Blue cruise anticipation (pic)

Have you ever seen water like this? We're hoping to see a lot more of it this weekend when we spend a few days on a sailboat just off the southwestern shore near Gocek and Fathiye. This photo was taken at Cesme which is about an hour from where we are in Izmir. More to come...

First visitor + Ephesus (incl pics)

My lifelong friend Larry Denver flew in from Florence where he was attending a conference and spent last weekend with us.


We had waited until his visit to see Ephesus with a professional tour guide along and all I can do is add our voices to the chorus of others who rave about the ancient Roman city.






I've included photos below and can hardly get over the size and stature of what used to be the NYC of this part of the world. I certainly have a new mental picture of Paul's visit to Ephesus in the New Testament book of Ephesians.

Prior to the weekend I think I more or less imagined Paul's Ephesus as a small city with some rocky dwellings that look like the old Hollywood movie sets from Ben Hur or Spartacus.

Fuzzy at best with no idea that Ephesus was a sophisticated, wealthy and well-ordered Roman city with in-door plumbing, a huge library, an amphitheater that held 25,000 people and on and on.

Frescoes from the dwellings on the slopes (early condos with an ocean view).

The wealthy of Ephesus were patrons of the arts and seemed to have an insatiable appetite for new buildings honoring various gods and goddesses and of course themselves.

The original slave, warming the seat.

Earliest backgammon game?

Kids in the cheap seats and lovin' it.

Sam's Take on Driving w/ Mom

Yes I do realize that dad is in fact in the car, but I just want to
give you an idea of what we're working with.

         I would like to talk about our road trip adventures with mother. As you have heard we have a Fiat Doblo with the horsepower of a lap dog, and brakes that are jealous of Toyota, which was being driven by a very very very careful mother. We have a game that we play every morning on our way to school where we add points for passing cars but then subtract points for cars that pass us. This game, would have ended somewhere near -100 had we not pulled the plug early, and even while applying her best score we ended at -2. That was on our highway drive to school, however in the city in which people will jump in front of your car as soon as you think about slowing down the car came to lurching halts so frequently that we were turned into human bobble-heads. Whenever we said something to the affect of “you have to be a little more aggressive” we heard that “there is nothing wrong with being cautious” or “look at these streets, they are shiny I need to have plenty of time to stop” or most commonly “shhhhh stop talking and let me drive”. 

The politics of politics

I'm no Middle East expert but my experience in places like Iran and Jordan is that most folks are direct and to the point in asking about nationality and religion. It usually takes me awhile to shed my American political correctness and even when I get around to asking the same questions of them it doesn't roll smoothly off the tongue. Here in Izmir however, and other places we've visited in Turkey our experience has been that folks are pretty shy about discussing politics and religion, especially given the conservative Islamic element that seems to be gaining political ground in Turkey. Izmir in particular and western Turkey in general is fairly liberal and voted heavily against the recent referendum to change the constitution (it passed anyway), fearing the current government will use this an opportunity to neutralize the judiciary which has to date been very oriented towards a secular government. More to come...I'm wading into these conversational waters carefully and so it seems is everyone else.

Cold turkey with sugary cereals

Ladan and I went shopping together one morning a few days ago and walked out of the store with a few bags of groceries trying to figure out where we had just spent 50 Turkish lira (US $34). We had a few essentials including a pound of  olives which cost $1.00, a big hunk of local cheese which cost about the same, cartons of milk and a couple of boxes of cocoa puffs and Capt'n Crunch equivalent. We've purchased these for the kids thinking of them as comfort foods in a new place but these junky cereals and milk are even more expensive here than in the U.S. Time to get healthy. Tomorrow I plan to buy some fresh bread early in the morning and start the kids off with a more traditional Turkish breakfast of bread, cheese, olives and tea. If they really have to have something sweet there is an amazing variety of honey available e.g. raw, processed, with and without honeycomb, sorted by flower and so forth. 

I'll let you know how it goes. Schlichting kids, if you are reading this you need to go back to your homework.

Update (Sept 26): We've been out of cereal for the past few days and the breakfast transition hasn't been too bad. We plow through a lot of fresh bread, cheese, sour cherry jam, honey and olives but that's what we hoped for so I guess it's just the volumes that are surprising. Milk is for coffee only now and even that's on the wane as we drink more and more chai (tea). No one would mistake us for Turkish yet but almost nothing in our current diet resembles what we were eating when we left Phila.

Sam's Wish List (with pix)

Diesel

After having watched my brother and sister write blog entries I was sure everyone was just dying to hear from me as well. We have finally settled in to a daily routine, more or less.  However there are some things that I definitely miss, for example our beloved dog, Diesel, or a succulent, juicy, beautiful burger. We've tried a few here and I think they must make burgers out of the same meat as kebabs (lamb), bringing about the dubious nickname "kebaburger" in our family. They look good but they just don't smell or taste like a real beef burger. Oh yeah, I miss my friends too, but if I were presented with a choice, I'm afraid of how I might answer. I never really realized what a luxury good burgers are. I do think that both Zach and I would be able to pass on a savory burger to see Diesel. Zach’s heart has gone out to every stray that he has seen, and quietly I hate to admit it but so has mine. There is plenty more that we miss, including NFL games and our ping pong table. Zach and I used our ping-pong table daily if not hourly and have had nearly a 2 week drought since even the hotel we stayed at prior to moving into our apartment had a ping pong table.  At the bottom of the list but still missed (I’m a poet) comes my Xbox and a couple of American TV shows. It surprises me though how little I actually miss television and overall, Turkey has been a lot of fun. My apprehensions, which were many, have faded. More to come (I'll be back).  Sam

PS: If anyone who is visiting us feels led to bring me a burger I would certainly not be opposed.

Something I said?

Those who know me will understand when I say I'm not really mistaken for anything but American when I go abroad. I wear like a badge of honor the few times that someone has spoken to me in say German, when I'm in Germany. My wife Ladan, on the other hand has the opposite problem. Other cultures seem eager to welcome her and accept her as their own. In Mexico, Spain, India, Greece and of course Turkey, folks speak to Ladan like a native, that is until she gives them a polite little laugh and tries to explain that she doesn't understand. That's when it gets interesting and you can almost see the wheels turning in their heads. Option 1: Disdain. "Is she refusing to speak anything but English?" We've seen that one before in Mexico and India and we just move on since it's pretty much impossible to get served after that. Option 2: Identification. "Is she somehow just waiting for her American husband to leave so she can get down to real business?" Of course I'd be happy to leave but it wouldn't help much. Option 3: Suspicion, especially from street vendors. "Is she trying to hustle us somehow? Because we're trying to hustle her and the big redhead so what sort of Jedi language trick are they playing? Option 4: Disbelief. She just doesn't speak her own language? Impossible. Perhaps if we just say it faster and lean in closer with flying bits of spittle she'll remember her ancestry.

And so it goes, with almost every restaurant, car rental agency and street vendor here in Turkey. I start the conversations with a few words of Turkish and when we've reached the limits of their English and my Turkish, which is pretty fast, they look to her for help. Even if they believe in the end that she doesn't speak Turkish they look at her imploringly as if some ancient shared heritage might have allowed her to understand the conversation better than her plodding husband. And in the end, when we walk away which we often do, I have to say that it's with an odd sense of pride that I put my arm around the woman they think I must have coerced to leave their country. And yes, we're hiring a Turkish tutor asap.

The real reason learning Turkish is hard for Iranians

I think we're all aware by now that there are lots of little prejudices between Middle Eastern countries, many so complicated that you have to be born into them to truly understand. However, as my mind wandered ever so slightly in that  direction with respect to Ladan and the Turkish language she explained why learning this language is even harder for Iranians.

Says she, "Imagine in English that the adjective comes after the noun instead of before and that the verb comes at the end of the sentence. A sentence in English such as "Please pass me the green olives" with Farsi construction would become "The olives green to me please pass." So far so good.

In Turkish however, the really tricky part is that the words that are recognizable to a Farsi speaker have changed just enough over the centuries so that the same sentence becomes something akin to "The grin alives to my please posh." Get your head around that! Of course it works both ways so that if you start out speaking Turkish and try to learn Farsi the same effect occurs with words that seem so close and yet so different. In any event we're tracking down a personal tutor.

Monday morning stretch

I just finished dropping the kids off at school but today we used public transport in the form of a nice new rail link from near our house to near their school, about $1 each way per kid. They didn't share my sense of adventure with this new effort but perhaps a kernel of something was embedded in their psyche (that's my fallback position when something doesn't work so well). I had hustled over to the train station early in the morning to buy a Kart, basically a prepaid public transportation card, but Monday mornings on school days are the same everywhere and the kids were having a hard time getting backpacks, permission slips and homework all headed in the same direction i.e. out the door. To complicate things, the train station is only a few hundred yards from our apartment but for whatever reason there are about 8 or 9 road crossings between us and the station and we're not yet mentally prepared for crossing without a light.


The good news is that we made it to the train but truthfully only because it was a few minutes late. Jasmine was more alert than I've ever seen her in the morning, checking her watch as we waited for each crosswalk. Sam grumbled, mostly I think because we actually made it, and Zach got up on his tip toes and pointed out using the train map that we were headed in the wrong direction. Son, do we really need everyone in the car to know that out of two trains we picked the wrong one? I don't think so. The fact that we were pulling into a station that seemed to be one stop further away from our destination wasn't lost on me but I guess I had hoped the kids might miss it somehow in the garbled pre-recorded announcements while I figured out next steps. My brain raced. Perhaps this was a special thing here in Izmir where the trains go backwards before they go forwards? Must be either that or a map issue since everyone including the conductor assured me that ultimately we were headed the other direction towards the school. 


Whew, nothing like getting on the wrong train even when it's the right train...unless of course it's getting off at the wrong stop which we also then managed to do at the other end. With Jasmine in a desperate dash for a bathroom while we hailed a taxi to take us that last kilometer I decided to drive the kids to school at least one more day. 
(jasmine writing here) even after all that, i made it to homeroom right as the bell to go to class rang. 

Zach's in the house (with pix)

Hey everyone, Zach here now. So after seeing my Dad and sister write I thought, “hmm maybe I could make a funny blog too.” But when I tried to think of something nothing came. Then I thought maybe I could write an interesting, factual blog without the often really cheesy, corny jokes. So here goes….we’ve been in Turkey for 3 weeks now. School is good and the food is not as bad as Jasmine describes, at least compared to my school in Philadelphia. Every day after school when we’re done with homework Sam, my Dad and I will go across the street near the water to a giant spot for playing where we throw the football around. They also have a playground and an outdoor gym machines.

We’ve also seen these funny looking life-size cows sculptures all over town with paintings on them.


They have one cow that is standing serving wine, another is a yellow cow cut in half to look like the inside of a lemon, another has spots like a football (really soccer but we're trying to get in the habit of speaking like Turks even if we’re not fluent).



Another cow is a sailor and the list goes on and on and on. We haven’t yet found the name of the artist(s) but I will tell you asap when I do.

BTW, I also just thought of a very punny joke so this is not completely jokeless: what if they made a cow-dracula! Get it?

I will try to write another blog when I figure out any other punny, corny, cheesy jokes so I don’t bore you to sleep.  Good night.

Z Man the Beast

Now let's get some things straight (+ pix)

Hello everyone, this is Jasmine writing. We just finished our first full week of school at MEF. I swear everyday the classes get longer and the second hand on the clock moves a bit slower. Everyone is starving by lunchtime, but as soon as we see the food, most kids have lost their appetite. Totally typical school stuff. The not so typical thing is that there are 3-7 kids in each grade on average. I actually managed to find a school smaller than my school back in the U.S., which has a measly 46 students in my grade. That seems like a lot of people to me now. But, one of the major reasons I am writing this blog entry is not to talk about school, but to set right some of what my dad said in the previous blog entries. For starters, the superstore my dad is obsessed with is actually Ozdilek, with two dots over the O. And while back to school shopping, Zach never did pray silently in the corner, nor was I about to die of embarrassment. It just makes a better story in my dad’s mind if he is the daredevil pioneer and his kids are standing aside, embarrassed to death. I would also like to point out that the only reason we did not find a durum restaurant earlier than we did was because nobody would believe me that gyros were called durum in Turkey. Although, the blog on driving is absolutely true, and so is my dad’s absolute obsession with the fishermen by the water. I’m sure one of these days he’ll show up with a graph of them (for those of you who don’t know, my dad loves graphs and lists). Some other points of interest: Instead of selling fake purses and badly made plastic toys by the water, as people might do in other countries, there is vendor after vendor selling albino baby bunnies. And, as with every time we go to a different country, my dad spends nearly half an hour ordering, feeling the need to ask the waiter what EVERYTHING on the menu is, and then proceeds to see how many different ways he can pronounce every dish. My mom is now learning the numbers in Turkish and how to say hello, thank you, and goodbye. This is a major achievement since earlier she was dead set on not learning Turkish. Way to go mom! Sam and Zach have taught all the kids at our school how to play American football, and most of the kids are quite good. I think the NFL needs to start recruiting abroad because these kids who had never picked up a football before in their lives can throw a perfect spiral on the first try. Zach officially moved into my room yesterday, although I still don’t understand why. Just because Sam has now hit 6 ft. does not mean that he is too big to share a room. Doesn’t being the oldest count for anything anymore? There is so much to say, but I don’t want to bore you. Maybe I will start writing on the blog more often. Just keep my dad in check you know ; )  All in all, I love Turkey. I wish we were staying for the whole year. Until next time, Hoshchakal.

a picture of one of the many giant turkish flags and pictures of Mustafa Kemal aka Ataturk. They are on nearly every building, and everyone is trying to outdo each other. Just to put this in perspective, this was an ancient fortress, and my dad is only as tall as the second layer of bricks down at the bottom of the fortress.

an old picture from our days of living in a hotel. It's the list of complimentary items the hotel will provide. Where else could you find this other than Turkey?

That's why they call it fishin'...and not catchin'

We live a stone's throw from the water in Izmir and count ourselves lucky to be in such a pretty spot although occasionally we get inbound winds (Imbat) that aren't so pleasant. And rain or shine, windy or calm, there are dozens of fisherman lined up along the sea wall. Always. I go out running in the morning along the bay sometimes and haven't once been able to get up ahead of the fisherman. Likewise at night they continue to fish long after the sun goes down and we're heading to bed. Some use huge ocean fishing rods while others prefer using no rod at all, casting the line by winding up and slinging it lasso-style like their fathers must have taught them.

Now I have a lot of time for fishing and plenty of patience for days when the fishing is slow but what are these guys doing out there? I have yet to see a single fish landed or even come out of the water. We've been here nearly a month during which we drive, run or walk near the water at least 4x per day, often more. Malcolm Gladwell would probably have something to say about my calculations on this but I'd estimate that during each stroll or drive along the water we see (and I keep a sharp eye on) at least 20 fisherman and that each stroll or drive is a minimum of 15 minutes. By my calculation that's 5 fishing man hours per drive-by/stroll multiplied by 4 drive-bys/strolls per day which equals 20 fishing man hours per day. Remember, over the two miles of bay that we pass there are hundreds of these guys. We've done this every day for the last three weeks meaning that we've witnessed a total of 420 hours of fishing and have never seen anyone catch a fish. My conclusion is that either these guys can run in-between rain drops or the fishing is pure escapist fantasy. Actually never mind, I get it now.

Hard to describe the magic of Cappadocia (photos)

We drove from Izmir to Cappadocia last Thursday and back on Sunday and it's a hike. Ten hours in the car each way but well worth it. I'll let the photos speak for themselves at least for now.

After driving all day we got stopped to stretch just a few miles from our hotel. The view was absolutely breathtaking and it only got better from here as we explored cave houses, churches cut from solid rock and underground villages (cities?) that could provide shelter for up to 30,000 people.

Fixer-upper, secluded, needs TLC but great views and no neighbors.

Just glad to be out of the car. It was good to see central Turkey like that...once.

It's hard to capture the huge frescoes that were painted on the walls of the better known cave churches over a thousand years ago. Painted on plaster by professionals from Istanbul and defaced by competing religions, they still glow and give a sense of how different life must have been

Just one of hundreds of old cave churches, this one wasn't even on the map.

OK, someone must have had a sense of humor even back then when they were scrambling up sheer rock walls to take care of their pigeons (this guy's "teeth" are pigeon houses carved into the rock)

Our hotel, which wasn't officially a cave hotel but was made from 5 reconstructed houses built into the mountain.

"Honeymoon Valley"... 18 years late.

Arrival in Izmir (with photos), August 25th

Found this in my "drafts" box:

We have arrived at the Crown Plaza which has a beautiful view but the flight and the drama at the airport have exhausted us. Photos of Izmir below from our window:

Off (with his head) to Kapadokya this weekend

We have a long weekend coming up due to Bayrum which is a celebration of the end of Ramazan and the fasting that goes along with it for devout Muslims. The cafes don't seem less crowded over lunchtime right now but we're probably not the best gauge of such things and this is Izmir, one of the most liberal cities in Middle East. But I digress...

Kapadokya (Cappadocia) sounds like a very cool place both geologically and archeologically. The early Christians built extensive cities and churches underground in the soft rock to escape armies unsympathetic to their beliefs. One entry in particular caught my as I was reading our guidebook about how Persian horseman would come marauding through the countryside and it occurred to me that we have it pretty easy in 21st century America. I also wondered just how, as an early Christian in Kapadokya, a pre-Mennonite of sorts, I would have been able to get in a position to take a Persian bride. Just guessing but the conversations seem like they may have been strained, requiring more creativity than just taking my future father-in-law out to dinner in Beverly Hills.

"Saheb, I know I'm just a simple cave-dwelling Kapadokyan but I am in fact training to be a Mennonite and was just thinking about how well your daughter and I..." (swoosh, head falls to ground)

We'll write more about the real Kapadokya, and maybe the imagined, after we arrive.

Tearing Around Turkey, the video game

Did I mention that pedestrians jump in front of your car at all times and on all roads? The drivers seem sensible but the pedestrians are daring. Imagine a video racing game where you have to maneuver a washing machine box powered by a lawn mower down small streets and sidewalks (yes I said sidewalks). The challenge that you must achieve every time you play is to get the kids to school within a two minute window so that they are not late nor do they feel awkward for being the first in their home room to arrive. Now change the language on the street signs to a sort of Slavic Japanese, give the three under-age kids in the back seat opinions on how to drive and best of all, have pedestrians jump in front of your car every time you slow down to less than 60 km per hour or leave more than 6 feet between you and the next car. And by the way, if you ever hit a pedestrian in this game it really is "game over". It's a rush for sure and I haven't decided yet whether throwing coffee into the mix is an advanced stage for only the best gamers or just not advisable.

New status for the old Volvo back home

As the kids have expanded in size our 5 year old Volvo S-40 back in Philadelphia has increasingly taken it on the chin. It's a fine car to be sure but we bought it when the kids were smaller and 14 year old Sam in particular has a hard time folding his legs into the back seat, or so he thought. Folding our collective selves into tiny car seats has taken on new meaning here in Turkey and the much derided silver Volvo back home seems like a dream car, a roomy sedan able to drive in the left lane and pass others at will. We did try by the way to turn in the Doblo for a larger and slightly more expensive sedan but when I could feel Sam's breath in my ear from the back seat I knew we had a problem.  Back to the Doblo and lovin' it.

Our Italian supercar

Driving here in Izmir is pretty civilized, at least on the major roads where there is some chance that the police are watching. The side streets are another matter entirely with cars parked on both sides everywhere, often leaving only enough room for one car on a two way street. And "One Way" signs might as well be in Greek since we can't really read them and no one else bothers. The kids have taken to calling our gutless, boxy little Fiat the "Italian Supercar" and on the way to school each morning they carefully track (shouting numbers in Turkish) the cars we pass versus the number of cars that pass us. It's tough to end up in the positive numbers with five folks in our car and brakes that leave a grain of doubt but we try hard and have started including buses and trucks just to boost our numbers. We're driving 1600 cc of Italian stallion about as hard as we should and can only ogle the Volkswagons that pass us like we're standing still. Someday...

Old school navigation

Remember the time before GPS when navigating in a foreign place took map reading skills and a little bit of intuition? Our kids sure don't. As Ladan and I would silently pat ourselves on the back for getting around Izmir, a city of 4 million, our kids would groan in the back seat at even the slightest hesitation about where to turn next. It was Sam though, who broke the spell of self-congratulation when he grumbled from the back seat, "You guys may want to reconsider your navigation algorithm of eeny-meeny-miny-moe."

We're back to using the Garmin and the kids seem to think it makes a big difference but Ladan and I are pretty sure we are doing just as well as we were before.

Back to school shopping....in Turkey

The kids attended their first day of school at MEF International School here in Izmir and the stories are trickling out. It's a small cozy school that caters mostly to NATO families and K-12 has only 120 kids so it seems pretty manageable. Yesterday we did our back to school shopping at Kipa, the big Turkish department store chain, and by now none of us except maybe my 15 year old daughter Jasmine was self-conscious as we stood around the big bin of college ruled notebooks trying to figure out the ongoing puzzle of Turkey. We could tell just by the signs that notebooks were on special and we were determined to take advantage of the special but we really had absolutely no idea of what the special was or how it worked. At one stage we thought perhaps they might sell notebooks by weight, a theory which was eventually discarded as impractical, and at another stage we thought we were on to it for sure with the idea that it required a club card. No theory was too crazy since our pattern-matching skills were failing us. Finally, possibly with divine intervention since I think I saw Zach praying silently, perhaps that he could become part of another family, we got to the point where we figured out that in a bin of many types of notebooks only 2 types were on sale. Yes! We had beaten the system and bought only those notebooks that were on sale, thereby saving the family $3 maybe $4 US.