Testing...

This is Paul and I'm verifying that I still know how to post to a blog... :)

I wanted to edit Colin's previous post to add a photo of the bus we took from Edirne back to Istanbul. I could not figure out how to edit someone else's post (maybe you are not supposed to be able to do that) so I am posting the picture here:




These buses are built by Mercedes Benz and are very comfortable!

Mutlu yıllar!

Happy twenty-ten everyone!  We're back in Istanbul - well, I'm here for another few hours :(  My flight leaves tomorrow at 6:35am.  Oy.  And last night I (along with everyone else in the family) got very little sleep.  The "no special" celebration turned out to entail raucous street parties, loud Arabic music, squealing tires, drunken college students, etc., until 4am-ish.  And we had to keep the windows open to counteract the heater, which tho set at 'low' still seemed to want to keep the room at a healthy 90° or so.

We caught the 9am bus out of Edirne ;)  So the city wasn't great, but we got a good two days' worth of entertainment out of it, and it was WAY different from Istanbul.  I feel like we definitely have a more complete (though by no means actually complete) view of Turkey because of it.  Plus, I need to say that, just like in Istanbul, everyone was extremely nice.  Plus, unlike Istanbul, very few people spoke English, and those who did, didn't well; nonetheless they went far out of their way to help us tourists.

After getting into Istanbul, we took a crazy shuttle through town, which bounced and swerved so much that it almost made Mom throw up.  Then we ate at a really nice little restaurant a few blocks away from our hotel.  As we walked there, we were greeted by a bunch of shop and restaurant owners asking us questions like "Where'd you go?"  and "How was Edirne?"  I felt a bit like a celebrity.  The food was really good, and we got to sit outside (on January 1st!) because it was 64° today and not a cloud in the sky.  Then we went back to the hotel, unpacked (and I repacked) and chatted with Fatih. 

From there we walked to the bazaar for Annaliese to buy some more scarves and for me to get a good Turkish dictionary (the only one I had before was not thorough enough).  On the way, Annaliese realized she'd left her expensive camera sitting on her chair outside of the restaurant we'd had lunch at.  She jogged back and found it right where she'd left it.  The owner apologized numerous times for not having noticed, and several people murmured in astonishment "Just look how safe it is here!"

Well, we're off to Turquoise again for my last meal in Turkey :(  This was an absolutely wonderful trip.  Annaliese has said several times this is the second country (not counting the US) in which she could see herself living.  Thank you, Mom, Dad, Anna, Fatih, Rolf, Hermann, Anita, Volker, for making this one of the best vacations of my life! 

Love, peace and good fortune in the New Year!
Colin

PS - My parents have promised to post one more entry to this blog tomorrow evening, their last day in Turkey.

kronik psikozlu!!

Wow!  Today was the most unusual New Years Eve I have ever experienced.  I ended up choosing "kronik psikozlu" (see below) for the title of this entry, but my other favorite suggestions were "most travelers avoid Edirne" (from a travel blog I read this morning) and "fighting OSHA since 125 AD".

Before getting into today's adventures, though, I want to start with the last fail of yesterday followed by its redeeming grace:  Anna is now a vegetarian, so we've been looking for places that serve things other than just meat.  We were recommended a place nearby called Balık.  We walked in, sat down, got water and opened up our menus.  Everything was in Turkish.  I could pick out a few words related to seafood, but that was it.  No one in our family really likes seafood.  None of our waiters spoke English.  Suddenly, we realized that balık means "fish"!  Oy!  Fail.

After getting help from the wonderful people working there (negotiated in broken Turkish and English), we ended up in an alleyway being welcomed into a smokey pub by its proprietor, a very mafioso-looking Turk with a slightly unbuttoned shirt and gold chain.  He sat us down in tiny wooden chairs next to a mural of a forest.  The table next to us was full of young, raucous twenty-somethings; otherwise the establishment was empty.  Young men and boys kept coming in the entryway, picking up packages and running off.  Anna suggested that these "business transactions" seemed a bit illicit.  A three-man band came into our little room and started playing what I can only assume is traditional Turkish or Bulgarian music (we're only a few miles from Bulgaria here).  It was AMAZING!  They were great; there was a clarinet, a drum and some sort of 16-stringed banjo or something.  And they all sang.  After a while, the young Turks at the table next to us joined in on the chorus.  The Don kept bringing us tray after tray of vegetarian food without our even ordering it.  He was extremely nice, jovial even, grinning broadly and speaking in very decent English.  The music was wonderful, the food was good, and the people were friendly and helpful.  It was the most true-to-life, the "realest", experience I've had here.  It truly salvaged an otherwise less-than-fantastic day.

Back to today:  Morning smog rises around the Selimiye Mosque.  The air is so dirty that Annaliese couldn't actually join us for our walk around the city.  By the time I got back to the hotel (about 3 hours after leaving), there was so much grit and grime in my mouth that I could hear a crunching noise when I ground my teeth.  The first thing I did was brush my teeth.

Before heading back, however, we went to three mosques (including a second visit to the Selimiye) and to the Edirne Archeology and Ethnography Museum.  This museum was actually really nice, full of artifacts from back in the Roman period when Edirne was called Hadrianopolis.  The museum director/curator even talked with us for a while - in German, because he didn't speak much English.  Then at the end of our visit, he shook our hands and wrote down directions to the Museum of Health (Sağlık Müzesi), which was another place we planned on stopping at.

Some great English translation efforts from the museum are:

"It caught at Kapıkule" (about a pot found at Kapıkule)

"The Edirne Museum's aim is to make the knowledge be more apprehensible for the community."

The streets today were full of people selling live fowl.

Mom went shopping at a little outdoor pavilion of women knitting and selling their wares.

one of the mosques we visited

(The calligraphy on the left in bold face says "Allah", and the outline says "Muhammed".)

Then we went back to the hotel, got Anna, and went to lunch.  Here you can see two chickens that ran through the outdoor restaurant we ate at.  Anna and Mom got gözlemes (which are like tasty, goat cheese-filled quesadillas), and Dad and I got adana kebaps.  While eating, we saw a young man, who had been smoking a hookah, have a seizure and almost die.  The ambulance came and he was taken away on a gurney-chair.

After lunch we began our trek to the Museum of Health.  Getting slightly off the beaten track, we found ourselves in a very low-income district.

This is probably in all truthfulness the most acute poverty I've ever seen.  Also, though the kids look sweet here, they turned into the Children of the Corn further down the cobblestone/dirt path.  Photo credit here is due to Annaliese; I didn't feel like taking my camera out during this long, long portion of the trek.

sheep in the foreground, the museum/mosque/madrasah complex in the background

sunset and more of the sheep

At the museum we saw a man practicing the old Ottoman art of ebru, or paper marbling.  You float paints or inks on the surface of a container with water, and then you use brushes to push the paint around.  When you have a design or image you like, you place a piece of paper or silk on top of the water and peel it off.  Voilà, and ebru painting!  His work was really beautiful.

the museum

A large portion of the museum consisted of mannequins dressed oddly and acting out various mental disorders that Ottoman sufis would treat with mystic healing arts.  Various rooms also contained scenes of repairing hydrocephaly through cutting, procuring medicine from a rooster being bitten by a viper, and  treating vertebral maladies with a hot branding iron.  The person in the above picture (the one behind me) was labeled kronik psikozlu or "patient with chronic psychosis".

As we were leaving, we asked a guard to call us a cab.  (No one wanted to walk through the slummy area in the dark.)  At the restaurant where we had dinner, Christmas music like "Go Tell it on the Mountain" was playing for New Year's Eve.  It was a wild day.

failblog

Well, today wasn't the greatest of the days of this vacation…  I'm writing this entry while the family is sitting in the kids' room watching the most boring introduction to a movie in the world:  Free Zone.  Natalie Portman cries for at least the first five minutes.  The next ten or so minutes are seen through the rearview mirror.  That will count as the first fail, though anachronistically.

We began the day by going to the Selimiye Mosque.  Outside of the mosque is a little bazaar.  Edirne is known for its soaps-shaped-like-fruits.  They're actually pretty cool.  Mom bought a bunch for like 10 lira or something.  Edirne is very much cheaper than Istanbul.

The mosque is another one by Sinan, and it's considered his finest.  It is really beautiful.  I think I still like the Sokollu the best, though.

 

Outside the mosque again, we ran into our first Turkish gypsies (or Roma, I guess).  They basically attacked us with little cups full of bird seed for the pigeons.  I asked in Turkish how much they wanted for the little cups, and the mother signed "nothing", while the little girl told me one lira.  Anna took a cup and started feeding the birds.  I said "no thanks" many times, but the little skankbomb then shoved a cup in my hand.  I figured whatever if it's only one lira.  While we were leaving, the father kept asking for five lira from Dad, even though Dad had already paid the girl.  The gypsies ended up getting two lira from us.  Ugh, fail number two.

After that we went to "Hello Pizza" for lunch.  For five lira I got a large-ish meal of "şnitzel", noodles with yogurt sauce (I thought it was cheese sauce), some kind of spicy couscous and French fries (pomfrit, from French pommes frites 'fried apples [of the earth]).  For dessert we went next door to "Dondurmaci" (which means "ice cream maker").  Mom and Anna got baklava (well, Anna first got some profiteroles, but didn't like it).  Dad got this strange drink that is called something like balaban, which tasted like lemon pudding.  I asked for ice cream (as in, what the shop was named after), but they said they were out (Dondurma yok).  Fail.  We all kind of shared.  I liked none of them.  Another fail.

mullets!  There are more mullets here than in Istanbul.  Generally, this city is fairly provincial, very few people speak any English, there's a bunch of graffitied walls, everything is a lot cheaper, etc.

There's neither much to do nor to see here, so we decided to go to another movie.  I checked online and found out that 2012 was playing nearby and it was "with Turkish subtitles".  We went in and I purchased our tickets using my vast knowledge of Turkish numbers.  We went in, sat down, and five minutes into the movie realized it was dubbed into Turkish.  We left.  Yet another fail.

Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and Christmas music have all been re-appropriated in Turkey as symbols of the New Year.  In Istanbul, the New Year (Yeni Yıl) is a big deal.  When we asked a young man at our hotel yesterday whether anything special happens here in Edirne, he responded without a second's hesitation:  "No."  Oh boy, I'm excited now for tomorrow!

Oh, and I almost forgot:  upon entering the mosque, two Roma women came up to us, forcing bags on us.  You have to take off your shoes before entering mosques, and the bags are to keep your shoes in while walking through the building.  None of the Roma respond to my question kaç para? ("how much?"), but eventually they said 1 lira a piece.  Dad only had a 10 lira note and asked for change.  The woman tried to run off with it, when a man who works in the mosque came up and started yelling at the women.  They eventually returned all ten lira.  I carried my shoes in the ratty, crusty old bag, but everyone else threw theirs away.  That's the failure I'll leave you with for the day.

mushroom milkshakes

Sadly, today we left Istanbul for Edirne.  Before heading out, though, we went to the Basilica cisterns.  They're from the 6th century during the Byzantine period and were built under Emperor Justinian.

the cisterns

more cisterns

Oddly enough, there were tons and tons of fish - some even very decent sized ones.  How do they live in an underground, manmade cavern with no natural light?  I have absolutely no idea.

sunny day (The structure in the background is the German Fountain; I don't remember why it's called that.)

At lunch, Anna and I decided to try the local liquor specialty, rakı.  In fact, even Mom and Dad sipped a bit from ours.  The white one is mine.  It apparently turns white when you add water to it.  It tastes like licorice.  It is so SO gross that just looking at this photo makes me gag a bit.

Here we are just before leaving with our AWESOME hotel-working friend Fatih.  Not only was he amazingly helpful and completely proficient in English, he was also a great guy.  We played cards, Anna went to cheer him on in soccer, etc. etc.  He absolutely made our stay at the Osmanhan hotel.

After a two and a half hour trip in the nicest bus I've ever ridden in (which cost about $10/person), we arrived in Edirne, right on the Bulgarian border.  We're here for the next three days or so.  It's a small city whose main (basically only) attraction is a huge mosque built by Sinan (again).  It's supposedly his best; that's what we'll see tomorrow.  Other than that, I guess we'll just wander.

The hotel here is actually completely decent, but I wanted to post this one picture of the odd decor.  Look at the tiny little picture hidden behind the TV.  Love it.  Very feng shui.

In closing, I will leave you with the ridiculously touristy meal I ate this evening:  hamburger and milkshake.  Yum.