Destination: Turkey

Memory Monday

Looking at those photos from 2002 last week reminded me of a lot of things, including Turkey.

Even though I worked with an extremely diverse population in my home in East London, both India and Turkey had, in different ways, become countries and cultures of focus for me. Going to India in 1993 had been one step in the path of getting me to London, but in 2002 when I realised I’d be relocating back to the States, I still hadn’t been to Turkey.

I had become accustomed to traveling all around Europe at very low costs as a London resident, by visiting and staying with friends in these other countries, and by flying budget airlines. So, probably not long after I truly decided I was moving back across the Pond, I also decided I needed to take one more trip. I thought about Italy, but I didn’t know anyone in Italy, and besides, everybody goes to Italy. If I were going to make European trips ever again, from the United States instead of from the United Kingdom, it was far more likely that I’d make it to Italy than to Turkey. Besides, I knew a British couple living in Izmir at the time. So, I reckoned, I could probably stay with them. They reckoned so, as well.

What I hadn’t reckoned on was the fact that either I couldn’t get a flight to Izmir, or else I couldn’t afford one, so my British-Friends-in-Turkey recommended I fly into Istanbul and take a bus (coach) to their city, and then reverse the trip on the way back. This probably wouldn’t have been such a terrible idea, except that if I was going to be in Istanbul, I wanted to see Istanbul. I can’t really remember how it was I decided to bite the bullet and schedule myself two nights in a small hotel in the Old City at the beginning of the trip, and two more nights on the way back. I bought my tickets and booked the hotel, which I had discovered after some research on Backpacker.com, and at the beginning of May 2002, just a few weeks before I left London forever as a resident, I left London temporarily as a tourist to Turkey.

Hotel Sur – I recommend it–at least as it was a decade ago.

“Be careful,” said my Turkish and Kurdish women friends. “You will love Turkey. But be careful of the men.” They said that last part a lot. “Be careful of Turkish men.”

“Don’t go down any alleys with anyone,” quipped . . . actually, I don’t remember who quipped that. But I know someone did. I remember the quip because please. Who actually goes down alleyways with someone they don’t know?

My British-Friends-in-Turkey told me what I had to do to get from my hotel to the bus on the second day and warned me about scam-artist cab drivers.

“Be careful,” said everybody.

Of course I was going to be careful. I wouldn’t go out after dark, and I don’t talk to men on the street anyway, so that wasn’t a concern. I was maybe a little naive, but I wasn’t stupid, and I was just nervous and yet determined enough, that probably, with God’s help, I was going to be just fine.

I’m going to say God’s help was the clincher, but I’m at more than 500 words, so you’re going to have to wait until next week to find out how the trip went.

Technically, this is still BEFORE dark. From the roof of my restaurant.

We’re Talkin’ ‘Bout Good Fixations

Good, good, good . . . good fixations.

Well, not necessarily, I suppose, but I needed a title and apparently the Beach Boys were right there.

Just when you would’ve thought I couldn’t have got more self-obsessed via the whole blogging thing, since WordPress lets you see things like the number of hits your blog has had on a given day, they ramped it up.

Now you can also see what countries people are reading your blog in. As a former modern nomad of sorts, this fascinates me. Now, instead of just trying to find out how many people have wasted five minutes of their precious lives over here, I am also constantly checking to see if those people share my same continent. For a while, they were Beta-testing this or whatever they were doing, and every time I went to my stats page, it would say something like, “Soon stats will automatically show up on your home page, with 100% more country stats. Click here to see what this looks like.” And I would think, “I’m not a facebook change-hater! Why do I have to keep pressing a button to see 100% more country stats? Stop telling me about it and just put them there already!”Part of why I like this, besides that it makes me feel like an internationally-read author, is that I do know people from quite an extensive number of countries; I like to see if I can guess if I know the person from the countries that are highlighted or not. For example, I already know I have a friend in Israel who reads my blog. Actually, we’re friends because she reads my blogs, if you want to know the truth of it. She became in-person friends with TheBro and Sister-in-Lu when they lived in Jerusalem briefly, because she reads my blogs.(I still have never met her, alas.) Anyway, when I look below the little map and see “Israel . . . 1,” I know that K has read my latest post. But what if it says “Israel . . . 4”? Are those people that K knows? Or are they people that just randomly stumbled across this morass of meandering musings?

Or what about the countries where I used to know people? I used to know someone who lived in Bosnia. Today, someone from Bosnia read something on my blog. But my friend who used to live there? Now lives in the UK. It’s all very mysterious.I’m sure none of this fascinates anybody as much as it does me, but that’s okay, because I’m the only one who gets to see my stats anyway. Except for right now.

Can you tell I just learned how to take a screen shot?

Yesterday was a good day. Look how many countries lit up! And Chile! I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone from Chile.

But here’s something else I’m wondering about. Is there some sort of blog-hit Bermuda triangle? Because I could have sworn–sworn, I tell you, that before yesterday, there were 216 “views on my busiest day,” not 212. Where did those four people go? How can you lose blog hits? I realise I have no way to prove that that little spot right there used to say “216.” I was also convinced as a child that one day the hands on the little two dimensional plastic clock in my Raggedy-Ann and -Andy Colorforms set, moved. Laugh all you want, though. Someone’s stealing blog-stats.

Besides Who is it? what I want to know is:

Do you blog? Are you as obsessed with your stats as I evidently am?

Where are you reading this blog from? And do we know each other?

In a Sari State

The first time I wore an Indian sari, I was a college student traveling with 8 other people for five weeks during the summer. (As an aside, if you can avoid India in July, you’d be best advised to do so.) The sari had belonged to an elderly missionary who had since retired to the United States, so it wasn’t exactly top sari fashion or anything, but it was durable polyester and it was a good practice sari.

Two of the people on our traveling team were a college-aged brother and sister duo who had been born in India but moved with their family to the US in late childhood. The first time I wore that polyester sari, that sister enlisted the help of some of the other female travelers, in order to teach us all the art of sari tying at once.

We learned that there’s an underskirt, and that it’s best to cinch the drawstring on that uncomfortably tight, because that’s basically what holds the rest of the outfit together. We learned the sari itself is a big 9-yard long rectangle of fabric. You tie a knot in one corner and tuck it in the right side of your underskirt, and then start wrapping the thing around your waist, right to left. There are these pleats that you fold in the front, and we learned that the first one is the trickiest to fold because it’s meant to hang straight down like the other ones, but it’s hard to get it to do that. Unless you haven’t got hips, in which case you might be a guy, and probably stopped reading this post about twelve sentences ago.

Apparently the more pleats you can incorporate into the front, the more beautiful the sari is, and therefore the more beautiful the wearer. Evidently I had a good amount of pleats, because when I emerged from the room with my first ever sari, Sari Sister’s brother said, “Wow. Wow.”

One of the female members of the team said, “Here comes Amy Carmichael!” which I took as quite as nice a compliment, because Amy Carmichael has always been a hero of mine.

In subsequent years, I acquired a new sari when I was asked to be in Sari Sister’s wedding, and then I got some shalwar kameez from Pakistani friends when I lived in London. So, even though most of the time my old fashioned polyester sari spends its time as a curtain, and wedding attendant sari lies folded in my cedar trunk, every so often, I have the opportunity to wear one or the other.

Four years ago, I was thrown into Now Church’s Christmas pageant for the first time. At the end of the pageant, the narrators say, “And people from all walks of life, people from all corners of the earth, will come and worship the One who brings us light.” Then people, dressed up as people from other countries or times, or, say, bikers with tattoos, come down the aisle one at a time and leave something at the altar, and sing a song.

Dismayingly, I don’t currently have any South Asian friends in this part of this country, so the chances of my being able to wear a sari or shalwar kameez to, for example, somebody’s baby’s first birthday party, are nil. So the pageant seemed like as good an opportunity to bring those outfits out. I chose the old school sari. But then the next two years, I wore shalwar kameez, so I really haven’t tied a sari since December of 2008.

Yesterday I discovered that maybe sari tying is not like riding a bike. I couldn’t remember which direction to wrap it. I pleated the pleats in the right direction, but then somehow the rest of the thing wrapped backwards, so that I was flinging the end over the right shoulder instead of the left, which made the pleats flatten and try to go the opposite way. At least, I thought, I can still get a decent number of pleats in here.

But then I went to the dressing room to see if I could round up some assistance and maybe, unbelievably, someone who actually knew how to tie these things. “Miss Jenn,” one of the pageant’s little angels asked with some concern, “Why is your belly showing?” I had forgotten how much that would’ve freaked me out as a kid.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “it soon won’t be, if I can figure out how to wear this right.”

“I’m sure,” said the angel’s grandmother, “you’ve seen bellies before.”

“You probably have one,” I said. “Do you?”

“Yes,” said another little angel. “But mine is thin.”

Totally “de-pleated,” as it were, I returned to my office to resume my fight with my attire. I managed a makeshift, belly-hiding drape, and, while narrating the story of Sweet Baby Jesus, tied and retied saris in my mind. So that, by the second showing of the pageant, I had got it right.