October 23, 2006
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Turkey: Mt. Dan-Rah (Pics)
It was an island uninhabitable by design: a small oblong of razor sharp rock covered in thorny brambles. Weary of the interior, I opted to sit on a short stone spire sticking out of the ocean, my feet protesting as I tried to find smooth places to place them, my backside no happier when I finally sat down, legs just over the sea, the water gently lapping up against them.
Sarah swam up from a sandbar she had been exploring, pulling off her mask and snorkel and tossing them beside mine on a nearby protrusion. A few hundred yards away floated our yacht, the blobs of color around it were our fellow passengers, who always seemed reluctant to swim more than ten feet away from it. My pockets were full of interesting shells, some of which would later prove to be owned by other creatures of the world. Having snorkeled nearly every inch of shoreline of the bay where our yacht was anchored and around the island itself, I was taking an enjoyable break to get warm in the sun, saltwater drying on my skin.
“Think we could climb that?” I asked Sarah.
Mountains—albeit small ones—rose up from the shoreline of the mainland. Their surfaces seemed like piles of pebbles left by some god child, stacked steep up to three separate peaks, the middle one noticeably higher than the others. Goats made noises at each other as they picked their way along the rocks, chewing on the scrub brush growing from the crevices. There was nothing remotely approaching a path to those peaks; there was nothing remotely approaching flatness, actually, but if you thought in terms of climbing rather than hiking, it was just a grade four scramble that couldn’t take more than an hour.
“Probably,” said Sarah, leaving it at that. I took her lack of enthusiasm as an idea rejection.
***
Several hours, the rest of a book and a number of backgammon games later, Sarah proffered a suggestion. Most of the shells had been cleaned and were drying in the bathroom of the small cabin Sarah and I shared with Doyon. The fact of other ownership became known when a couple of the shells magically moved themselves several feet away from where I had put them. The owners and their homes soon found themselves on an unasked-for adrenaline joyride through the air before splashing back into the brink.
“Let’s climb the mountain,” Sarah said to me.
She said this, of course, with only an hour before we were scheduled to leave the bay. I wasn’t sure we could get up and down in time. Sarah had spent the past two hours tanning herself and writing in her notebook a few feet from me. Why we hadn’t started earlier, save perhaps to make the experience intense instead of leisurely (I do not deny that Sarah’s subconscious as well as mine decides things in this way), I don’t know.
I thought for a moment.
“Cool.”
***
“Don’t let the devil goats get you!” Brenna yelled from the ship as Sarah and I kicked our way to shore, shoes held over our heads. The goats had been so named because, yes, they did have a certain malevolent look about them. They stayed out of our way, though, as we put on our socks and shoes and started scrambling up the steep rocks, showing up their prowess and hurting their collective pride. They “nahhed” at us in scorn.
Sarah took the lead because we both have our areas of expertise, and trailfinding is certainly one of Sarah’s. Trailfinding here entailed locating climbable rocks while avoiding the sharp branches of the shrubs. The rock was a hard, porous limestone, which made climbing up them easy, a plethora of holds available for hands and feet. We practically ran up the thing, and within half an hour were on the top, looking down at our ship and the others in the bay.
It was amazingly beautiful, but I’ll let the pictures tell the thousand words. We had enough time to pose for them, take a couple more of ourselves bouldering with that beautiful backdrop, then rock hop back down to the shoreline to swim to the boat, our little adventure taking less than 45 sweat-soaked minutes.
On top of the mountain
On board, I looked at the maps of the area. Although the mountain range behind the one we had been on had its peaks named, ours must have been too small to merit labels, or the map wasn’t detailed enough, being more concerned with the topography of the ocean floor. The point is, as far as we knew, our peak was unnamed.
So we named it, smashing our own together.
We had just climbed Mount Dan-Rah.
***
After seeing a sunken city, the foundations of its houses visible through the clear water, after seeing a fishing village on an island reachable only by ship, a castle clinging to its one peak, we sailed into a cove and dropped anchor.
As the day gave way to night, we started secretly drinking the vodka and raki (a Turkish liquorish-flavored liquor not unlike ouzo) that we had smuggled on board after our stop in Kash. We were not supposed to bring any drinks on board, which meant the ship had a monopoly of the market and allowed them to mark everything up 100%. Because we didn’t have the World Bank on our side, we were forced to turn into raki runners and Pepsi pirates (my treasure trove of cans now buried at the bottom of the ship’s cooler). Tipsy and happy, we scarfed down dinner and got dressed. Here, in the middle of the night in the middle of the Mediterranean, we were going dancing.
At 11:00 PM, a speedboat pulled up beside the yacht and everyone under the age of 30 got on board, the older people begging off, perhaps thinking it wasn’t their scene. The speedboat stopped at the other boats anchored in the cove and soon a party was making its way to a sandy beach, to a dance club reachable only by boat.
“Pirate’s Cove” was a three sided wooden building on stilts, its open side facing out towards the water. Between it and the docks were a number of wooden platforms with pillows and chairs, and they’d already lit a small bonfire before we arrived. The selection of music, spun by one of the bartenders in between getting drinks, was the most eclectic I’ve ever heard, from Counting Crows to Jay Z to Madonna, the only seeming criteria being that the next song had to be an absolutely different genre from the last. This made for better dancing because I can get bored of the same stuff after a while and loved moving to a beat never stopped changing.
Brenna, Me, Sarah, Stella, Ryan and Doyon
We danced for hours before taking a break on one of the wooden platforms, cooling off in the night air. A movie moment happened shortly thereafter: all the Americans on the boat were on that platform, as well as Stella and Doyon, who simply watched us with raised eyebrows. A fair amount of America bashing had been going on during the four days on the yacht, about its foreign policies and attitudes in general, about Bush in particular. The most virulent bashing came from the Americans, Brenna spearheading it, and the lone defensive voice was me. I was quite an America basher until I lived in Ukraine, and now I feel that even though we screw up a lot and deserve most of our stereotypes, we’re still a damn good country trying to do damn good things. I even think one of our better qualities is our self-criticism, but all of that floated away for a few minutes on the opening chords of Don Mclean’s “American Pie.”
“A long, long time ago/I remember how that music used to make me smile…”
It came to us on the night breeze from the over-amped stereo system, and no matter what we thought about our country, at that moment we felt. The thirty or so other people sitting outside—all from other countries—quietly listened, as the four of us began singing together. We four sat and looked off at the sky, the water, occasionally glancing at each other but mostly singing for ourselves, our voices in near whispers during the verses but rising up joyously together on the choruses. The four of us: Sarah, Ryan, Brenna and me, are all travelers; we pride ourselves on having visited and lived in many places, on speaking other languages and being comfortable in other cultures, but that moment something was very clear, at least to me: we were inescapably American. No one else on that beach, in that club, knew those words, at they were one of thousands of strings that bound us together as a people, a culture, a nation. And while it looked like a cool Almost Famous/”Tiny Dancer” movie moment, it was more than that because we all felt very close just then, something we remarked upon later, drawn together by childhoods staring out car windows while this song played on car radios, now adults out in the middle of nowhere in an area of the world that mostly hates us and being together being very, very American. And normally to be “very American” is a negative label, but just then it was a very positive, very beautiful concept.
***
Leave it to the Australians to ratchet up the party. At some point in the evening two of the Australian girls had gotten behind the bar and were helping to serve drinks, getting in a shot or two (or seven) for themselves. At one point I was getting hit in the back with ice cubes and, when I turned around, Jess, one of the Australian girls, was tugging the front of her tank top down and offering me a target. I underhand tossed one cube of ice at her and she maneuvered to catch it between her breasts. Another ice cube, another perfect catch and soon our Turkish bartenders, Vinnie and Hussein (yes, that was their names), happy about all that close-by cleavage, started giving out free bottles of water and soon lined up glasses and gave us all a free shot of vodka.
The dance floor was a loud group of moving bodies. Ryan was glued onto Stella at that point and possibly I should have been going for Jess but I was having too much fun dancing with Brenna, even though I knew it would probably cost me any action that night. Sarah was dancing with Ahmed, the first mate of our boat, who had started the evening by saying to her: “I want be with you tonight.”
Groovin' at Pirate's Cove. Ahmed is on the right
The lack of English meant that the insinuation could have gone either way but it was pretty apparent when, a few dances later, he was pushing his tongue in her mouth. Being attractive, Turkish and made of muscle, Sarah wasn’t minding.
***
I stripped naked and dove into the water, narrowing missing Sarah, who was dog-paddling in all her pinkness. Skinny dipping had not been our idea: it had been suggested by Brenna and seconded by Stella. Stella was now under a pile of blankets with Ryan on the top deck, though, and Brenna had become morose and lonely during the evening (there had been a distinct lack of lesbians at the club) and had gone straight back to her cabin. Most of the boat was still back at the club, our group calling it a night at 3:00 AM while they were still going strong. The music carried across the water towards us, seemingly as loud at the boat as it had been on the beach.
Never ones to let a good idea die, Sarah and I decided to still go skinny dipping, even though no one else would. Besides, who wouldn’t want to say they had gone skinny dipping in a cove in Turkey in blue-black water under a moon one day from full?
Inexplicably, the water four inches under the surface was warm while the top layer was cold. Although it was fun, the novelty wore off the colder I got and I told Sarah I was going in. Showered off and carrying my blankets up on the deck, I noticed Ahmed spreading out a blanket over two of the deck cushions and putting more on top, creating a double bed. He was ambitious. I knew he had told Sarah things like: “Look my eyes” and “I think I loving you,”, but from what I understood, she had declined his offers. Still, I made my bed up as far as possible from his.
A few minutes later, I couldn’t find Sarah. She wasn’t in the water, she wasn’t on the deck and she wasn’t in the cabin. I didn’t think she was drunk enough to have had a problem swimming, but it was too small a boat for her to have disappeared. Finally, though, she swam into view from the front of the boat and I handed her clothes to her when she got on board.
In a life moment Sarah declared to be one of her cooler ones, Ahmed had descended the chain that stretched taut from the bow of the boat down just above the water and sat on it, his feet dangling in the water. Sarah had pulled herself up out of the water, one hand on the chain, the other on the back of his head, breasts exposed and dripping in the moonlight, to make out with him.
I think her next decision to sleep on that bed with Ahmed fell into the category of teasing. She had no intention of having sex with him: with a stranger on a deck filled with half a dozen other people (most of them from the boat’s 50-and-over contingent) was not her style, but the topless making out probably gave Ahmed the idea that he was on his way to scoredom.
I awoke a few hours later, almost at daybreak, to hear her telling him to stop and that she wanted to sleep, her hushed whispers carrying over the deck. Sarah can take care of herself, but when I still heard her sharp protestations a few minutes later, I thought I might have to get up and say something (and that would have been an interesting fight to film: two guys sliding around on a dew-slicked deck, ropes and booms and elderly tour patrons all caught up in the fray). Apparently he laid off his groping, though, because soon it was quiet and I fell back to sleep.
In the debrief the next day, Sarah told me the climax of the evening had been the making out at the bow of the ship, and that it had been falling action from there. Although happy to cuddle and make-out with Ahmed, she had discovered that his idea of kissing was of the “shock and awe” variety, and she showed me where his tongue, in its forceful incursions, had actually torn a bit of that flap of skin between her tongue and the bottom of her mouth. It was swollen and bleeding a little.
Apparently for her, it had not been a Turkish delight…
***
And that was the end of our adventure. We got off the boat the next day, made our way to Antalya and spent the evening walking around the winding cobblestone streets of its walled old city. The next morning, while merchants were carrying their goods out of their stores to display in the streets, we caught a cab up to the airport and flew back to Ukraine, our ten days in Turkey at an end. Still, it had been an amazing time, and our memories were carried with us in our heads, our notebooks, our cameras, and, especially, in Sarah’s slowly healing tongue.
Sarah swam up from a sandbar she had been exploring, pulling off her mask and snorkel and tossing them beside mine on a nearby protrusion. A few hundred yards away floated our yacht, the blobs of color around it were our fellow passengers, who always seemed reluctant to swim more than ten feet away from it. My pockets were full of interesting shells, some of which would later prove to be owned by other creatures of the world. Having snorkeled nearly every inch of shoreline of the bay where our yacht was anchored and around the island itself, I was taking an enjoyable break to get warm in the sun, saltwater drying on my skin.
“Think we could climb that?” I asked Sarah.
Mountains—albeit small ones—rose up from the shoreline of the mainland. Their surfaces seemed like piles of pebbles left by some god child, stacked steep up to three separate peaks, the middle one noticeably higher than the others. Goats made noises at each other as they picked their way along the rocks, chewing on the scrub brush growing from the crevices. There was nothing remotely approaching a path to those peaks; there was nothing remotely approaching flatness, actually, but if you thought in terms of climbing rather than hiking, it was just a grade four scramble that couldn’t take more than an hour.
“Probably,” said Sarah, leaving it at that. I took her lack of enthusiasm as an idea rejection.
***
Several hours, the rest of a book and a number of backgammon games later, Sarah proffered a suggestion. Most of the shells had been cleaned and were drying in the bathroom of the small cabin Sarah and I shared with Doyon. The fact of other ownership became known when a couple of the shells magically moved themselves several feet away from where I had put them. The owners and their homes soon found themselves on an unasked-for adrenaline joyride through the air before splashing back into the brink.
“Let’s climb the mountain,” Sarah said to me.
She said this, of course, with only an hour before we were scheduled to leave the bay. I wasn’t sure we could get up and down in time. Sarah had spent the past two hours tanning herself and writing in her notebook a few feet from me. Why we hadn’t started earlier, save perhaps to make the experience intense instead of leisurely (I do not deny that Sarah’s subconscious as well as mine decides things in this way), I don’t know.
I thought for a moment.
“Cool.”
***
“Don’t let the devil goats get you!” Brenna yelled from the ship as Sarah and I kicked our way to shore, shoes held over our heads. The goats had been so named because, yes, they did have a certain malevolent look about them. They stayed out of our way, though, as we put on our socks and shoes and started scrambling up the steep rocks, showing up their prowess and hurting their collective pride. They “nahhed” at us in scorn.
Sarah took the lead because we both have our areas of expertise, and trailfinding is certainly one of Sarah’s. Trailfinding here entailed locating climbable rocks while avoiding the sharp branches of the shrubs. The rock was a hard, porous limestone, which made climbing up them easy, a plethora of holds available for hands and feet. We practically ran up the thing, and within half an hour were on the top, looking down at our ship and the others in the bay.
It was amazingly beautiful, but I’ll let the pictures tell the thousand words. We had enough time to pose for them, take a couple more of ourselves bouldering with that beautiful backdrop, then rock hop back down to the shoreline to swim to the boat, our little adventure taking less than 45 sweat-soaked minutes.
On top of the mountain
On board, I looked at the maps of the area. Although the mountain range behind the one we had been on had its peaks named, ours must have been too small to merit labels, or the map wasn’t detailed enough, being more concerned with the topography of the ocean floor. The point is, as far as we knew, our peak was unnamed.
So we named it, smashing our own together.
We had just climbed Mount Dan-Rah.
***
After seeing a sunken city, the foundations of its houses visible through the clear water, after seeing a fishing village on an island reachable only by ship, a castle clinging to its one peak, we sailed into a cove and dropped anchor.
As the day gave way to night, we started secretly drinking the vodka and raki (a Turkish liquorish-flavored liquor not unlike ouzo) that we had smuggled on board after our stop in Kash. We were not supposed to bring any drinks on board, which meant the ship had a monopoly of the market and allowed them to mark everything up 100%. Because we didn’t have the World Bank on our side, we were forced to turn into raki runners and Pepsi pirates (my treasure trove of cans now buried at the bottom of the ship’s cooler). Tipsy and happy, we scarfed down dinner and got dressed. Here, in the middle of the night in the middle of the Mediterranean, we were going dancing.
At 11:00 PM, a speedboat pulled up beside the yacht and everyone under the age of 30 got on board, the older people begging off, perhaps thinking it wasn’t their scene. The speedboat stopped at the other boats anchored in the cove and soon a party was making its way to a sandy beach, to a dance club reachable only by boat.
“Pirate’s Cove” was a three sided wooden building on stilts, its open side facing out towards the water. Between it and the docks were a number of wooden platforms with pillows and chairs, and they’d already lit a small bonfire before we arrived. The selection of music, spun by one of the bartenders in between getting drinks, was the most eclectic I’ve ever heard, from Counting Crows to Jay Z to Madonna, the only seeming criteria being that the next song had to be an absolutely different genre from the last. This made for better dancing because I can get bored of the same stuff after a while and loved moving to a beat never stopped changing.
Brenna, Me, Sarah, Stella, Ryan and Doyon
We danced for hours before taking a break on one of the wooden platforms, cooling off in the night air. A movie moment happened shortly thereafter: all the Americans on the boat were on that platform, as well as Stella and Doyon, who simply watched us with raised eyebrows. A fair amount of America bashing had been going on during the four days on the yacht, about its foreign policies and attitudes in general, about Bush in particular. The most virulent bashing came from the Americans, Brenna spearheading it, and the lone defensive voice was me. I was quite an America basher until I lived in Ukraine, and now I feel that even though we screw up a lot and deserve most of our stereotypes, we’re still a damn good country trying to do damn good things. I even think one of our better qualities is our self-criticism, but all of that floated away for a few minutes on the opening chords of Don Mclean’s “American Pie.”
“A long, long time ago/I remember how that music used to make me smile…”
It came to us on the night breeze from the over-amped stereo system, and no matter what we thought about our country, at that moment we felt. The thirty or so other people sitting outside—all from other countries—quietly listened, as the four of us began singing together. We four sat and looked off at the sky, the water, occasionally glancing at each other but mostly singing for ourselves, our voices in near whispers during the verses but rising up joyously together on the choruses. The four of us: Sarah, Ryan, Brenna and me, are all travelers; we pride ourselves on having visited and lived in many places, on speaking other languages and being comfortable in other cultures, but that moment something was very clear, at least to me: we were inescapably American. No one else on that beach, in that club, knew those words, at they were one of thousands of strings that bound us together as a people, a culture, a nation. And while it looked like a cool Almost Famous/”Tiny Dancer” movie moment, it was more than that because we all felt very close just then, something we remarked upon later, drawn together by childhoods staring out car windows while this song played on car radios, now adults out in the middle of nowhere in an area of the world that mostly hates us and being together being very, very American. And normally to be “very American” is a negative label, but just then it was a very positive, very beautiful concept.
***
Leave it to the Australians to ratchet up the party. At some point in the evening two of the Australian girls had gotten behind the bar and were helping to serve drinks, getting in a shot or two (or seven) for themselves. At one point I was getting hit in the back with ice cubes and, when I turned around, Jess, one of the Australian girls, was tugging the front of her tank top down and offering me a target. I underhand tossed one cube of ice at her and she maneuvered to catch it between her breasts. Another ice cube, another perfect catch and soon our Turkish bartenders, Vinnie and Hussein (yes, that was their names), happy about all that close-by cleavage, started giving out free bottles of water and soon lined up glasses and gave us all a free shot of vodka.
The dance floor was a loud group of moving bodies. Ryan was glued onto Stella at that point and possibly I should have been going for Jess but I was having too much fun dancing with Brenna, even though I knew it would probably cost me any action that night. Sarah was dancing with Ahmed, the first mate of our boat, who had started the evening by saying to her: “I want be with you tonight.”
Groovin' at Pirate's Cove. Ahmed is on the right
The lack of English meant that the insinuation could have gone either way but it was pretty apparent when, a few dances later, he was pushing his tongue in her mouth. Being attractive, Turkish and made of muscle, Sarah wasn’t minding.
***
I stripped naked and dove into the water, narrowing missing Sarah, who was dog-paddling in all her pinkness. Skinny dipping had not been our idea: it had been suggested by Brenna and seconded by Stella. Stella was now under a pile of blankets with Ryan on the top deck, though, and Brenna had become morose and lonely during the evening (there had been a distinct lack of lesbians at the club) and had gone straight back to her cabin. Most of the boat was still back at the club, our group calling it a night at 3:00 AM while they were still going strong. The music carried across the water towards us, seemingly as loud at the boat as it had been on the beach.
Never ones to let a good idea die, Sarah and I decided to still go skinny dipping, even though no one else would. Besides, who wouldn’t want to say they had gone skinny dipping in a cove in Turkey in blue-black water under a moon one day from full?
Inexplicably, the water four inches under the surface was warm while the top layer was cold. Although it was fun, the novelty wore off the colder I got and I told Sarah I was going in. Showered off and carrying my blankets up on the deck, I noticed Ahmed spreading out a blanket over two of the deck cushions and putting more on top, creating a double bed. He was ambitious. I knew he had told Sarah things like: “Look my eyes” and “I think I loving you,”, but from what I understood, she had declined his offers. Still, I made my bed up as far as possible from his.
A few minutes later, I couldn’t find Sarah. She wasn’t in the water, she wasn’t on the deck and she wasn’t in the cabin. I didn’t think she was drunk enough to have had a problem swimming, but it was too small a boat for her to have disappeared. Finally, though, she swam into view from the front of the boat and I handed her clothes to her when she got on board.
In a life moment Sarah declared to be one of her cooler ones, Ahmed had descended the chain that stretched taut from the bow of the boat down just above the water and sat on it, his feet dangling in the water. Sarah had pulled herself up out of the water, one hand on the chain, the other on the back of his head, breasts exposed and dripping in the moonlight, to make out with him.
I think her next decision to sleep on that bed with Ahmed fell into the category of teasing. She had no intention of having sex with him: with a stranger on a deck filled with half a dozen other people (most of them from the boat’s 50-and-over contingent) was not her style, but the topless making out probably gave Ahmed the idea that he was on his way to scoredom.
I awoke a few hours later, almost at daybreak, to hear her telling him to stop and that she wanted to sleep, her hushed whispers carrying over the deck. Sarah can take care of herself, but when I still heard her sharp protestations a few minutes later, I thought I might have to get up and say something (and that would have been an interesting fight to film: two guys sliding around on a dew-slicked deck, ropes and booms and elderly tour patrons all caught up in the fray). Apparently he laid off his groping, though, because soon it was quiet and I fell back to sleep.
In the debrief the next day, Sarah told me the climax of the evening had been the making out at the bow of the ship, and that it had been falling action from there. Although happy to cuddle and make-out with Ahmed, she had discovered that his idea of kissing was of the “shock and awe” variety, and she showed me where his tongue, in its forceful incursions, had actually torn a bit of that flap of skin between her tongue and the bottom of her mouth. It was swollen and bleeding a little.
Apparently for her, it had not been a Turkish delight…
***
And that was the end of our adventure. We got off the boat the next day, made our way to Antalya and spent the evening walking around the winding cobblestone streets of its walled old city. The next morning, while merchants were carrying their goods out of their stores to display in the streets, we caught a cab up to the airport and flew back to Ukraine, our ten days in Turkey at an end. Still, it had been an amazing time, and our memories were carried with us in our heads, our notebooks, our cameras, and, especially, in Sarah’s slowly healing tongue.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Turkey: This Was One Day... (Pics)
This was one day…
Sarah and I awoke with the rising of the sun, stirring out from underneath the blankets we had laid over the blue foam mattresses strapped to the deck of the yacht. We were anchored near St. Nicholas Island, once home to a Byzantine trading town, now home to sprawling ruins, the peeking sun painting yellow and orange the white stone shapes poking through brush and marching up the spine of the island to its rounded top.
There was no boat to the island, but no matter. Without saying anything to anyone, we climbed down the ladder into the water, held our sneakers over our heads (my camera wrapped in a trash bag and stuffed into one shoe), and swam the few hundred miles to shore.
On the island, we tied on our shoes (Sarah looking sexy in her bikini, me in my Speedo looking more like the cover boy of the Gay Times’ special Twinks edition) and set off to explore. We had maybe an hour before we needed to get back to the ship, so we followed ancient paths past roofless houses, churches with collapsed domes, mausoleums that no longer held bodies, mosaics barely visible beneath overgrown grass. We were alone on the island save for insects, working to the crest of the island and finally greeted with gorgeous views all around: the mainland, the yachts anchored in the cove below, the water surrounding everything, so blue…
Sarah in the ruins
The view from the top
Sarah
Me, at a long corridor that once connected two churches, its roof now collapsed
We made our way down through the rubble, picking our way past thorny bushes that scrapped at our copious amounts of exposed skin, exploring nooks and crannies, rambling past hundreds of buildings that represented thousands of years before we finally found our way back to the shore. We put our shoes up over our heads and swam back to the ship to eat breakfast.
***
I got to drive the boat through an inlet between the shore and an island. Yes, the captain and the crew entrusted their lives to me, though I've never driven a yacht before, allowed me to steer the ship even though this was dangerous, technically exact stuff.
Okay, so the inlet was like a mile wide and the captain was always two feet away, but I still got to drive the damn boat…
Me, with everyone's lives in my hands...
***
If you come at the right time, apparently Butterfly Valley is home to millions of butterflies who come their to mate. We missed the right time by about a month. We also had no time in general because due to an anchor issue and some other scheduling problems, the captain had been trying to pack two days of itinerary into one. Rather than cut some things out, he simply shortened everything, often drastically. When the yacht anchored, 200 yards from shore, we were told we had 30 minutes.
Butterfly Valley
Most of the other passangers choose to just swim around the boat, but our motley tribe decided to swim to shore. There we found many people on tours, basking on the beach, sitting in a wooden bar listening reggae music, paying to go parasailing. We wanted to see the valley.
They guy at the gate in front of the path into the valley wanted 4 lira each. This was like $2.50, but, as we tried to explain, we had swam to the shore and had not thought to bring money. No matter, said the guy. No lira, no valley.
This thwarted all but Brenna and I. Possibly not to either’s benefit, we found that our personalities formed a closed loop of headstrongness that soon had us pushing through a worker’s access gate about 100 yards from the pay gate that had a nice big “No Entrance!” sign on it in English and Turkish. Everyone else refused to follow, so Brenna and I Navy SEALed the fucker, communicating by hand signals as we snuck along an irrigation ditch past the guy at the pay gate and finally crossed some fields, flanking the guy and finding our way to the path into the valley.
Brenna was keeping an eye on time and we had none. By the time we got to the valley, we had only five minutes to get back to the boat. Satisfied that we’d at least got there, we turned and sprinted.
We were a good mile from the gate at that point, and running in wet bathing suits and sneakers is never comfortable, but we had a boat to catch (not that they’d leave without us, but pretending otherwise did make it exciting). We stopped as we reach the fields and once again silently snuck along the irrigation ditch and back through the worker’s gate, running for the beach, kicking off our shoes and swimming like mad for the boat.
I saw exactly one butterfly.
***
I met Yahya outside his carpet shop in Kash, overlooking a harbor packed with yachts, one of which was ours, anchored for the night. Although it was evening and the streets were mostly empty, his store was still open and would be until midnight, a managerial decision I never had explained to me.
Sitting outside in the warm late summer air, lit by the open doors and unshuttered windows behind him, he was finishing his day’s work: repairing a long tear in a large kilim that was someone’s family heirloom. Walking up, I would have told you he was fixing a carpet, but the the difference between a carpet and a kilim, as well as a dozen other carpet-related things, would be my educational experience for the night.
Yahya repairing the kilim
I asked to take his picture and he consented, then invited me to sit with him, pulling a pillow at me . I did, watching his hands quickly work a crochet hook over and under the weave, pulling through a piece of yarn that then bound the tear together, perfectly matching and making the rent disappear.
Yahya spoke fairly decent English and immediately corrected me when I asked him how long it took to repair the carpet. “Kilim,” he said. “No carpet. Kilim flat weave.” He demonstrated what he meant, showing me that that horizontal wool was woven over and under vertical wool, creating a flat piece of material. In carpets, he later showed me, thousands and thousands of strands of wool was individually tied onto vertical pieces of wool, causing them to stick up and creating a plush softness.
He asked where I was from, pleasantly surprised, as I have found many Turks to be, that I am American. Yahya later explained why this was. “Many Americans came to Turkey, but after 9/11, none of them come.” His opinion was reinforced by some other Turks a day later. The Turks we met seemed happily seemed to think Sarah and I represented the beginning of a resurgence in American tourism. We were baffled, because neither of us had ever regarded Turkey as unsafe. It is predominantly Muslim, yes, but is also a liberal, secular state with a fully-functioning democracy that is only a few hurdles away from EU membership. I regard Greece and Italy, with their rampant corruption and criminality, not to mention a strengthening mafia, to be far more dangerous. I was surprised to hear that Americans had stayed away.
As if to disprove the Americans comment, Brenna, Sarah and Ryan came up from their shopping to find me sitting with Yahya and reminded me that it was time for dinner before walking off to the boat. Sarah stayed behind and Yahya invited us inside. “I know you will no buy carpets,” he said. That was obvious, from Sarah’s $2 sunglasses to the duct tape holding one of my sandals together. “Come, I give you little gift.”
We went inside, to a store with its walls and floor covered in carpets, and hundreds stacked around the perimeter of the room. Yahya pointed out the four different types of carpets: wool, silk, cotton, and carpets that are amalgams of these materials. After explaining, carpets obviously being the obsession of his life, he pulled out a stack of woven pillow covers and told Sarah and I to each choose one as a gift. They were old and obviously had been used, not to be resold, but that he was giving us such a unique gift was still awesome. I chose one with two red squares, two blue ones and bordered in green. Now covering a pillow and sitting in a chair in my apartment, it clashes with absolutely everything, which is just the way it should be.
Yahya invited us back for tea after dinner.
***
While the rest of the boat went out in search of a bar, Brenna joined Sarah and I back at Yahya’s shop. Yahya, sitting on the floor with a glass of apple tea beside him, came under a barrage of questions.
Yahya was originally from Capodocia, a poorer region in the center of the country with a landscape better suited for the moon. He learned carpet weaving at his mother’s knee and was so good at it by the age of 13 that a carpet seller, making his rounds of the villages to buy carpets for resale in Istanbul, invited Yahya along. Only just a teenager, he left his family and everyone he knew to go weave carpets in Turkey’s largest city.
“I had to cook for myself, clean my dishes,” he said. “It was very hard.” I had to smile. I was thinking of this huge, bustling city, adults who may or may not take advantage of him and his skills, loneliness, exposure to bars, clubs, brothels, and yet Yahya’s memories were of a boy whose mother was no longer doing the domestic duties. After a few years, Yahya moved down to Kash, on the southern coast, where tourists came in on their yachts looking to spend their foreign currency on woven wool. He know owned half the shop, manning it until the wee hours of the night.
“Demi Moore, she come here,” he said. “And Madonna,” listing the famous people who had passed his carpet store. “She have two boats.”
When I told him I lived in Ukraine, he smiled knowingly. “You should visit,” I said at his smile. “Why?” he asked, the thought disdainful to him. “Beautiful things in Ukraine,” I said. He winked. “I know. They have come here.” His tongue darted up and touched the gap in his two front teeth, something he did whenever he made a joke.
“You like Ukrainian women?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t want to die!” he said. “And I don’t spend money.” It took a few minutes to get clarification on this, but Yahya was of the opinion that Ukrainian women, all Ukrainian women were prostitutes and he neither wanted to A) pay for their services or B) get any lethal diseases. It was easy to see how he arrived at this generalization: most Ukrainian women who lived in Turkey were prostitutes. I wanted to point out that many were victims of human trafficking, lured to Turkey (and Germany, and Britain, and…) by promises of jobs as waitresses and hotel staff but then put to work as prostitutes, their passports taken from them and objections met with beatings, but Yahya was so adamant that Ukrainians the world over sold their bodies for money that it didn’t seem worth the effort and I didn’t want to upset him with an argument.
He put in the last word on it any way: “And they no buy carpets.”
***
“Flying carpet!” said Yahya, and one spun through the air towards me. He stuck his tongue to his teeth again, proud at his pun. I looked at the carpet now lying on the floor in front of me. It was beautiful, and this from a guy who didn’t get why people think carpets are beautiful. On a white background, a tree emerged from the bottom, multicolored birds on its branches. It wasn’t large, perhaps the size of a poster, but it was made of silk, said Yahya, then he flipped it over to show me how tightly packed all the knots were. It had come out of a wooden dowry chest that he stored his most valuable carpets in. He would sell it for around $3,000. In American it might fetch $15,000.
He went into the back room to make more tea and I overcame the urge to roll it up and run. $15,000 could be mine if I could just get out of the country. Instead it was right where Yahya had left it when he came back with more tea.
Yahya said that in a year he would probably sell about 600 carpets. Although of different values, he was still pulling down probably half a million dollars, much of which went back into inventory. Still, he wasn’t hurting: during the course of the evening he pulled out both a very expensive digital camera and an even more expensive mobile phone.
The carpet business was apparently a good one.
After our second glass of apple tea, Brenna asked about the differences in carpet quality. Yahya didn’t quite have the English for it, but he took us to a loom in the corner. He showed us the knot used in most carpets, especially those done by machines. It looped under itself only once. Giving a hard tug on the yarn, it came out of the vertical lines of wool. He then showed us the knot used in Turkey, which doubled back on itself twice, something only dexterous human fingers, not machines, could do (well, not cheaply anyway). No mater how you tugged on it, the yarn wouldn’t come out. Pulling a book off a shelf, Yahya showed us a picture of a 1,200 year old Turkish carpet currently in a museum in St. Petersburg. It looked dull and worn, but was completely intact.
Now that’s quality.
I had Yahya show me the knot again and sat down to do it while he pulled out a carpet he had woven himself to show Brenna and Sarah. The knot was hard to do, my fingers fumbling, but I slowly got it down while Yahya explained the symbolism woven into the carpet, and how each shape demonstrated what was on his mind when he made it: the yearning for love. Eventually I had knotted ten or so pieces of yarn, finishing another line over the one Yahya had done. After cutting them to length with a pair of special scissors that must have been 50 years old, my line perfectly matched. I had just helped make a Turkish carpet! Make that a Cuban-American-Turkish carpet!
Yahya showing me the Turkish double knot
Trimming the yarn down after knotting a line
My one line of carpet
Yahya explaining the symbolism in a carpet he had made
The tea had forced me to leave and go to the bathroom shortly thereafter, and when I got back, Brenna had pulled me aside. Apparently, while Sarah had been looking at carpets on a wall, she and Yahya had a conversation that had gone like this:
“You like girls? You lesbian?”
“Yes,” Brenna had said.
“You dated guy before?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you date one again?” he had asked hopefully.
Later, he convinced her, to mild protestations, to give him a back massage. Since he had been kind and had given her a pillow cover as well, she obliged while Sarah flipped threw a carpet book, and I laid down on a stack of carpets, realizing how tired I was.
Everyone relaxing in the carpet shop
The carpet on top was old, almost a hundred years old, and huge, about fifteen feet by six feet. Expressing my happiness at its softness, Yahya offered it to me for $600. Everyone’s mouths dropped open.
Yahya offered me the top carpet for $600
“Take it,” said Brenna. It would easily fetch $3000 in America.
Of course I didn’t have that much money. Nor that much room in my backpack.
***
The end of the evening, after Yahya closed shop, found us in “The Secret Garden”, a bar with a hookah (“Nargehleh” in Turkish). Brenna had made sure she was sandwiched between Sarah and myself and I felt almost bad for Yahya has the conversation, aided by much apple flavored tobacco (which, since we don’t smoke, definitely gave Brenna and I a buzz), sped out of control and mostly centered on male and female roles.
Sarah on the hookah
The rest of the boat crew inadvertently found us when they independently came into the bar. “Bar” tends to connote a smoky interior, but we were outside, sitting on cushions, smoking out of a pipe so long it looked like a musical instrument, hooked up to a four foot tall hookah with a metal horse impaled on the pipe leading up to the coals. I will say one thing: Turks have relaxation down to an art form. Although the rest of the party took over another table, Stella came over to ours and nestled in beside me. The ambiguity of whether her wrist, hand hanging limp, was on my knee out of necessity or flirtation was pleasantly distracting, and as smoke curled out of my mouth I reflected on waking up on the deck of a boat, swimming to an island covered in ruins, steering a yacht for the first time, sneaking into a valley, weaving a carpet and ending the evening smoking flavored tobacco on a warm, moonlit summer night with the warmth of a beautiful Greek girl beside me.
Stella and I
And Americans were afraid to come here?
Good. More for me.
Sarah and I awoke with the rising of the sun, stirring out from underneath the blankets we had laid over the blue foam mattresses strapped to the deck of the yacht. We were anchored near St. Nicholas Island, once home to a Byzantine trading town, now home to sprawling ruins, the peeking sun painting yellow and orange the white stone shapes poking through brush and marching up the spine of the island to its rounded top.
There was no boat to the island, but no matter. Without saying anything to anyone, we climbed down the ladder into the water, held our sneakers over our heads (my camera wrapped in a trash bag and stuffed into one shoe), and swam the few hundred miles to shore.
On the island, we tied on our shoes (Sarah looking sexy in her bikini, me in my Speedo looking more like the cover boy of the Gay Times’ special Twinks edition) and set off to explore. We had maybe an hour before we needed to get back to the ship, so we followed ancient paths past roofless houses, churches with collapsed domes, mausoleums that no longer held bodies, mosaics barely visible beneath overgrown grass. We were alone on the island save for insects, working to the crest of the island and finally greeted with gorgeous views all around: the mainland, the yachts anchored in the cove below, the water surrounding everything, so blue…
Sarah in the ruins
The view from the top
Sarah
Me, at a long corridor that once connected two churches, its roof now collapsed
We made our way down through the rubble, picking our way past thorny bushes that scrapped at our copious amounts of exposed skin, exploring nooks and crannies, rambling past hundreds of buildings that represented thousands of years before we finally found our way back to the shore. We put our shoes up over our heads and swam back to the ship to eat breakfast.
***
I got to drive the boat through an inlet between the shore and an island. Yes, the captain and the crew entrusted their lives to me, though I've never driven a yacht before, allowed me to steer the ship even though this was dangerous, technically exact stuff.
Okay, so the inlet was like a mile wide and the captain was always two feet away, but I still got to drive the damn boat…
Me, with everyone's lives in my hands...
***
If you come at the right time, apparently Butterfly Valley is home to millions of butterflies who come their to mate. We missed the right time by about a month. We also had no time in general because due to an anchor issue and some other scheduling problems, the captain had been trying to pack two days of itinerary into one. Rather than cut some things out, he simply shortened everything, often drastically. When the yacht anchored, 200 yards from shore, we were told we had 30 minutes.
Butterfly Valley
Most of the other passangers choose to just swim around the boat, but our motley tribe decided to swim to shore. There we found many people on tours, basking on the beach, sitting in a wooden bar listening reggae music, paying to go parasailing. We wanted to see the valley.
They guy at the gate in front of the path into the valley wanted 4 lira each. This was like $2.50, but, as we tried to explain, we had swam to the shore and had not thought to bring money. No matter, said the guy. No lira, no valley.
This thwarted all but Brenna and I. Possibly not to either’s benefit, we found that our personalities formed a closed loop of headstrongness that soon had us pushing through a worker’s access gate about 100 yards from the pay gate that had a nice big “No Entrance!” sign on it in English and Turkish. Everyone else refused to follow, so Brenna and I Navy SEALed the fucker, communicating by hand signals as we snuck along an irrigation ditch past the guy at the pay gate and finally crossed some fields, flanking the guy and finding our way to the path into the valley.
Brenna was keeping an eye on time and we had none. By the time we got to the valley, we had only five minutes to get back to the boat. Satisfied that we’d at least got there, we turned and sprinted.
We were a good mile from the gate at that point, and running in wet bathing suits and sneakers is never comfortable, but we had a boat to catch (not that they’d leave without us, but pretending otherwise did make it exciting). We stopped as we reach the fields and once again silently snuck along the irrigation ditch and back through the worker’s gate, running for the beach, kicking off our shoes and swimming like mad for the boat.
I saw exactly one butterfly.
***
I met Yahya outside his carpet shop in Kash, overlooking a harbor packed with yachts, one of which was ours, anchored for the night. Although it was evening and the streets were mostly empty, his store was still open and would be until midnight, a managerial decision I never had explained to me.
Sitting outside in the warm late summer air, lit by the open doors and unshuttered windows behind him, he was finishing his day’s work: repairing a long tear in a large kilim that was someone’s family heirloom. Walking up, I would have told you he was fixing a carpet, but the the difference between a carpet and a kilim, as well as a dozen other carpet-related things, would be my educational experience for the night.
Yahya repairing the kilim
I asked to take his picture and he consented, then invited me to sit with him, pulling a pillow at me . I did, watching his hands quickly work a crochet hook over and under the weave, pulling through a piece of yarn that then bound the tear together, perfectly matching and making the rent disappear.
Yahya spoke fairly decent English and immediately corrected me when I asked him how long it took to repair the carpet. “Kilim,” he said. “No carpet. Kilim flat weave.” He demonstrated what he meant, showing me that that horizontal wool was woven over and under vertical wool, creating a flat piece of material. In carpets, he later showed me, thousands and thousands of strands of wool was individually tied onto vertical pieces of wool, causing them to stick up and creating a plush softness.
He asked where I was from, pleasantly surprised, as I have found many Turks to be, that I am American. Yahya later explained why this was. “Many Americans came to Turkey, but after 9/11, none of them come.” His opinion was reinforced by some other Turks a day later. The Turks we met seemed happily seemed to think Sarah and I represented the beginning of a resurgence in American tourism. We were baffled, because neither of us had ever regarded Turkey as unsafe. It is predominantly Muslim, yes, but is also a liberal, secular state with a fully-functioning democracy that is only a few hurdles away from EU membership. I regard Greece and Italy, with their rampant corruption and criminality, not to mention a strengthening mafia, to be far more dangerous. I was surprised to hear that Americans had stayed away.
As if to disprove the Americans comment, Brenna, Sarah and Ryan came up from their shopping to find me sitting with Yahya and reminded me that it was time for dinner before walking off to the boat. Sarah stayed behind and Yahya invited us inside. “I know you will no buy carpets,” he said. That was obvious, from Sarah’s $2 sunglasses to the duct tape holding one of my sandals together. “Come, I give you little gift.”
We went inside, to a store with its walls and floor covered in carpets, and hundreds stacked around the perimeter of the room. Yahya pointed out the four different types of carpets: wool, silk, cotton, and carpets that are amalgams of these materials. After explaining, carpets obviously being the obsession of his life, he pulled out a stack of woven pillow covers and told Sarah and I to each choose one as a gift. They were old and obviously had been used, not to be resold, but that he was giving us such a unique gift was still awesome. I chose one with two red squares, two blue ones and bordered in green. Now covering a pillow and sitting in a chair in my apartment, it clashes with absolutely everything, which is just the way it should be.
Yahya invited us back for tea after dinner.
***
While the rest of the boat went out in search of a bar, Brenna joined Sarah and I back at Yahya’s shop. Yahya, sitting on the floor with a glass of apple tea beside him, came under a barrage of questions.
Yahya was originally from Capodocia, a poorer region in the center of the country with a landscape better suited for the moon. He learned carpet weaving at his mother’s knee and was so good at it by the age of 13 that a carpet seller, making his rounds of the villages to buy carpets for resale in Istanbul, invited Yahya along. Only just a teenager, he left his family and everyone he knew to go weave carpets in Turkey’s largest city.
“I had to cook for myself, clean my dishes,” he said. “It was very hard.” I had to smile. I was thinking of this huge, bustling city, adults who may or may not take advantage of him and his skills, loneliness, exposure to bars, clubs, brothels, and yet Yahya’s memories were of a boy whose mother was no longer doing the domestic duties. After a few years, Yahya moved down to Kash, on the southern coast, where tourists came in on their yachts looking to spend their foreign currency on woven wool. He know owned half the shop, manning it until the wee hours of the night.
“Demi Moore, she come here,” he said. “And Madonna,” listing the famous people who had passed his carpet store. “She have two boats.”
When I told him I lived in Ukraine, he smiled knowingly. “You should visit,” I said at his smile. “Why?” he asked, the thought disdainful to him. “Beautiful things in Ukraine,” I said. He winked. “I know. They have come here.” His tongue darted up and touched the gap in his two front teeth, something he did whenever he made a joke.
“You like Ukrainian women?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t want to die!” he said. “And I don’t spend money.” It took a few minutes to get clarification on this, but Yahya was of the opinion that Ukrainian women, all Ukrainian women were prostitutes and he neither wanted to A) pay for their services or B) get any lethal diseases. It was easy to see how he arrived at this generalization: most Ukrainian women who lived in Turkey were prostitutes. I wanted to point out that many were victims of human trafficking, lured to Turkey (and Germany, and Britain, and…) by promises of jobs as waitresses and hotel staff but then put to work as prostitutes, their passports taken from them and objections met with beatings, but Yahya was so adamant that Ukrainians the world over sold their bodies for money that it didn’t seem worth the effort and I didn’t want to upset him with an argument.
He put in the last word on it any way: “And they no buy carpets.”
***
“Flying carpet!” said Yahya, and one spun through the air towards me. He stuck his tongue to his teeth again, proud at his pun. I looked at the carpet now lying on the floor in front of me. It was beautiful, and this from a guy who didn’t get why people think carpets are beautiful. On a white background, a tree emerged from the bottom, multicolored birds on its branches. It wasn’t large, perhaps the size of a poster, but it was made of silk, said Yahya, then he flipped it over to show me how tightly packed all the knots were. It had come out of a wooden dowry chest that he stored his most valuable carpets in. He would sell it for around $3,000. In American it might fetch $15,000.
He went into the back room to make more tea and I overcame the urge to roll it up and run. $15,000 could be mine if I could just get out of the country. Instead it was right where Yahya had left it when he came back with more tea.
Yahya said that in a year he would probably sell about 600 carpets. Although of different values, he was still pulling down probably half a million dollars, much of which went back into inventory. Still, he wasn’t hurting: during the course of the evening he pulled out both a very expensive digital camera and an even more expensive mobile phone.
The carpet business was apparently a good one.
After our second glass of apple tea, Brenna asked about the differences in carpet quality. Yahya didn’t quite have the English for it, but he took us to a loom in the corner. He showed us the knot used in most carpets, especially those done by machines. It looped under itself only once. Giving a hard tug on the yarn, it came out of the vertical lines of wool. He then showed us the knot used in Turkey, which doubled back on itself twice, something only dexterous human fingers, not machines, could do (well, not cheaply anyway). No mater how you tugged on it, the yarn wouldn’t come out. Pulling a book off a shelf, Yahya showed us a picture of a 1,200 year old Turkish carpet currently in a museum in St. Petersburg. It looked dull and worn, but was completely intact.
Now that’s quality.
I had Yahya show me the knot again and sat down to do it while he pulled out a carpet he had woven himself to show Brenna and Sarah. The knot was hard to do, my fingers fumbling, but I slowly got it down while Yahya explained the symbolism woven into the carpet, and how each shape demonstrated what was on his mind when he made it: the yearning for love. Eventually I had knotted ten or so pieces of yarn, finishing another line over the one Yahya had done. After cutting them to length with a pair of special scissors that must have been 50 years old, my line perfectly matched. I had just helped make a Turkish carpet! Make that a Cuban-American-Turkish carpet!
Yahya showing me the Turkish double knot
Trimming the yarn down after knotting a line
My one line of carpet
Yahya explaining the symbolism in a carpet he had made
The tea had forced me to leave and go to the bathroom shortly thereafter, and when I got back, Brenna had pulled me aside. Apparently, while Sarah had been looking at carpets on a wall, she and Yahya had a conversation that had gone like this:
“You like girls? You lesbian?”
“Yes,” Brenna had said.
“You dated guy before?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you date one again?” he had asked hopefully.
Later, he convinced her, to mild protestations, to give him a back massage. Since he had been kind and had given her a pillow cover as well, she obliged while Sarah flipped threw a carpet book, and I laid down on a stack of carpets, realizing how tired I was.
Everyone relaxing in the carpet shop
The carpet on top was old, almost a hundred years old, and huge, about fifteen feet by six feet. Expressing my happiness at its softness, Yahya offered it to me for $600. Everyone’s mouths dropped open.
Yahya offered me the top carpet for $600
“Take it,” said Brenna. It would easily fetch $3000 in America.
Of course I didn’t have that much money. Nor that much room in my backpack.
***
The end of the evening, after Yahya closed shop, found us in “The Secret Garden”, a bar with a hookah (“Nargehleh” in Turkish). Brenna had made sure she was sandwiched between Sarah and myself and I felt almost bad for Yahya has the conversation, aided by much apple flavored tobacco (which, since we don’t smoke, definitely gave Brenna and I a buzz), sped out of control and mostly centered on male and female roles.
Sarah on the hookah
The rest of the boat crew inadvertently found us when they independently came into the bar. “Bar” tends to connote a smoky interior, but we were outside, sitting on cushions, smoking out of a pipe so long it looked like a musical instrument, hooked up to a four foot tall hookah with a metal horse impaled on the pipe leading up to the coals. I will say one thing: Turks have relaxation down to an art form. Although the rest of the party took over another table, Stella came over to ours and nestled in beside me. The ambiguity of whether her wrist, hand hanging limp, was on my knee out of necessity or flirtation was pleasantly distracting, and as smoke curled out of my mouth I reflected on waking up on the deck of a boat, swimming to an island covered in ruins, steering a yacht for the first time, sneaking into a valley, weaving a carpet and ending the evening smoking flavored tobacco on a warm, moonlit summer night with the warmth of a beautiful Greek girl beside me.
Stella and I
And Americans were afraid to come here?
Good. More for me.
Turkey: Scenes from a Boat (Pics)
What does one do on a guliet (a traditional wooden yacht) for four days? Swim. Read. Tan. Talk. Eat. Repeat.
For a go-go-go traveler like me, taking a “Blue Cruise” along the Turkey’s southern coast seemed an egregious waste of time. But when Sarah was too sick to go north, it seemed a good idea, especially when we read that the itinerary would things like sunken ruins, fishing villages, and a dance club reachable only by boat. The price, $180 each, seemed a little steep, but we haggled down to $140, a price that we were sworn to secrecy over.
The boat we spent four days on
I was glad Sarah was along: no matter who the other dozen or so passengers were, I knew we’d have a good time. But as it turned out the other passengers made it worth it. For social reasons explicable only to an anthropologist, our group rapidly split into three tribes who would little interact during the entire voyage. There was the older group, the retirees in their 50s and 60s who dissected every aspect of everything: the food, the color of the water, the comfort of the cabins. There were the Australians, who numbered five, came separately and immediately congregated together (I’m sad to say that they’d still win in any survivor situation) and the rest of us: four Americans, one Greek and one South Korean.
A motley crew we were: Brenna was a lesbian (she would make sure you knew this fact within minutes of meeting her, so it’s kind of a defining characteristic) who had worked as a masseuse in Greece, which is how she met Stella, a distracting beauty who routinely kicked my ass at backgammon (I blame the bikini). Stella was pursued by Ryan, a graphic designer from Colorado on an extended world tour, (who would quasi-succeed with her by the end of the trip). This left Doyon, on an eight month trip and who had stopped to teach math for a month in a hut in Nepal “because I thought it would be fun.”
Me, Stella, Ryan, Brenna and Sarah. Doyon is taking the picture
I’ve met a number of people while traveling, exchanged a lot of email addresses but a couple hours at a hostel or a club does not let you now a lot about a person. Four days on a boat is a really good way to actually get to know people. With Ryan and Doyon I talked of travel and women. With Stella I flirted, but mostly kept that chill so as not to get in Ryan’s way. With Brenna I also talked about travel and women (she was ready to jump on the first ferry across the Black Sea to Ukraine when she heard of the women there), but she and I connected in a way I rarely do with people and we spent many hours talking and laughing and debating about absolutely nothing.
Me conning Brenna into giving me a back massage. Baring the needed tools, it was done on the dining room table with suntan lotion serving as massage oil
Our patterns on the boat were quickly established. While the boat was on the move we’d read (between buses and the boat trip I went through three books in nine days), tan, talk, and play backgammon and chess, all to a constant soundtrack from the music blasting from the galley, everything from Cat Stevens to Moby to Turkish pop.
Chilling on the boat. This is also where most of us slept since the nights were warm
As you can see, life was very difficult
The boat would stop, usually in some unidentified cove, and everyone would jump overboard and swim in water that was blissfully warm (with strange cold eddies that would hit you).
Sometimes we snorkeled with leaky gear. Sometimes we fished with nothing but fishing lines and hooks. Sometimes we would go cliff diving (the first time it took me an hour to work up the courage to actually dive, that is head first, from the top of the cliff, some thirty feet above the water. Before then I would jump, scream like a girl and curl into a cannonball).
The clarity of the deep, fish-filled water
An octopus caught with nothing but line, bait and a hook
Me, jumping off a cliff
After a while our captain, Mustafa, would tell us we were leaving and we pull ourselves out of the water, arrange ourselves on the deck, and ply the blue waters some more, to swim, tan, talk, eat, read, repeat.
Getting my ass kicked at backgammon
Could you concentrate on the game?
Often, Turks would come out to the boat to sell us ice cream or stuffed pancakes
Me, hanging off the bow
Delicious Turkish food, three times a day
Stella, Ryan, Me and Sarah jumping off the boat. Stella didn't quite get the idea.
For a go-go-go traveler like me, taking a “Blue Cruise” along the Turkey’s southern coast seemed an egregious waste of time. But when Sarah was too sick to go north, it seemed a good idea, especially when we read that the itinerary would things like sunken ruins, fishing villages, and a dance club reachable only by boat. The price, $180 each, seemed a little steep, but we haggled down to $140, a price that we were sworn to secrecy over.
The boat we spent four days on
I was glad Sarah was along: no matter who the other dozen or so passengers were, I knew we’d have a good time. But as it turned out the other passengers made it worth it. For social reasons explicable only to an anthropologist, our group rapidly split into three tribes who would little interact during the entire voyage. There was the older group, the retirees in their 50s and 60s who dissected every aspect of everything: the food, the color of the water, the comfort of the cabins. There were the Australians, who numbered five, came separately and immediately congregated together (I’m sad to say that they’d still win in any survivor situation) and the rest of us: four Americans, one Greek and one South Korean.
A motley crew we were: Brenna was a lesbian (she would make sure you knew this fact within minutes of meeting her, so it’s kind of a defining characteristic) who had worked as a masseuse in Greece, which is how she met Stella, a distracting beauty who routinely kicked my ass at backgammon (I blame the bikini). Stella was pursued by Ryan, a graphic designer from Colorado on an extended world tour, (who would quasi-succeed with her by the end of the trip). This left Doyon, on an eight month trip and who had stopped to teach math for a month in a hut in Nepal “because I thought it would be fun.”
Me, Stella, Ryan, Brenna and Sarah. Doyon is taking the picture
I’ve met a number of people while traveling, exchanged a lot of email addresses but a couple hours at a hostel or a club does not let you now a lot about a person. Four days on a boat is a really good way to actually get to know people. With Ryan and Doyon I talked of travel and women. With Stella I flirted, but mostly kept that chill so as not to get in Ryan’s way. With Brenna I also talked about travel and women (she was ready to jump on the first ferry across the Black Sea to Ukraine when she heard of the women there), but she and I connected in a way I rarely do with people and we spent many hours talking and laughing and debating about absolutely nothing.
Me conning Brenna into giving me a back massage. Baring the needed tools, it was done on the dining room table with suntan lotion serving as massage oil
Our patterns on the boat were quickly established. While the boat was on the move we’d read (between buses and the boat trip I went through three books in nine days), tan, talk, and play backgammon and chess, all to a constant soundtrack from the music blasting from the galley, everything from Cat Stevens to Moby to Turkish pop.
Chilling on the boat. This is also where most of us slept since the nights were warm
As you can see, life was very difficult
The boat would stop, usually in some unidentified cove, and everyone would jump overboard and swim in water that was blissfully warm (with strange cold eddies that would hit you).
Sometimes we snorkeled with leaky gear. Sometimes we fished with nothing but fishing lines and hooks. Sometimes we would go cliff diving (the first time it took me an hour to work up the courage to actually dive, that is head first, from the top of the cliff, some thirty feet above the water. Before then I would jump, scream like a girl and curl into a cannonball).
The clarity of the deep, fish-filled water
An octopus caught with nothing but line, bait and a hook
Me, jumping off a cliff
After a while our captain, Mustafa, would tell us we were leaving and we pull ourselves out of the water, arrange ourselves on the deck, and ply the blue waters some more, to swim, tan, talk, eat, read, repeat.
Getting my ass kicked at backgammon
Could you concentrate on the game?
Often, Turks would come out to the boat to sell us ice cream or stuffed pancakes
Me, hanging off the bow
Delicious Turkish food, three times a day
Stella, Ryan, Me and Sarah jumping off the boat. Stella didn't quite get the idea.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Turkey: Fetiye (Pics)
Every morning started with a traditional Turkish breakfast
The harbor at Fetiye, packed with yachts that travel along Turkey's southern coast.
Women canning olives. Turkish life is lived outside.
Spices at the market
Before the Romans ruled this area, it was controlled by the Lycasions, who left little behind but these graves carved into the cliffs
The grave of some Lycasion king
Now with a Daniel on it
Lycasion sarchophogi are all over the city. Rather than move them, people simply built the streets around them
A family enjoying the warm late evening air
We were in Fetiye to catch a boat. And after this relaxing day, that's just what we did...
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