So today’s the last day of May. I can’t believe that I’ve been here that long! I also can’t believe that it’s almost June and I still have 3 more weeks of school, and one week to finish up all of my work. May has been a pretty hectic month, with lots of travelling because there have been lots of four-day weekends due to a number of holidays. First there was Labor Day, then Pentecost, and then Corpus Christi (last Thursday).
As last Thursday was Corpus Christi (a Catholic celebration of the rite of Communion), me and some other friends went up the Danube to visit Durnstein. Durnstein is the castle where King Richard the Lion-hearted was imprisoned on his way back from the Crusades. The castle was mostly destroyed by the Swedish near the end of the Thirty Years War, so we just hiked up the castle and wandered around the ruins. We also got to wander around the quaint little town. There were branches lining the main pedestrian street, and fresh hay on the ground. I assume that was because of Corpus Christi, and that they had had some kind of procession there in the morning. In the early evening we went to a Heuriger (a new wine restaurant), where we had white wine grown in Durnstein and then slices of meat and cheese to go with it. The more traditional Heurigers usually only serve appetizer-type things, and this was one of those.
A new U-bahn line has opened up only a couple of blocks away from my dorm, so now I can get to school in 20 minutes instead of 45. I love it so much. Otherwise, things are fairly uninteresting here. I have 4 more weeks in Vienna, and I hope that I won’t be so overwhelmed with work that I will be too preoccupied to enjoy my remaining time here and the Euro Cup (which starts in a week from today!).
Romania 14-18 May
For the visual accompaniment to this post, go to:
http://eastofwest.shutterfly.com/action/?a=0CcMWrlw5bsXrA¬ag=1
Last week I went to rural Romania—more specifically, Transylvania—with a charity organization called Project Centipede to bring aid items to schoolchildren. I found out about it at church, because the project directors are also members of the Vienna Community Church congregation. There were 21 of us all told. There were about eight young adults studying abroad, and then there was a big age jump from mid-forties to mid-sixties.
Wednesday evening we all met up to get on the bus. It was a really nice bus, with a bathroom, sleeping compartment for the driver, coffee makers, and a refrigerator. Every inch of the bus was used to store something or other, whether it was food for the team, computers, or boxes and boxes of stuff. We even had to have a trailer full to the brim with boxes. We left around 7 pm on Wednesday, driving through Hungary, and stopping at the Romanian border around 3 am so that our passports could be checked. Romania is in the EU, but not part of the Schengen convention. This means, for example, that there are border controls between Hungary and Romania, but not between Austria and Hungary. After getting through customs, we kept driving. Interestingly enough, though we had gone from Austria, crossed Hungary, and gotten to the Romanian border, we were still only half-way to our destination. This should give you an idea of how big Romania is when compared with other European countries.
Traveling on the bus was not so bad. All of the “senior adults” got to have two seats on the bus to themselves, and we took over the back of the bus where there were tables on each side of the bus and four seats around them, so we could continue to chat. We talked, shared life stories, sang songs, and just generally tried to entertain ourselves. One of the senior adults, probably in his mid-sixties, is named Georg. He’s originally from the Czech Republic, but is now living in Vienna. I knew him before the trip, because he goes to our church as well. We have coffee hour after church every Sunday, and he gets everyone coffee or tea. He remembers my name every week, and always tells me a joke. He loves telling jokes. Over the course of the four day trip in Romania, I probably heard one hundred or so jokes from him. Seriously. They aren’t really funny in and of themselves, but he’s just such a happy person and he clearly derives a great deal of enjoyment from them, so we manage to laugh one way or another. Here’s a sample joke (picture a Czech accent, if you can): “Do you know what the difference is between a lady and a diplomat? When a diplomat says yes, she means maybe, when she says maybe, she means no, but if she says no, she’s not a diplomat. When a lady says no, she means maybe, when she says maybe, she means yes, but if she says yes, she’s not a lady.” Getting to know Georg was probably one of the best parts of the trip. He is such a giving person, always wanting to know if he could make us coffee or tea, or if we wanted something to eat, or carrying boxes for the girls.
Sleeping on the bus was not quite as fun as traveling on it. Unfortunately, there were computers on the seats in the back, so we did not get two seats to ourselves. The only way I could sleep comfortably (a relative term, mind you) was to get down on the floor of the bus and wedge my head under the seat and stretch out across the aisle a little bit. Having my torso under the seat made tossing or turning impossible, so I developed a big bruise on my hip where my weight rested all on night on the hard floor. Fortunately, the guy sleeping in the seats above me only accidentally kicked me once. At first, I felt every bump and turn in the road, but you have to will yourself to become one with the bus, and after that it isn’t quite as jarring. I actually slept decently, considering the circumstances.
We were woken up around 7 in the morning when the bus pulled onto a large shoulder and we disembarked to have a picnic breakfast. We got big thick slices of brown brown (mm, I love Austrian bread), honey, jam, and hard boiled eggs. I even got my morning tea! The country side was beautiful, expansive, and green. There was a little village down the hill, and we soon had two visitors from there: a boy about eight or nine, and his younger brother who looked to be about six. They were dirty, wearing clothes that didn’t fit them at all, and just stood around staring at the bus. We gave them food, but if you watched closely, the older boy just pretended to eat anything we gave him, instead giving it to his brother. I tried getting their names, but the language barrier seemed too big to overcome, and they were both so shy they hardly said anything anyway. I took their picture and showed it to them, but I’m not sure they understood that it was them. That meeting really set the tone for the rest of the trip.
But first, a brief introduction to Transylvania. It was briefly part of the Ottoman Empire, then independent, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in the Hungarian area) and after World War I it became part of Romania. During World War II, the northern part of Transylvania became Hungarian, but after the end of the war the land was returned to Romania. In the area of Transylvania we were in (Harghita country), the majority of people are Hungarian, and not Romanian. The children learn in Hungarian, but they also have to learn Romania, because it’s the official language. I met a pastor a couple days into the trip, and couldn’t resist asking him if he considered himself Hungarian or Romanian. He gave me a startled look, like he didn’t know how I could even ask that question. He said he was Hungarian, and his parents were Hungarian, and his grandparents. His mother tongue was Hungarian, though he spoke Romanian, English, and German as well. This is difficult for me to understand. Why can’t you be Romanian and Hungarian? If my parents were Hungarians living in the US, I would consider myself both Hungarian and American. On the one hand, I understand wanting to feel close to your roots and wanting to have a national identity, because I have often felt rootless and customless, but I’m American because I grew up in America. I guess it’s because we have the idea that you can be more than one thing in America—an African American, or a Chinese American. Maybe they don’t have that idea in Transylvania.
After our breakfast picnic, we got back on the bus and drove to Sighişoara. This city brings to mind the other side of Transylvania—its fictional associations with the vampire Dracula. Vlad Drâculea Ţepeş (Vlad, son of Dracul, the Impaler) ruled Wallachia from Sighişoara, and was likely the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The medieval city walls on the top of a hill are still intact, but Vlad’s castle is not. You can see the house where he was born, but it probably isn’t the same house dating from his birth in 1431. In any case, Sighişoara is a very nice little town, with only a slight aftertaste of tourism.
After spending a couple of hours there, we got back on the bus and started driving. For reasons I couldn’t understand, we couldn’t arrive in Csíkszereda (this is the Hungarian name; the Romanian name is Miercurea-Ciuc) until after 3, and since we were running early we stopped at a beautiful meadow along the side of the road and had a picnic lunch.
Finally we arrived in Csíkszereda, which was our base for the next couple of days. We explored the town and checked into our hotel. The town was small and a little bit sad—there are basically two streets in the city center. I felt very out of place there, because it was so obvious that we didn’t belong, and there weren’t exactly a lot of tourists there to make us less unique. Nevertheless, the people were nice enough.
We had dinner at a pastor’s house, and afterwards we (the junior adults) starting learning to line dance. Though we didn’t know it beforehand, the school children usually do something for us when we come, like recite poetry or sing songs, and the project directors thought it would be nice if we returned the favor by doing something for them. A couple of girls from Canada knew how to line dance, so we all learned and spent time practicing for the next day.
The next day (Saturday) we had to get up very early. We set off for our first school, which was about 45 minutes away. It was an integration school, trying to integrate Roma children into the population. The Roma (more commonly called Gypsies) probably make up almost ten percent of the Romanian population, and only some of them are currently settled. We were strictly forbidden from giving anything to loitering Roma, because then everyone will want something and then you have a problem on your hands. We had exactly enough for the children in these schools, and could only help so many people.
We got there, unloaded boxes for the children, and then played a game outside with some of them. They sang songs for us, and recited some poetry. Then we gave each child a box. At this school, the children had to put their names on their boxes and leave them at school instead of taking them home, because if they had taken them home there was a risk that their parents would have taken the boxes and then sold the contents. These boxes had toothpaste, soap, a coloring book, some paper and pencils, and some other things. We rarely got to see the children open the boxes. The teachers then gave us some pretzels and some tea.
Then we went on our way to Sinmartin. About twenty years ago, the program directors stumbled upon this orphanage in Sinmartin, and discovered these children in horrible conditions, with almost no food, no exercise, etc. They also suffered from a lack of love and nurturing, because the women who cared for them saw a Romany child instead of just an orphan. Eventually, they realized how much better the children were if they just took them home for the weekend, and now there is a regular fostering program. We had a reception with the current foster families, and then gave them some necessities. I was puzzled at first because I saw some of the mothers with cell phones, and they didn’t look like they were in dire poverty. Then someone explained to me that the government is supposed to help them care for these children, but that the aid they get is almost impossible to rely upon. This is why we gave them non-perishables, so that when these hard times come by they have something stored away. Also, as the weekend progressed, I realized that everywhere we went, we were treated specially. The children wore their prettiest outfits, and the teachers always gave us something to eat or drink after visiting with the children. These families probably dressed in their nicest clothes to come see us. Many of them had to load their boxes onto communal horse carts, because they didn’t have a car. Sinmartin is also mainly a small, farming community. After giving everyone their boxes, we got the chance to visit one of the foster families. They had two little children, a boy between two and three and a little girl who was probably 18 months. We got a chance to look inside the house—there were four rooms. One room was for the children, and would surely become too small once they were out of cribs. Then there was a dining room, a kitchen, and the adults’ bedroom. Heating was provided by the way of large ceramic stoves heated with coal, like the ones I’ve seen in palaces from the 1700s.
Our next stop was another school near Csikszereda. The children sang songs for us—in Hungarian, English, and German—and we danced and sang for them. Then they recited poetry for us. The whole school had turned out, and all of us could fit in a room just a little bigger than my bedroom at home. Afterwards, we handed out the boxes—it was amazing that there was never any pushing or shoving. All of the children waited patiently, quietly, and always thanked us. At this school, every child had a bunch of flowers and drawings that they had made, and they shoved these into our hands. I don’t mind saying that the kids must have found the girls more approachable, because within minutes I had more flowers and drawings than I could hold, and some of the boys had just a couple of bunches. What stuck with me from that school, is that despite the limited resources of the teachers, they had taught the older students some English. The one I will never forget, Z., was pretty and smart and gave me a drawing of a bus—our bus—with her name on it. What would she be doing if she had been born somewhere else?
We went from this school to the Technical High School to drop off the computers. These computers were probably from the era when I started using computers, in the mid-1990s, and yet this school was thankful to have them. What happens to all of those other computers that we find outdated? Finally, after an emotionally and physically exhausting day, we returned to the hotel.
On Saturday we got up early again. Our first stop was a school for mentally disabled children in Olteni. All of the kids came right up to us and took our hands, or hugged us, without even saying hello! You can tell they were starved for attention and love. We spent some time hiding chocolate eggs and bags full of jelly beans for the kids in a large field (for an Easter egg hunt) and then we had some really yummy pastries and schnapps for brunch. Mm…The Easter egg hunt was a really great success. Interestingly enough, this school, which probably has a little over 50 kids, is about 90 percent self-sufficient because of the farming and pig raising they do. So, the kids learn something practical that they can hopefully use after they have to leave the home. We played more games, sang songs, and then did our line dance for them. Then we got some kids to come up with us and we taught them the dance. The two girls I got, who were probably both about 15 or 16, learned the dance really quickly and got a little bored. Suddenly, they broke out in a new dance that I had never seen before, and preceded to teach me! What a reversal. Finally, the kids had to go, and we left.
We got back to Sinmartin and got into two vans. We went up a very dusty bumpy dirt road into the Carpathian mountains (many of the roads in that area of Romania are unpaved). This road probably would have turned into impassable mud after 15 minutes of rain, and it’s probably just as inaccessible when it snows. On the way up, we saw a nomadic Roma family. The father was watching the horses, and the mother and grandmother were camped out near the covered wagon (seriously) trying to start a fire, and the children were just running around. After about 40 minutes, we got to the Roma mountain village of Csinod. Even though this was a Saturday, and some of the children lived as far as seven kilometers away, they were all assembled in front of the school house. They also sang more songs for us and recited poetry, but we got the added bonus of having traditional music performed for us. One of the instruments was a regular violin, but the other looked like a cello, but instead of playing it with a bow you plucked the strings and thumped it with something like a drum stick. The musicians were this really cute old Roma couple who had probably been playing those instruments since they could…well, since they could. The school didn’t even have indoor plumbing, but there was an outhouse nearby. These kids were also very grateful, but more than that I noticed that they lived in a tiny mountain village that looked like it was straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder (except for the occasional satellite dish—nice to see where the priorities are). These people also gave us food to eat afterwards—potatoes, cheese, pastries, and some kind of schnapps. Thinking about it, the entire meal was probably hand made, because it’s not like you can take a jaunt down to the grocery store. In fact, I didn’t see a single store up there—just houses.
Back in Csikszereda, we finished packing the bus back up, and after dinner we were all getting on the bus. A friend and I saw two Roma women with their babies just silently standing outside the bus. It was wrong to just leave them. How I knew this, I’m not sure, because I take a very long time deciding where to even eat, and moral decisions take days. But somehow I knew what was right, and even though I knew I would likely get in trouble for it, I took some of our breakfast bread and gave it to one of the women. To try to convey the look in her eyes, the wave she gave as we pulled away, would do it injustice. Suffice it to say that great silent tears started to flow down my cheeks.
Paris 9-13 May 2008
Despite the “irreconcilable differences” that Paris and I cited in our divorce papers, I think we will always love one another. My friend J. wanted to see Paris for the first time, and I wanted to see the friends I still had there (including Paris herself) so we took the opportunity afforded by the five day Pentecost holiday and flew over. It was incredibly bizarre being back there. I could still communicate in French fairly well, but all of the little everyday words like “excuse me,” “please,” and “thank you” had gone out the window in Austria—now they only come out in German! My German and my French keep getting mixed up. Probably when my German gets better I will be able to separate the two better, but now it’s very difficult to do. It seems like every time I learn a new word in German, it replaces the area of my brain where that French word used to be. It makes speaking very difficult.
We made our way to my former teacher’s apartment, who generously let us spend the holiday with her, and dropped our stuff off there. Then we went up to the Arc de Triomphe, walked down the Champs Elysées, and went to the Louvre. I introduced J. to all of the very important paintings, but was very happy to stumble onto parts of the Louvre that I had never visited before (which is great since I’ve been there probably eight times now). I love that I can still go back to Paris and find new things, and see old things that I still find beautiful. Then we went to Angelina for some of the hot chocolate. Unfortunately, in light of my hot chocolate discovery in Barcelona, it was no longer the best hot chocolate I had ever had, so that was a little sad. Then we went back to my teacher’s apartment, tired because we had to get up at 4 in the morning to make our flight, and had dinner with her, her family, and some students. It was great to be able to see everyone again, and to play with their dog (!).
The next day we went into the Salvador Dali Museum. I had never been in it before, but it wasn’t that new and exciting because I’ve been to Dali Museums in London and Barcelona as well. I can say for certain, however, that Dali is really really crazy, but still a genius. Then we went down to the Gustave Moreau Museum (still one of my favorite museums in Paris). In between, we helped an old lady cross the street and get her groceries home. I was just chatting away with her and started following her. After we got the old lady safely back to her apartment building, my friend was finally able to ask me what in the world was going on—I had completely forgotten that he couldn’t understand what she was saying!
We then wandered down to St-Germain-des-Prés and I actually went in the church St-Germain-des-Prés for the first time. I had always felt silly about passing that church every time I went to school or left it without ever going in it, so I finally got the chance to go in. It wasn’t that exciting. We also had coffee in the upstairs room of Café de Flore, which is where Sartre’s Resistance group met during the German occupation of France in WWII. That was very interesting. Then we wandered around the Latin Quarter for a while, and then met the German student who stayed with my French host family and his friend. We got to hang out for a while and went out to dinner together. I tried bœuf tartare for the first time—it’s basically a raw meat patty. Tasty.
The next day I was happy to go to the Musée d’Orsay and see all of my old favorite paintings, and (again) I was glad to see that I could still find some things that I had never seen before. It was also fun to play tour guide for my friend, because I learned so much about all of these paintings from my art and architecture class last semester. In fact, I kept him supplied with a steady stream of Parisian and French history, art, culture, and anecdotes for the entire trip. I’m not sure whether he appreciated that or not. We also saw Notre Dame (naturally). Then we wandered around one of my favorite quartiers of Paris—le Marais. It is the Jewish and gay section of Paris, as well as the oldest district. We had a fabulous falafel sandwich (since I couldn’t find any in Istanbul) and then went to the Centre Pompidou. Of all of the times that I passed by it, this was the first time I ever actually went inside the museum section. The first part I saw was too modern for me—I just don’t understand any of it. The floor above that, however, was much more palatable for me, because it was still somewhat grounded in reality. They had some really great Kandinsky paintings up there. After dinner we went to see the Eiffel tower at night—beautiful as ever.
On Monday we went to Père Lachaise. I had been before but this time the weather was much nicer (in fact, it was hot when we were there—skirts and t-shirts only weather). Last time I had just wandered around without trying to find the famous people, but J. wanted to see Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, so I tagged on after him. Oscar Wilde’s grave is covered with lipstick, where people either wrote love related comments or kissed his grave stone. Jim Morrison’s grave stone is quite small and fence off with a guard standing nearby, probably because the poor sepulcher next to Jim Morrison is covered in graffiti. Then we made our way to the Eiffel tower. No matter how many times I visit it, it is always so beautiful. We walked up to the top and back down again for dinner with my teacher.
On Tuesday we got up early and went to Versailles. We zipped through the palace part and wandered around in the gardens for a while, which I’d never really taken the time to do before. I was always too hot and worn out to do it before. They are really something to see. We got back to Paris and took our last couple of hours at a café, before hopping on our place back again.
It was really wonderful to get to see my friends and Paris again. I realized just how much I learned last semester—I was like the encyclopedia of Paris. Since I went through some rough times in Paris I felt like the city and I didn’t get along sometimes, and since then I think I’ve been giving Paris the short end of the stick. Being back there reminded me that it really is a beautiful, unique city, and that it was a priceless experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I guess Paris got under my skin more than I thought it had.
Achtung! This post is pretty long…sorry!
Istanbul 1-6 May 2008
The trouble started before we even left for Istanbul. I adamantly refused to go to Istanbul without at least one man because I had heard that women by themselves sometimes get harassed. So I invited two men and then another girl jumped on board. Trying to coordinate flights and accommodation for four people who all want to pay for themselves, etc, is extraordinarily complicated (made more complicated because the other girl and I had too many opinions, and the boys had too few). We left on a Wednesday night, April 30, and took a bus to Bratislava. We were flying into and out of Bratislava because we could only find cheap flights going to Istanbul from there, and it takes at most 2 hours to get there. You have to be careful to eat before going to the Bratislava airport, because you might not be able to buy a snack or a water bottle there—or at least not without exchanging into Slovakian Koruna.
The downside of cheap flights is that you can’t really check bags without paying extra fees, and that they always leave and arrive at the worst times. We got into the airport at 2 in the morning, and then we had to stand in a long line to get our visas. You need to have a visa to get into Turkey, but you just buy them at the airport right before you go through customs. It costs about 15 euros, and lets you go in and out of Turkey as much as you want for the next three months. Then we got picked up by our hostel, settled into our beds, and were out like lights.
We slept in a little the next day and then got up and went to breakfast in the shadow of Aya Sophya (Hagia Sophia). The mosque was only two blocks away from our hostel, so we had a pretty perfect location. I got a potato pancake, which isn’t what we think of, but is more like a tortilla with mashed potatoes inside. These pancakes were fairly common fare in Istanbul. Next we proceeded to the Basilica Cistern. This was a cistern built during the Byzantine Empire, and is one of the only surviving cisterns that still hold water. It was underground, and really huge. There were all of these huge ghostly carp gliding through the shallow water, and water kept dripping on my head from the roof. It was very cool to see. Next we went to Aya Sophya. It was interesting to see that we had to scan our bags and go through metal detectors—not only here but at pretty much every single monument or museum we went to see. Aya Sophya was built in the 6th century as this big beautiful church, but when the Ottoman Empire conquered Istanbul (then Constantinople) they turned it into a mosque. The inside was huge, and there was an interesting mixture of Christian mosaics and mosque features, such as Arabic calligraphy and no pews. Next we made our way across Sultanahmet Square to the Blue Mosque.
The Blue Mosque was built by a sultan on the hill opposite Aya Sophya so that everyone could compare the beauty of the two mosques and see that the Blue Mosque was much more magnificent. Outside the mosque was a screen scrolling through phrases from the Koran, translated into Turkish and English. Going into the Mosque had its conditions, however. Women had to cover their hair, you weren’t allowed to enter the mosque during prayer time, everyone had to remove their shoes, and you had to remain silent. My girlfriend (W.) and I covered up our hair in specially brought scarves, and all of us removed our shoes and put them in plastic bags that the mosque provided. The floor of the mosque was covered in beautiful Turkish rugs, and there was a large area reserved for men’s prayer. There was a smaller area behind this where the tourists milled around, and then behind that there were areas for women to pray, which were separated by the rest of the mosque by wooden screens. I noticed a lot of women wore a scarf just to get into the mosque, and then immediately removed them. I might not like wearing a head scarf, but it’s not my culture, so I think that people should have been much more respectful. The walls were covered with beautiful blue tiles, and chandeliers hung from the ceiling. It felt much smaller than Aya Sophya, which was probably partly due to the fact that the chandeliers full of light bulbs were hanging only 3 meters above the mosque floor. We left the mosque and went into the neighboring bazaar, where we were lucky enough to see a whirling dervish performance. The whirling dervishes are men who wear white pants with a long white skirt over that, a long white shirt, and a tall hat. They spin around and around with their arms outstretched, and meditate. Spinning is supposed to bring them closer to God in their meditative state. They probably spun around for around seven or eight minutes, which I find quite impressive. The whole thing was very beautiful and a little otherworldly, just because it was so foreign to me. After a little we noticed that the whirling dervishes were being filmed. Since we stumbled across another film crew around a makeshift Turkish kebab kitchen in front of the Blue Mosque, we figured it was probably the Travel Channel or something like that.
Afterwards we made our way over to the Grand Bazaar, which is the largest covered market in the world with 4500 shops. And it is enormous. My girlfriend and I got very pumped up about going to the Grand Bazaar and buying tons of things, but once we got there, the size and variety of it completely overwhelmed us. It also didn’t help that, as Western women, we were targeted by the shopkeepers (who were almost always men). Everyone wanted us to come into his shop, to give us a special price, to give us a compliment, or try to draw us in one way or another. These comments were more persistent and frequent the further away we wandered from the boys, who were apparently not very interesting for Turkish shopkeepers. Just to clarify, these comments were in no way rude or derogatory, but were always very friendly. At one point, I was looking at one store (because they are more like tiny stores than individual booths) and the guy standing outside it invited me and my girlfriend to have apple tea with him. Before going into the Grand Bazaar, my friend told me that it was very rude to turn down a cup of tea, because it was a sign of hospitality. So we said yes, but he started walking away from his store and into a courtyard, where a young boy brought us all apple tea on a tray held precariously by an overhead handle. After only a minute or two, we discovered that this tea invitation was really designed to get us to go out with him and his friend, rather than to express Turkish hospitality. We plead out of it and found the boys and didn’t leave them again in the bazaar. Everyone in the bazaar were ablution fountains for ritual foot washing (Muslims have to wash their feet before prayer). I started to feel hemmed in because I couldn’t look at anything without being approached. It wasn’t like Mexico where it seemed like these shopkeepers were poor; most people in Istanbul seem fairly well off by Western standards, and I saw very few beggars. We soon became exhausted, overwhelmed, and somewhat discouraged that we hadn’t bought anything, so we headed back to the hostel.
We had dinner at a beautiful rooftop restaurant at the hotel next to our hostel, which afforded us a view of the Blue Mosque, Aya Sophya, and the Bosphorus (the body of water which separates the Asian part of Istanbul from the European part—we were on the European side). At night the mosques are all lit up and the sea gulls circle them eating the insects attracted by the light. The lights reflect off the white bullies of the gulls and they looked like unholy orbs circling the mosques. It creeped me out some. We discovered that Turkish kebabs are not really like what we get in Vienna. In Vienna, a kebab is meat, vegetables, and some kind of sauce in pita bread. Genuine Turkish kebabs don’t actually come inside a pita. They are just meat on a plate, and it is not the meat that gets shaved off those enormous spits, but is just like a shish kebab sans stick. That was interesting to discover. Istanbul also has far fewer falafels than I thought it would. The food there was very interesting, but wasn’t really my favorite. I tried a lot of different things, like nut-stuffed grapes covered in honey, Turkish delight, apple tea, kebabs, puffed pitas (giant pitas put into the oven and made all puffy and crispy), Turkish pizza, these great Turkish cookies, etc. Cucumbers are also a big thing here. There are street vendors with carts full of cucumbers and they peel them for you with a knife so you can eat it like a banana. The sweets were good (baklava and other honeyed things!), and I fell in love with the apple tea.
We returned to our hostel and since the weather was night we sat outside and smoked a hookah that one of the boys had bought at the Grand Bazaar (which is an essential Turkish cultural experience). There was construction going on at the building across the street from us, and for some reason the construction workers were outside working until after midnight. One of the construction workers actually gave me and W. some flowers—though I have no idea why—maybe we were just pretty. That was also Labor Day in Europe (May 1) and when we got back to the hostel we found out that there had been riots in a different district in Istanbul, with people throwing rocks at the police and the police beating people. I was just thankful we hadn’t gone over there that day!
The next day we went to Topkapı Palace, where the sultans of the Ottoman Empire and his harem lived. It was absolutely huge, and surrounded by very thick stone walls. If you were lucky enough to get an audience with the sultan, you had to kiss the hem of his robe, and then you could speak to him through the Grand Vizier. Even though there were lots of tourists there, I found it amazing and magnificent, not because everything was beautiful and tiled or gilded and covered in calligraphy, but because it was just so different. We saw the library, the treasury, the circumcision room, the turban storage room (!!), the harem, and the Sacred Trust. The Sacred Trust is where they keep objects of religious importance, like Abraham’s bowl, David’s sword, Moses’ rod, part of John the Baptist’s arm and skull, a former container for the sacred black stone, and many objects associated with Muhammad, such as some of his beard, his sword, anything he ever touched, etc. That was a really good opportunity for me to learn something about the Islamic religion, because my knowledge is limited at best. We went to the royal harem next, where the sultan and his many wives actually lived. That was interesting.
We next made our way up to the Spice Bazaar, which specializes in spices but also has other traditional Turkish wares, such as tea cups, pashminas, hookahs, and evil eyes (the evil eye is an eye-like symbol to ward off evil). Since it was less crowded and much smaller than the Grand Bazaar, I found it less pressuring, and managed to spend a decent amount of money. The exchange rate is actually quite good—2 Turkish lira to the euro. The cost of living is certainly less there than it is in Europe. We spent the night hanging out in a hookah bar on floor cushions, which was great and relaxing. We also discovered this bakery with some really fabulous cookies that we continued to get almost every night for dessert because they were just that good.
On Saturday we started walking towards the Golden Horn. The Bosphorus separates European and Asian Istanbul, and the Golden Horn is a channel that separates the older part of European Istanbul from the newer part. Along the way W. and I stopped to watch a woman weaving a Turkish rug in the window of a store, and then got invited in, started looking at rugs, had apple tea with the shopkeeper, and nearly bought rugs but didn’t (a fact with I now lament). We proceeded to Galata Bridge and walked across it. I saw jelly fish for the first time in my life, which was a lot of fun for me. Then we took the tram—there are gun stores in the underground passages leading to the trams!—up the coast to Dolmabahçe Palace, where the sultans moved in the mid-1800s. It’s a very European style palace, which you can only see if you go on a guided tour. We joined an English guided tour and had to put plastic booties over our feet so that we wouldn’t damage anything with our shoes. The neat thing about the palace is that the whole thing is symmetrical—there’s two of everything. We also got to see what once was the largest chandelier in the world. Then we walked back over Galata Bridge and had some traditional fish sandwiches—a fish filet with lettuce and lemon juice on bread. Then we hopped on a ferry and went over to Asia. I’ve now been on three continents! There was basically nothing to see over there in the way of sights; it was just residential, so we turned around and went back to the hostel. For dinner we went to this restaurant where they didn’t serve alcohol because you can’t serve it within 100 meters of a mosque. That was interesting. It’s also fascinating to hear the call to prayer, which occurs at regular intervals throughout the day (maybe five times?). The call to prayer is just a man at a mosque singing, indicating that Muslim people should pray. Nowadays, the call to prayer is broadcast over a speaker, so you can usually hear three calls to prayer at the same time no matter where you are. They don’t start at the same time either, but within a couple of minutes of one another. It’s interesting that absolutely nothing changes during the day when you hear the call to prayer. Nobody stops moving or brings out their prayer mats, or really acknowledges it at all. Maybe it’s just a reflection of the fact that large cities are usually more secular.
On Sunday W. felt sick—she might have had some of the tap water, which you aren’t supposed to drink—so the boys and I went to the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. We saw a lot of rugs, pottery, and Arabic calligraphy. It was interesting that we saw a lot of calligraphy but didn’t see any Korans in the museums. Maybe there’s a rule about that. The ethnographic section of the museum was the most interesting because it had dioramas of village life for women across Turkey, with a focus on rug weaving. There were also photos of real Turkish village women. That was my favorite part, because you got a really good idea of what living in Turkey is like even now.
We then went to the Archaeological Museums. We got to see artifacts from Troy, which a German scientist discovered in the late 1800s. It was just so cool to be able to see things that they would have had in Homer’s Troy, and what it might have been like there. I also liked to see the ancient cuneiform tablets, which gave you some idea of the things they considered important, like cures for impotence or IOUs.
On our last day, we took a ferry out to the Princes’ Islands. Unfortunately, the main attraction of the Princes’ Islands is their outdoor beauty and it was raining at first. It eventually stopped though and we went on a hike in search of a monastery that was supposed to be there. We never found it, but we got a good idea of what life in a small Turkish town might be like. It was pretty but not my favorite thing to visit.
Overall, Istanbul was incredible. The weather wasn’t great, and the food wasn’t either, but getting to see these beautiful things which were so different than anything I had ever experienced made up for all of that. The city was also beautiful, and I definitely want to return at some point in my life—I have to buy that Turkish rug!
I’m slightly behind on work/sleep/time what with going to Istanbul and leaving for Paris tomorrow.
Consequently, I’ll give the speed version of Istanbul now, and when I find free time (if it exists) then I can flush it out.
Day one: saw Aya Sophya (Hagia Sophia), the Blue Mosque, the Basilica Cistern, stumbled onto the Today show filming some Whirling Dervishes without knowing it, went to the Grand Bazaar, accidently went on an “apple tea date” with a random Turkish man, ate dinner on a rooftop, and smoked hookah for the first time (as a cultural experience, of course).
Day two: Went to Topkapi Palace, saw the Royal Harem, Abraham’s pot, Moses’ rod, and King David’s sword. Went to the Spice Bazaar, tried natural Turkish Viagra (without knowing it), and bought lots of great stuff.
Day three: Almost bought a Turkish rug, went across Galata Bridge, saw a jellyfish for the first time, saw Dolmabahce Palace, ate a fish sandwich, and took a ferry to Asia (Istanbul is on two continents).
Day four: Went to the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, and the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.
Day five: Took a ferry to Princes’ Island, wandered around for a very long time trying to find a monastery, never found it, took a ferry back to Istanbul.
Overall, I ate a lot of kebabs, drank a ton of apple tea, smoked hookah, heard the Islamic call to prayer many times, wore a head scarf on and off, went to the bathroom in a porcelain hole in the ground, had flowers given to me by a Turkish construction worker, avoided drinking the tap water, and was constantly hounded by shop-keepers.
Istanbul was a beautiful beautiful city, and I would love to go again. I had a really wonderful time there.
