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.

taksi Taksim'e

We got a relatively late start today.  We began with a great breakfast on the terrace.  Breakfast is included at our hotel, and it is always delicious:  fresh squeezed orange juice, homemade pastries, yogurt, fruit, Turkish coffee, and simit bread etc.

After breakfast we caught a crazy cab to Chora Church, a small Byzantine church on the other side of town.  (Driving here is insane.  I know people say that about anywhere they go, but this is especially true of Istanbul.  Although lanes are normally marked, the drivers pay them little mind.  The first evening here, my cab driver stopped me from putting on my seat belt, saying "No, not need", before barreling down several dozen narrow cobblestone streets at about 50 mph.)

Chora Church (or Kariye) was beautiful.  The ceilings were covered in mosaics and frescos from when the city was still Constantinople.  Here is the icon of Christ Chora ton Zonton ("Land of the Living").

And guess who we saw there?  None other than the French woman from the night of the dervishes.  She was crazy as always.  Anna posed "with" her here.

After the church, we went to Taksim Square, the social center of Istanbul.

It was kind of miserable out, cold and raining, so we spent the day inside.  First we grabbed ice cream (dondurma) in waffles.  I assumed "waffle" meant "waffle cone", but really it just meant "waffle".  It was delicious.  After ice cream, we walked to a Starbucks.  The family was apparently craving its coffee goodness, but I don't really drink coffee, so I just sat there.

After wandering around Taksim a bit, we went to a movie theater (sinema) and saw Avatar (check out the awesome trailer here).  I actually had to use quite a bit of Turkish to find this place.  I spoke more Turkish today than the rest of the trip put together.  Just about everyone in Sultanahment (where we are staying) speaks extremely good English, but we found almost no one who spoke English in Taksim.  Avatar was AWESOME!!  Yes, its plot was contrived, goofy and weak, but the visuals were absolutely spectacular!  And the aliens were SO COOL!  I absolutely recommend it.  And actually, even if the writing is not the best, it is still fun.  Go to it for the wild, carnival ride-like visual entertainment.

On the way back, Mom and Annaliese saw #157 and his dog-friend.  The women have been carrying around bread in their pockets for the last few days so that they could feed the street animals.  #157 ate the bread that my sister gave him, but friend-dog was more interested in the empty metal can that at one time may have contained sardines or something along those lines.  Not a great success, but a valiant effort by Mom and Anna to better these dogs' lives ;)

Turkcell'in arısı Ayasofya'da ;)

Merhaba arkadaşlar! Well, unfortunately two things: 1) Teri actually beat you to firsties, Karl, but she couldn't post. Judges? Does that still count? 2) Some of the photos don't "embiggen" in my last post. I have no idea why.

Now, onwards to my actual post. As I mentioned before, my family and I just arrived in Turkey yesterday. We set up camp in our beautiful hotel next to the Hagia Sophia (pronounced "EYE-yuh so-FEE-yuh) and the Blue Mosque, and ate out at a delicious restaurant called Turquoise. (Side note: The word "turquoise" actually comes from the French word for Turk, since the stone was originally imported from Turkestan.)

Mom and I before dinner. I had an İskender kebap, and Mom and Dad split this roast chicken meal that came in a clay pot that was then set on fire and shattered.

The other (Egenberger-)Halversons - After the main course, Annaliese ordered what the menu called "Ottoman Special Dessert (Milk Hot)".

Then today we wandered around Sultanahmet (the area of Istanbul in which we're staying). There are tons of stray dogs and cats around, and the one below (#157 according to his tags, or "Buddy" as I called him) tugged at Anna and Mom's heartstrings. Everyone but me pet it. I thought it might have fleas or something gross.

He followed us for quite a while and was pretty entertaining. He almost killed a stray cat. Then he took the most disgusting-smelling dump ever on a little tree along the street. The smell stayed with us for about a block. No one seemed to mind after that when Buddy decided to part ways with us.

just a pretty shot

Dad and I walked along the Bosphorus.

The area in which we're staying (Sultanahmet) is dominated by two enormous, beautiful mosques - the Hagia Sophia (top) and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, or the Blue Mosque, as it is popularly called by tourists because of the blue tiles that cover its surface (bottom).

The big event of the day was going into the Hagia Sophia (Turkish Ayasofya). The Hagia Sophia is, according to my mother, a Byzantine-era church that turned into a mosque in 1453 the day that the Ottoman Empire took Constantinople (now it's Istanbul, doncha know). It is considered one of the greatest achievements in architecture. Ever. In the world. It is beautiful.

While inside the Hagia Sophia, I was struck by holy inspiration and suddenly figured out how to read calligraphic Arabic script (seriously - I've been baffled by it since high school). I can now confidently tell you that the above medallions read Umar and Hussain. It was a proud moment in my life.

On our way over to the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Turkish, Sultanahmet Camii), I saw these two people with weird yellow hats on. I told them "I'm not interested in buying anything, but I'm really curious: What are you wearing?" It turns out they're working for Turkcell doing some kind of survey about cellphone use, and Turkcell's mascot is a "weird alien bee", which is what their hats are supposed to look like. They were extremely nice and hilarious and (best of all) not peddling any wares! Plus they gave us each little nazars (evil-eye charms) for taking part in their survey. And yes, I know; I kind of look preggers in the above picture.