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.

Dervişler

Today we went back to the market.  Cody, I found you a patch!  It took a lot of hassling, but I got it down from 45 Turkish lira to just 15.  Annaliese bought even more scarves.  I think she has plenty now. While trying one on, the young man waiting on her told her she looked like "Shakira, Lady Gaga".

Shakira/Gaga

palm trees, sunny skies and 62° !!!

As we were walking, we came past the sign "DİKKAT, KÖPEK VAR" ('Beware of dog').  I knew dikkat and var, but I didn't know the word for dog, and so I leaned in to read it.  Then, charging from the bowels of hell comes growling and lunging this nasty beast.  Anna and I literally had to run out of the way!  In Turkey, they really mean it when they say "beware"!

Then we went to the Süleymaniye Mosque.  It's another one by Sinan, and even though the interior is closed for renovation, it was very obvious that it is gorgeous.  It is also considered the most important mosque in Istanbul.

We wandered around the grounds of the Süleymaniye.  This is the graveyard.  This mosque is also in the area around the University of Istanbul.  It was cool to see where the largest student body in Turkey lives.

Anachronistic anecdote related to mosques:  When we went into the Hagia Sophia, they had a security check with metal detectors and guards.  I started taking out of my pockets my camera, cell phone, iPod, belt, etc., but the guard sort of waved me through.  I gave him a quizzical look, but he smiled and nodded.  I walked through and the alarm, naturally, went off.  I was ready to go back out when the guard laughs, asking "Where's the bomb-a?"  Hmm, what's the point of a metal detector and security guard when the response to an alarm is laughter and disconcern?  Haha, it's a different world here :)

After the mosque, we went to a restaurant called Dârüzziyafe.  At the time it was built, under the rule of Süleyman, it functioned as the mosque's soup kitchen for the poor.  Rick Steves' book on Istanbul said that if we showed the book at this restaurant, we'd get 10% off.  Mom mentioned this to our waiter, who responded "No, no … no".  Rick Steves also recommended the "sherbet drink", which truthfully is why we went there.  Looking at the menu, however, I couldn't find it.  I asked the waiter whether they did, in fact, have a sherbet drink.  This question resulted in all four of us (without further ado) getting "rosehip syrup", which turned out to be said sherbet drink.  It was disgusting, kind of like drinking a glass of Tang, but instead of hydrating it with water, you used honey.  The meal itself, however, was really, really good.

Side note:  The word sherbet comes from the Arabic word شرب (shariba), which means 'to drink' (well, technically 'he drank').  This word is also where we got the word "syrup" and the Turks got the word şarap 'wine'.

From there, we walked back to our hotel for some quick R&R.  On the way, we saw several young men selling spirographs.  Remember, those bright plastic things from the early 90s for making loopy designs…  And they're all over here!

And then this evening we went to see whirling dervishes.  Whirling dervishes are practitioners of Sufi Islam who enter mystical trances while spinning in circles.  It is supposed to be a religious experience in which the dervish becomes aware of the unseen world.  So yes, the purpose of this touristy excursion was to watch five people in deep, contemplative, slowly rotating prayer.  It was about as entertaining as watching a group of people go through the Hail Mary for two hours with the soundtrack to Borat playing in the background.  Dad fell asleep almost instantly.  During the spinning, they raise and lower their arms in a manner reminiscent of the YMCA dance.

This isn't my photo, since photography wasn't allowed.  But check out the awesome hats they wear.  It's like a cat's scratching post on his head.

One interesting thing to come out of the "cultural experience" (I use quotations here, because these people charge about $30/seat for foreigners to gawk at them while they feign ancient tradition) was the ridiculous tourist next to us.  She was this elderly woman, who almost as soon as she sat down was up again, then down, then up.  She kept popping up and down like a Whack-a-Mole.  At one point, she turned to Dad and asked him whether he could see when she was standing.  She wasn't blocking his view, seeing as she was to his right, and even if she'd been directly in front of him, it probably wouldn't have mattered, because she was about 5'2".  Then during the performance, she climbed onto her seat and tried to balance herself on the back of the chair.  Failing at that, she simply resigned herself to standing upright on it.  For the entire program!  Best part, though:  NOT American!  The French get to claim that nut job as one of their own.  So no, I did not like the dervishes too much (better than in Cairo, tho).  Mom and Anna, however, thought they were interesting.

Tomorrow we're going to the Archaeology Museum, which I'm really excited for!

İki Pazar

Today we toured the city.  Mom's old professor and friend, Walter Denny, suggested a friend of his to be our guide.  Our guide and his wife led us around the city, showing us several beautiful mosques, the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, and two bazaars.  It was a full day!

We began the tour just past the Blue Mosque next to a giant obelisk with hieroglyphs from Luxor.  I saw similar things at the Temple of Karnak, as you may recall.  The obelisk was brought to the city by a Roman emperor.  A similar obelisk can be seen in Paris on the Place de la Concorde.  The obelisk marks one of the edges of the giant Hippodrome, an ancient (now mostly buried) Greek stadium for horse-racing.

After the obelisk we walked to a mosque called Sokullu (after the grand vizier who commissioned it).  Along the way, we came across this very bizarre graffito.  "I carry books since years but could not stop to be a donkey!"  I have absolutely no idea what it means.  As to the Turkish below:  I know it means something along the lines of "a man is a man [something], a donkey is a donkey [something]".  You're welcome for that brilliant translation.  Any better/fuller translation would be much appreciated…

The Sokullu mosque was spectacular.  Unfortunately you're not allowed to take photos inside, so I have none to post here.  It was designed by Mimar Sinan, who also designed over 300 buildings.  He now ranks alongside Snøhetta (the firm that designed the Oslo opera house and the new Library of Alexandria) as one of my favorite architects of all time.

Next, we went to another mosque, the Küçük Ayasofya ('Little Hagia Sophia').  This is a pretty, but small, mosque that used to be a church.  From here we went to the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts.

The above image of the Blue Mosque and the obelisk was taken from the Museum.  It is a gorgeous collection of calligraphic works, enormous kilims and other rugs, large metal candle holders and other pieces of Middle Eastern art.  Below the art museum is the Etnography [sic] Museum, which houses costumes and scenes from Turkish/Turkic peoples around the globe.  Based on the extremely musky scent of the place, my dad guessed they use a lot of mothballs to preserve the artifacts.  One of my current dreams is to do research on the effects of Soviet policies of language standardization on cultural identity among the Turkic peoples of southern Siberia, so this part of the museum was especially interesting to me.

After that we went to the Grand Bazar.  It is enormous!  Extremely common were shops with rugs, hookahs (or narghiles as they're still called here), and fake D&G, Chanel and Abercrombie t-shirts.  People were constantly calling out to passersby, hoping to attract people to their shops:  "Let me help you spend your money!"  "I can help you change your life maybe!"  "Stop your horses!"  Annaliese bought an evil-eye talisman and a scarf.  I bought shot glasses.  And yes, to aid in your judging me, they do have the Turkish flag and a nazar on them.  Colin:  typical, trashy tourist.  We also stopped here to eat.  I had some sort of lamb and vegetables dish (tasty), and rice pudding again for dessert.  (It was caramelized on the top - I love it!)

Next we went to the Spice Bazaar (Mısır Çarısı in Turkish, or 'Egyptian Bazaar').  They were selling all kinds of spices, herbs and pastries.  Alongside the baklava and Turkish delights was a strange, nut-filled dessert called "Turkish viagra".  No, I do not know what that heck it is.

Both bazaars were jam-packed and loud.  We could hardly wind our way through the enormous crowds.  Shopkeepers were constantly shouting at us.  Our tour guide and his wife, both of whom are Turkish "born and bred" as they said, have lighter skin and therefore also couldn't escape English-language entreaties.  The woman, Şayeste, told us when she was younger she had blond hair (now it's black), so throughout her childhood she was constantly mistaken for a tourist and therefore hounded by shopkeepers and salesmen.

In closing, I leave you with a photo of the last mosque we visited (I don't remember what it's called) and a wish for everyone to have a very merry Christmas (even those of you who aren't Christians).