What a Christmas!

So much has been going on since the last episode I hardly know where to start. Why don't I ever learn to keep up with this blog?

When we left off we had just spent a week or so doing the town with Evan and were on our way to Chios to renew our visas. We have to leave the country every three months for long enough to turn around and go back in again, paying €45 for the privilege. In September and again this month we've taken the opportunity to go to the Greek island of Chios, a couple of km off the Turkish coast, where we can get things like peanut butter and sherry. This one was a whirlwind trip - the boats run only Tuesday-Sunday evenings and Wednesday-Monday mornings, and we had to be in İstanbul Wednesday afternoon to meet Rachel. So we took the bus to the gorgeous port town of Çeşme Tuesday afternoon, got on the boat, arrived in Chios half an hour later, shopped, ate a pizza in our chilly room, slept, jumped out of bed, and arrived back in İzmir in time to pack and catch a taxi to the airport. Our plane landed in İstanbul about the same time as Rachel got in from New York via London, so everything worked out extremely smoothly.

Begüm's parents Hülya and İskender rearranged their lives and household for us again, putting us up for a couple of nights while we glimpsed a few of the sights. It was a little frustrating not being able to spend more than an hour or so at Aya Sofya and the Grand Bazaar, and just being able to glimpse Topkapı through the gates. I hope it whetted their appetites, anyway.

Then back to İzmir by plane in time to tuck Rachel into bed.

The next day was Christmas Eve. Even though I'm retired I still needed to do some church stuff - get the bulletins ready for three services and prepare for the evening one. I was privileged to celebrate at the 8 p.m. service at St. John's. It's a popular place to go on Christmas Eve in Izmir; we had maybe 30 people receive communion but a whole lot more were in the congregation to watch the show!

Christmas Day was a bit of a rush. We had our traditional ketchup sandwiches for breakfast, thanks to Evan who brought some bacon from Canada. Then I needed to rush off to Bornova to get ready for the service there (someday I'll take the time to tell you about the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Bornova). We actually had 35 people there - more than 3 times the previous high. After the service we were invited back to the amazing home of some of the descendants of the builder of the church for sherry and conversation - then home quickly to open presents and prepare for dinner.

I can't honestly say we've ever had a Christmas dinner like that before. We had four guests: Adolfo, a young man from Mozambique who showed up at the church a couple of months ago; Numan, a Turkish friend of his (a serious Muslim); Ayser, another friend of his, Palestinian born in the United Arab Emirates; and Andreas, a Swiss pastor making a pilgrimage around the seven churches of Revelation, whom I met at the church bazaar at the beginning of the month. Andreas recorded the event in his blog (http://www.johannesoffenbarung.ch/arbeitsjournal/Izmir_weihnachten.php) in a very clear and readable German. Scroll down quite far to see pictures of our Christmas Eve service and our dinner party.
One thing that stands out for me from the dinner was Numan excusing himself and borrowing our bedroom to do his evening prayers. I'm glad he felt free to do that, although our bedroom was an incredible disaster area and I'm not sure it was a fitting place. And then, after he was done, we popped our Christmas crackers and discovered they each contained a numbered whistle (more or less tuned) and a silly hat with music on it. Evan discovered a baton and instruction sheet containing the scores for several Christmas carols & other ditties. Good thing there were 8 of us, because that's exactly what we needed to play Joy to the World and Frosty the Snowman. Too silly. And when our guests left to make their way home on the bus and subway they were still wearing their hats and carrying their whistles.

Gotta take a break now. You've been reading long enough. I hope I'll catch up completely tomorrow.

Please note that I'm moving my photo album to Flickr - it's more flexible and more fun than Yahoo. Click on the link to the left to see it.

We'd also like to map where all our friends and family are. Click on the Frapr link to the left to add yourself to our map.

Exploring Izmir with our boy

Since Evan arrived last Wednesday we've been sharing our city with him. We haven't got all that much done, what with his mild jet lag and our extreme sloth, but we've been enjoying ourselves anyway.

Ron (who teaches English to a couple of classes of people who know it fairly well) had the brilliant idea of asking his students to tell him where they'd take our son if they wanted to show him the sights. He collected a list of 15 restaurants and a bunch of places to visit, so we've been working our way through the list (with a few of our own favourites thrown in).

Wednesday night we dragged our sleepy kid out into our dark and rainy neighbourhood to visit the Asensör restaurant, a couple of blocks away. I mentioned it way back on Sept. 7, when the weather was still hot and sunny. It has a fantastic view over the city and the harbour, and pretty good food as well. Evan managed to stay awake long enough to enjoy his first Turkish meal and the view, and then fell into bed and slept for 12 hours.

It's been a bit of a blur since then. One day - I think it was Thursday - Evan and I took a ferry across the harbour to the northwest end of town and bussed partway back to where I thought we might find the Tepekule tumulus, the remains of the earliest settlement in Izmir. Turned out I was wrong by a couple of kilometers, but that meant we had a walk along a busy highway that runs beside the seashore until we got to the Bayraklı marketplace. And there it was, a fenced-in vineyard where they've been growing grapes for at least 5000 years, maybe 7000. Not much to see just now; there are excavations going on, but not in the winter so the gate was locked and all we could see was a grassy area with some grapevines. Still, we could see why people would settle there: there's a freshwater stream flowing out of the mountains, a hill behind the settled area where the townsfolk could flee for protection in case of trouble, a wide fertile plain spreading out in front, and the sea for fish and transportation. Folk were writing there at least 5000 years ago, although there were a few dark ages when they forgot. Homer was probably born there. Even though the site was closed, it felt rather wonderful to be walking over ground that Homer had touched.

Thursday night we dragged Evan to the church choir practice, where he wowed them all by doing a violin obligatto where I'd been supposed to play the recorder. Then out for supper and beer with our parish priest, and home to let the kid fall into bed again.

Friday night the Izmir symphony gave a concert at their hall downtown - a magical performance of the Dvorak cello concerto by a German cellist, and Mahler's 1st symphony. It was our first concert since we settled here, but it won't be our last. It's a good little orchestra and they apparently get great soloists.

Saturday Ron invited Evan and me to drop in on one of the classes that had planned our itinerary. We were supposed to give them a report on what we'd seen so far, but we spent so much time just talking about families, our countries, and other stuff people need to know about each other that we didn't get to that. I think we all enjoyed it, though. Then we explored a little corner of the huge Kemeraltı market, which stretches from the sea to the Agora, the ruins of the Greco-Roman marketplace and town square. That's another thing I love about this place: the market is where it's always been, and the same families have probably been selling the same things at the same stalls for a couple of thousand years. It makes you think... Somehow wars and natural disasters can't defeat the human spirit.

Sunday night Evan helped out at our church's Christmas service of lessons and carols. Some Turkish members of the choir had never sung this music, or even any music, before, but they did a more than acceptable job. Our volunteer temporary choir leader had worked unbelievably hard getting us into shape, and I hope we didn't let him down. We had a good crowd. In Turkey Christmas is a favourite celebration and even non-Christians turn up at church events. You don't hear much Christmas music around town or see many decorations, and you certainly don't get the buy-buy-buy pressure we experience in North America, but there's plenty of Christmas spirit.

Yesterday - Monday - we took a trip out to the Teleferik, a cable car that runs up a mountain to the south of the city. There's a magnificent view of the town and harbour, and a quite acceptable restaurant. It's obviously set up to handle hordes of visitors, but yesterday was so cold we were among a dozen or so visitors. It was Ron's 60th birthday, so we had his birthday dinner up there among the pines and the chickadees.

It is %^#$*& cold just now. It was so cold last night that I wore a woolen hat to bed. We have a great fleece-stuffed comforter that usually keeps us more than warm enough, but last night I was thinking of getting up and putting on another blanket. It was far too cold to get out of our warmish bed for that, though. Today we take a sea cruise to Chios to get our visas renewed again - just the thing for a brisk winter's day. And then tomorrow we rush back here, catch the plane for Istanbul, and meet Rachel. We'll have a couple of days doing the sights there, then back here for Christmas.

I'll add pictures when I manage to get my guys to download them from their cameras - mine ran out of battery a while ago and I've only just remembered to recharge it.

Next installment: the Lewis family hits Istanbul. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, check out our church's web page (see the link in the sidebar).

An evening with the ladies

I was feeding "my" cats some elderly chicken yesterday afternoon when the woman downstairs came by. She's a pleasant young mother of two lively, bright children. We've exchanged greetings on the stairs quite often, and the kids have practised their English on me, but my Turkish hasn't been up to more than that. Yesterday we were able to chat a bit about the cats - how I love cats, and what a good thing it was for me to feed them (sevap she called it, which means an act that fulfils the Muslim's requirement to be compassionate). And then she said it was her daughter's birthday and how they'd like me to drop in in the evening to have some cake.

So I knocked on their door a little after 6 and was swept into their apartment. It was the first time I'd seen the mom without a head covering, and she looked a lot younger and prettier. We spent some time exchanging names - Leslie is a very difficult name for Turks to pronounce. Then the kids wanted me to help them learn the English alphabet. You have to have learned the alphabet in Turkish to appreciate how difficult ours is. There's nothing logical about the letter names. Why "aitch" and "ef" but "gee" and "pee"? And "vee" is surprisingly difficult; the Turkish letter "v" is pronounced somewhere between our "w" and "v" sounds. Most adult Turks can't hear the difference between the two sounds, but I was able to help the kids understand the difference.

And then they put on a video of the mom's home town in the southeast, and when the music started playing they started dancing. First the daughter, who's 12, did quite an amazing belly dance - she can ripple her tummy like the best dancers I've seen. Then mom danced and dragged me into it. Another woman friend of hers turned up and we all danced. The video showed only men dancing together, and there we were all women dancing together - and I realized that here dancing is not traditionally a man-woman thing but something groups of people do together to enjoy the music and the companionship. Turkish society has always been strongly divided into men's groups and women's groups, and traditional people still live that way. If Ron had been able to come (he was teaching) he would have messed up the whole evening!

A couple more neighbour women turned up, and the poor birthday girl just had one friend her own age! But it seems that birthday parties here are for adults, not kids. Anyway, all us ladies chattered away - or they did, and I listened, just letting it flow over me, not trying to decode and translate but just let understanding happen. And for much of the time it did. They talked about the brother of one of them, who'd just died, and about how hard it was for another to find good food in London and not be spoken to in Arabic. Mostly I just enjoyed being in the midst of a group of people who treated me as a friend, one of them. Good thing they didn't expect me to make intelligent conversation, though!

I was there for about 3 hours, and left feeling exhausted but contented. I'm so grateful to have been invited.

Just now I'm sitting near our dear son listening to the Messiah CD he brought along. Evan arrived safely this afternoon and will be here until just after Christmas. "May your eyes shine", the Turks said when I told them he was coming. And indeed my eyes are shining. We're just about to go off for dinner at the Asensör restaurant, and then he will fall into bed. Tomorrow we start showing him "our" city.

In the bleak midwinter

... frosty winds made moan? Not exactly! It's been partly sunny and in the mid-to-upper teens for some time now, and not too windy for a change. Sometimes the winds on our top-floor terrace are strong enough to whip laundry off the drying rack if we don't pin it down securely. I discovered that in early September when I heard some women discussing something below our open window. "Büyük adam!" said one. "Çok büyük adam!" said another (Big man! Very big man!). Shortly afterwards our doorbell rang, and the helpful gentleman from the second floor handed me one of Ron's shirts. It had flown off the rack and down into the courtyard, causing great consternation among the neighbours.

Anyway... the wind isn't doing that just now. It's behaving itself very nicely. And the weather is quite fine much of the time, as you can see from some of our recent pictures; this one from the ferry boat travelling across the bay, for instance.

I caused a flap last Saturday - Dec. 3! - by going to the church's Christmas bazaar with bare feet in sandals. It was warm enough, and all my socks were in the laundry. People stared at me on the bus and on the street; they were wearing winter parkas because it was supposed to be cool.

But there is a little bleakness in my mood just now, caused perhaps by the shortness of the days and the long, dark, smoky nights. People here burn a lot of coal in their living-room sobalar or heater-stoves. And a soba is not a high-efficiency combustion device; it emits a lot of smoke. When you live on the top floor you're the recipient of that smoke, and my lungs don't like it. I'm very tired, probably from struggling to breathe at night.

The bleak mood seems to be affecting more than just me. I keep hearing people - Turks and foreigners alike - complaining about the idiocies of this country. I'm finding the ethnic charm of the crowded rattletrap buses, the insane drivers, and the people dumping garbage onto the street (shitting on their grandchildren, someone called it) beginning to wear a little thin. And today the gods of electricity decided to send a team of workers to cut all the overhead power lines leading into homes on our street in preparation for activating the new underground power lines. Fine, but we spent the day without power. It's hooked up again tonight, but you can bet they'll do it again tomorrow. Our neighbour across the street, who supports his family with his electric sewing machine, was not amused and spent a considerable amount of time in the street sharing his opinion with the world in general and the workers in particular. Not that the workers stayed around long enough to hear it - they evidently had a pressing and lengthy luncheon engagement. And I'm quite sure that once the underground power is connected the old wires will be left dangling until someone figures out how to harvest them for the copper.

Never mind. I must focus on the wonders of this place and not let the stupidities get me down. And one of the wonders is that the fresh produce continues to come. It's different every month but always good. There are orange trees everywhere, it turns out - they show up nicely now that their fruit has ripened. I always thought that orange colour was artificial. And there are lemon and grapefruit trees, too.

There's an interesting fruit ripe now called ayva - quince, I think. Our dear landlady Semiha came over the other day with a jar of marmalade she made from it. Delicious, of course. It looks and tastes a bit like a pear; marmalade is definitely the best way to enjoy it. There's also a lot of new salad greens, including our favourite, rocket - a plant in the cabbage and mustard family that has a sharp tang to it and just shrieks out "vitamins, vitamins!". It grows wild all over Canada but I've never eaten it there.

I guess this place isn't all that bad after all. And in a week Evan will be here for Christmas, and not long after that Rachel arrives, and I can't wait to share the good things around here with them both.