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.