Political overload

Yesterday I did something I thought I'd never do: I bought a membership in the Progressive Conservative party of Alberta. I've worked for the NDP since I was 15 (I fell and broke my tailbone in their Halifax office, which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "busting your butt").

Ron bought a membership, too. But we haven't undergone a radical conversion. It's just that it looked like Alberta was about to go even farther along the road to hell, and we knew we had to do something. The Conservatives are the only party that's going to be in power in Alberta in the forseeable future, so casting a vote in a provincial elections is pretty meaningless. But yesterday members of the Conservative party were voting for a new party leader, and a vote in that election can make a difference. There were three choices: a "suit" from Calgary with fairly moderate views; a southern rancher/professor who is only slightly to the left of the Ku Klux Klan, and a nice farmer from the north. The right-wing crazy man was very likely to win. So out we went and got our memberships. It was a multiple-choice ballot; you indicated your first and second choices, and if no one got over 50% of the first choices, the bottom guy dropped out and the second choices of the people who voted for him were counted. And so the winner was the one who came second after the first choice votes were counted: the nice northern farmer. With any luck he'll be harmless.

Meanwhile the federal Liberals were electing their new leader at a convention in Montreal, so when we weren't out messing around with the provincial Conservatives we were stuck in front of the TV. And the same thing happened, sort of. The leaders were overtaken by a really nice guy who'd been running third most of the time.

The thing that struck me about both these events was how nice all these people were to each other - the Liberals in particular. They'd had some ugly leadership conventions in the past, but this time they seemed to be making an effort to be civilized and kind. It seemed so much more intelligent than some of the alternatives you see in politics.

So politicians really can act like intelligent human beings. Maybe there's hope for this country, at least.

And maybe I'd better go out and buy myself an NDP membership to soothe my conscience

An end - and a beginning?

So I finally told the Bishop I wanted to retire. Last Wednesday we had a lovely chat by phone. Bishop John of Kootenay Diocese is a wonderful man and I would have liked very much to have been able to work with him, but I simply don't have the energy any more to be a parish priest. So now I'm officially retired - or on my way to being officially retired after the paperwork is done.

Now what? We're happily settled into our life in Canmore, enjoying not freezing our little behinds in Izmir(my goodness it gets cold there in the winter!), and being totally lazy. We belong to two choirs and are working a bit on the music they're doing next month, especially the Bow Valley Choir's production of Rutter's Reluctant Dragon and some quite lovely Christmas carols by Rutter. I'm working an afternoon a week at the Canmore Museum shop, which is about all I have the energy for. Eventually I'll see about getting licensed as a priest in Calgary diocese so I can help out at the church here. We're going back to Turkey in March for a few months, so I really can't get deeply involved in much else here. But eventually I guess I need to do something (as in "Don't just stand there..."). What?

One idea is to create another blog, a more commercial one, and write something about the spirituality of computing, or spirituality and computing, or something like that. I'd like to call it Mother Geek, but the name's taken. Saint Geek? Who knows. If it brought in a bit of money that would be nice.

Meanwhile, winter is here in the Bow Valley and the mountains are white about halfway down. The days are crisp and sunny and very short - the sun sinks behind Mt. Rundle about 3 p.m. But our apartment is snug and comfy, full of sun in the mornings so I can lounge in my comfy chair wasting time on the Internet and enjoying the luxury of laziness. Life could be lots worse!

Surprise!

Sunday morning this is what I saw out the window. That was Sunday October 29. The temperature in Izmir that day was 22. In Canmore it was -10, and it's stayed like that for 3 days.

I wanna go back to Izmir!

Quote for the day

My Google desktop started my day with this quote:

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It occurs to me that maybe we're all like Frenchmen that way

Surprises

So here we are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about as far from land as we've ever been. I'm lounging in our comfy little cabin, munching an apple and gazing out on a choppy, bouncy sea, when a bird flies by. A bird! And not just a seagull, which you don't see this far from land anyway, but a tiny olive and yellow warbler about half the size of a chickadee! It lands on our balcony, discovers an Azorean wasp that died there the day before, gobbles it down and hops under the divider to the next balcony.

In the dining room later that evening the steward gave me a little box of granola and the dining room manager came over to compare notes about birds - he has birds and fish back home in Indonesia. I'm hoping word will get around among the Indonesian members of the crew - most of the dining room and cabin stewards are Indonesian - and I'll hear if the little one shows up somewhere else on the ship.

We're skirting the edge of a tropical depression and had quite a rough, windy day yesterday, so I suppose the tiny little thing was blown like a feather from its regular migration route to our ship. I hope he can hang on until we get to Bermuda in 4 days.

Now we're cutting across the northern part of the Sargasso Sea, a calm, rainless vortex in the middle of the Atlantic. Another thing I've always wanted to see - another tick-mark for this trip. The weather is much better than yesterday, calm and sunny and very warm. Sailors have dreaded this area since the days of Columbus (or before - I'm reading a book called 1421 by Gavin Menzies, about the great Chinese expedition that explored the world between 1421 and 1423. They were here, of course, just like they were nearly everywhere else). One reason I'm glad we've got good strong diesel engines and don't have to rely on sails. Anyway, the surprise here is that there really is seaweed floating around. Not thick out here at the northern edge, but in streaks that look at first like some other ship (certainly not the Noordam, which works very hard at being environmentally friendly) has emptied its sewage tanks. But if you dare look more closely, it's just seaweed, the bladder sort that you see on rocks around Peggy's Cove and everywhere else. Kinda comforting, really, but surprising out here in a place that redefines nowhere for me.

While we're at it, there have been a lot more surprises on this voyage:

• Florence: how lovely it all is.
• Pisa: more than just the tower. The whole area around the cathedral is lovely. The cathederal, started in 1063, is my favourite.
• Monaco: all about money, but so clean.
• Barcelona: I knew Gaudi's Sagrada Familia church would be wonderful, and it was, but his other stuff made me laugh with delight too.
• Valencia: ladies making lace in the middle of a circle of needlework shops.
• Cadiz: it felt like home. Not spectacular, but familiar in a way that makes me wonder if my Spanish ancestors lived there.
• The Azores: green! and lovely, every inch. But too humid for me; I'd go moldy in a week. Pity. Otherwise I couldn't think of any place I'd rather live.
• Ron in formal dress. You really can clean that guy up. Just wait until I can post a picture or two!

So it's a fine trip so far. I just hope my little warbler turns up.

All at sea

What day is it today? Wednesday? It must be Cadiz.

We're on board the M.S. Noordam, the newest of the Holland America Line fleet, bound for New York. It's our first ocean cruise, and it's awesome. Of course our more experienced shipmates say this is the best ship they've ever seen, so maybe anything else would be an anticlimax. Anyway, it's pretty good.

Our original plan was to drop in on Rachel in England to celebrate her birthday and get a look at Yorkshire. And then Ron started thinking about alternative ways of getting home and discovered that there's a mass migration of liners from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean in the fall. So we flew to Rome, wandered around there for a couple of days, hopped a train for Civitavecchia, got onto the Noordam, and here we are.

We've had days in Livorno (= Florence and Pisa), Monaco, Barcelona and Valencia. After Cadiz we head out into the Atlantic towards the Azores. Couple of days there, then on to Bermuda and then New York.

The Mediterranean has been wonderful - but hot and steamy. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm looking forward to the cooler Atlantic. I'm curious to see what my father spent his life in the Navy cruising around. But there's always the chance of a hurricane at this time of year - might be kinda exciting.

Anyway, here we are, and when I get home there's going to be such a flood of pictures hitting our Flickr page! Maybe I'd better ration myself to just a couple of dozen a day.

Home on the 15th. Look out for more then.

Looking back at Turkey

I'm writing this on September 11, a day when all of North America seems focussed on "our enemies" in the Middle East and the threat they pose to us. And I'm thinking back to our time in Turkey and wondering how what we experienced there makes sense in those terms.

We went to Turkey knowing some Turkish people and so with solid evidence that at least some Turkish Muslims are trustworthy, loving people. We went expecting to meet more like them, and we did. What would it have been like if we hadn't started with that belief? Who knows. I think we would have learned the truth quickly, but I suppose you get what you're expecting and perhaps we would have interpreted what we saw quite differently.

I've been spending some time wondering what we miss most about Turkey. Number one is our rooftop clothesline on a hot summer day - by the time the efficient and thorough European-style washer finished the second load, the first would be bone dry and bleached. In our Canmore condo the bylaws don't permit us to hang laundry out on the balcony. It looks messy, don't you know? To me, the lack of laundry on balconies looks like we're a nation of energy-hogs, or maybe prudes who are embarrassed to show our underwear in public.

We also miss the fresh fruit and vegetables, of course. Even though the supermarkets around here provide green beans and lettuce and artichokes and tomatoes year-round, there's no taste to them. The sense of luxury that comes from having Peruvian asparagus in September is diminished somewhat by the inability to tell exactly what kind of vegetabular matter you're eating. And now I'm conscious of how much it costs to bring that stuff to our little mountain town. No, I don't want to go back to the days of carrots, turnips and potatoes in the winter, but I really would like to eat vegetables that still remember what it was like to be attached to the vine.

The big thing I noticed about Turkey is how important it is to be connected to a community. Relationships are everything there. That's why a Turk feels naked without a cell phone or two. When our "Turkish daughter" Begum was travelling with us, she talked to her mother at least twice a day and checked in with each of her friends every day or so. One reason we had a good time in Turkey is that we were part of a family thanks to our Rotary-exchange parenting of their daughter a few years ago. Add to that our connections through the Anglican church in Izmir, and we were guaranteed to be safe and cared for.

Canadians are vagrants; footloose, rootless immigrants, we've learned to be self-sufficient and lonely. Turks don't do that, and I suspect that's true of other Middle-Easterners, too. Relationships are everything there.

That's a good thing for people like us who arrive with ready-made relationships. But it can have its down side, too. Other tourists we met were quite justifiably cautious when dealing with Turkish shopkeepers and merchants. Outsiders are fair game. I thank God that we ended up living in a close-knit neighbourhood where people were ready to take us in and accept us. We found we could trust our local vegetable-sellers, pharmacist, and others we dealt with in the three or four blocks around home. Outside that area we could pay twice as much and be treated with something that felt close to hostility or suspicion. Around home we were, as I overheard a neighbour telling a visitor, "Our foreigners." That felt okay.

It also felt okay to see the church working the way it should. Although the Anglican church in Izmir makes no attempt to win converts among the Turkish people (that's against the law in Turkey, and not the Anglican way anyway), it is open to visitors of all backgrounds and more visible than the other churches - surrounded by just a low wall with a gate that doesn't lock. As a result the congregation and the liturgy are half Turkish. And in that congregation you see people mixing who would stay far apart in the world outside: foreigners and Turks, gay men and straight, the unemployed and middle-class. People who have no relationship in the traditional Turkish way are drawn together in Christ. It feels like the sort of place a church should be. There's a reason for its existence, unlike many Canadian churches I can think of.

So what's this got to do with September 11? I think that disaster, and others that have happened since in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, England, and many other places around the world, have at least some roots in this basic difference between western and Middle-Eastern societies. Westerners value self-reliance; for Middle-Easterners relationship is everything. Outsiders are not to be trusted and are fair game. And we sense that mistrust, whether we know it or not, and return it along with fear.

Many years ago a Middle-Easterner we say we love and trust told us to love one another. In other words, relationships are everything. Maybe he was onto something there. I wonder if he had the answer to what's going on in the world today?

Fourth-generation war hits home

Well, not home exactly, thank God, but it feels pretty close.

Four young Canadian soldiers were killed Friday in Kandahar, and attacks on Canadians continue. Meanwhile, Israel and Hezbollah continue bashing each other. It's all very ugly. I feel anxious and frustrated, just not able to get a handle on it.

The other day I read an article - pointed out by someone on the Canadian Anglican mail list - that helped me make sense of this. The author, William S. Lind, describes four generations of warfare. The first three are what we'd call conventional warfare. Our armies understand waging war like that. But what's happening now is "fourth generation war" (4GW), something armies and governments can't handle. It's war waged by cultures, not states; war with informal non-governmental forces, not armies. The strength of these groups is their support among ordinary people. The warriors are the fathers and sons and brothers and uncles and cousins of the ordinary people they live among. That's the source of their power. And it takes more than conventional warfare tactics to break that power.

George W.'s biggest mistake after Sept. 11 was to declare "war on terror". That's something no one will ever be able to win. He might have called it a "struggle for peace" - that would have been closer to the truth, something that can be achieved. Struggle can lead to understanding and compromise, which is what we need.
The original intention behind Canada's mission in Afghanistan, I thought, was to help the people of Afghanistan get their lives together. Occasionally we hear of soldiers and other Canadians helping schools and health facilities; military leaders, we're told, have been working with local patriarchs to try to win their confidence and support (that's why translators working for the Canadians have been specially targetted). These are the sort of things that can help when you're involved in 4GW. They won't win the war but they can help bring peace.

Fourth-generation war can be ended only when we come to realize that "power over" someone else is useless and counter-productive. "Sharing with" is the only answer. And so the suffering and deaths of Canadians in Afghanistan, although tragic, might actually help in some strange way. They might help in the way tragedy has always helped, by arousing pity and terror in the hearts of onlookers. If the people these troops serve, the local Afghans, see foreign friends joining them in their suffering, if they feel pity for Canadian friends and terror for themselves caught in the web of violence, they might begin to work to change the hearts of their friends and relatives who are causing the suffering.

Fourth-generation war can't be won by force and violence. Peace can be achieved only through compassion and understanding. When will we ever learn?

Thai food in Canmore

Tonight we had dinner at the little Thai restaurant across the railroad tracks. It was delicious, at least as good as anything we've had in Toronto or Vancouver. And here we are in a small town in the mountains.

It didn't look promising at first. The waiter who seated us looked more German than Thai, and the other, older one definitely was German. But as it became obvious we were delighting in the food, the senior server explained how there came to be a Thai restaurant in the back of beyond.
Many years ago a businesswoman fled Laos and ended up working in a restaurant Grand Prairie. She was the dishwasher at first because she spoke no English. But one day the cook quit and she took over. Business boomed and she kept the job.

As she could afford it she brought more and more of her relatives to Canada. Eventually they moved to Calgary and bought their own restaurant. Seven of them shared a tiny apartment at first, but time passed and their hard work and determination paid off. They bought land and more restaurants that became known for their great food.

The place in Canmore is one of two owned by the neice of the original woman from Laos - her other is in Banff. And she ended up marrying a German man who was maitre d' at a posh hotel. So now, in his retirement, he's looking after her Canmore place, and the family is continuing to bring in cooks and other staff from southeast Asia.

I love stories like that - stories about people with talent who work hard and succeed. And I love the ethnic mix in this country, summed up in this Thai restaurant with its German host. This isn't the Canmore Ron grew up in, and it isn't the Canada we both knew when we were young. It's way better.

It's hard to believe the riches we're surrounded with here. Banff, with its summer festival of the arts, is 20 minutes away. We've been to a great concert there and a photography workshop. Monday we enjoyed a student concert in Canmore, and next week we see the Magic Flute in Banff. There's a folk festival in Canmore this weekend. We're discovering that there are opportunities to volunteer at the library and the museum. There's a decent choir we hope to join this fall. And there's a fantastic, friendly wool shop a short walk away from our condo.

I could learn to like this place. It's kinda nice staying home for a bit.

One more museum

Our first Saturday back in Canada we went to yet another museum, just to compare: the Museum of Civilization in Hull. We'd driven past it before, and I've always liked the way it looks - layers of limestone just like the cliffs in Ottawa - but we'd never been in it before.

My tolerance time for museums is about 2 hours. We were there for 3 hours before being kicked out at closing time. The exhibits are what I had been hoping for in Turkey and Greece and Egypt. There weren't acres of identical stuff that would only mean something to an expert. In the West Coast First Nations part they'd chosen the best items and displayed them in a context that gave some idea of their significance. On the Europeans in Canada floor you walked through the last 1000 years of Canadian history and felt like you were there. If the early parts are as accurate as the 20th-century displays (which made me feel like I'd slipped back into my childhood), they're good.

This is the best museum we've seen in the last year. Click on the title above to see something about it.

Re-entry

So we've been back in Canada for a week now. Almost time to get used to the place again. And the culture shock isn't too great yet. Of course, we've been pretty sheltered by our loving family so far; just wait until we try to make it on our own.

We left Istanbul early in the morning of the 8th, flying Lufthansa to Munich and then London, and Air Canada to Ottawa. Lufthansa disappointed me for the first time. We arrived ready to check in two hours in advance, as instructed, but there were agents only for first and business class. The rest of us waited 45 minutes or so. They gave us a decrepit rattletrap of a plane that made it somehow to Munich. The flight to London wasn't bad, except for the dry roll and lonely piece of cheese that passed for lunch on that flight. Heathrow insisted on putting us all through a security check again - less thorough than the one at Munich that I think even picked up the metal in my fillings. Took close to an hour to get through that one, which made me glad Ron had timed our flights so perfectly. Air Canada was a blessed relief : good plane, good food, attentive attendants. So we made it to Ottawa in time for Evan to pick us up on his way home from work.

The first thing I noticed was how handsome and fit our kid looked in his suit and tie. You really can dress him up and take him places. And then I noticed how pleasant the air in Ottawa smells, and how green everything was, and how smooth and clean the roads were, and how everyone stopped for red lights. Only in Canada, you say. How nice to be home.

We loved staying with Evan and Anna in their comfy home. But Monday we headed south to Toronto, picked up a car, met our friends Bob & Eunice on their way to Toronto and our way to London, and had dinner in London with our friend Royce. Back to Toronto the next day to check in with my friend Patricia and her gorgeous new four-year-old son who was born in Haiti - what a healthy child in every way! Lunch the next day with Don, then off to Calgary.

So now we're in Ron's brother Earl's house in northwest Calgary, far too full from much delicous food and warmed by the company of more family. It's cold and rainy outside (and I left most of my cool-weather clothes back in Izmir), but we don't mind being here at all.

At the moment we're still enjoying cool, clean, affluent Canada a great deal. I don't know when the longing for chaos will set in; I assume we're going to get homesick sometime soon. For now all I miss is Turkish toilets and yogurt. And my friends back in Izmir, of course. I'll let you know if that changes.

A sermon for Pentecost

Given at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Izmir, June 4

In my old parish we used to have an elderly Englishwoman named Freda. Freda didn't have much formal education, but she was wise and faithful and often quite funny. I loved to hear her read in her cockney accent; she often cast new light on the scriptures with her fresh point of view.

One Pentecost it was her turn to read. She got to the Acts reading and, although I know she'd done her homework; she always did, the list of countries and nationalities threw her. “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of a whole lot of other places” she said. And most of us thought that was really quite good enough.

Over the last year my Ron and I have been to an awful lot of the places those first hearers of the Holy Spirit came from: Parthia, near Lake Van; Media, the home of the Kurds; Mesopotamia, between Diyarbakır and Gaziantep; Cappadocia; Pontus – the Karadeniz; Phyrigia, near Eskişehir; and Pamphyllia, near Şanlıurfa; not to mention Asia, the whole rest of Anatolia. I'd had no real understanding until this year exactly how important Anatolia was in the history of Christianity. There were just these names in the New Testament that I mentally translated as “a whole lot of other places.”

So this year has been quite instructive. And one thing has struck me in particular: except for Smyrna – our city of Izmir – there's hardly a trace of the Christian church left in those places where it began its life.

I think the place where that knowledge really hit was the mound that's what's left of Colossae. That's all it is – a hill, with a poppy field on its side. And Laodicea, just down the road – just a few ruins.

But you know what? That's all right. Because the Christian church is more than buildings, more even than scattered communities of believers. The Christian church is bigger and stronger and stranger than any of us can imagine.

The Church was born that day in Jerusalem when faithful people from all over the known world heard Jesus' followers telling the story of Christ's life and death and resurrection. And the most amazing thing: they all understood. They heard it told in ways that made sense to them. Jesus' friends found themselves speaking in languages and in ways they'd never used before, and it worked.

That was the first time the Holy Spirit went public. She'd been at work for untold ages before, of course, since the very beginning of the universe: breathing order into chaos, life into dry bones, words into prophets' mouths. But finally she burst into the world in a huge way, kicking reluctant disciples out of their comfy upper room into the streets, and creating a whole new way for God to be present in the world.

And she hasn't stopped. Every time we get comfortable in our safe, predictable ways of doing things she gets to work again. Every time we hit a dead end in our ways of being the Body of Christ in the world, look out, here she comes.

And so I'm not sad that Christianity is not in control in this country anymore. We had our chance and we blew it. Constantine co-opted our faith and made it a route to power. But that's not what Christianity is about. It's about love; it's about the little ones who are the ones who really matter to God. It's about not getting comfortable in our pews or in our daily lives.

So the Christian church got it wrong when it sided with the powerful ones of this world. But that's okay. The Spirit isn't finished with us yet. There's still a church, and there always will be a church. It's just not always going to look the same, that's all. The church here is very different from what it was in Byzantine times, but it's still the Body of Christ, still one of the ways God acts in our world. And it will keep on doing that in one way or another until the Kingdom comes.

The Holy Spirit can do some unusual things. I'm sure that's what pushed me to be ordained; it's also, I think, what pushed me to come here. It works within us and among us to strengthen us and give us the courage to do things we'd never dream of doing.

This is the last time I'm going to be with you for awhile. But no matter how far apart we are, we'll still be together in this strange and wounded miracle, the Church. And I hope before too long we'll be together in the same city again. So until then, thanks for your goodness and kindness to me, thanks for the help you've given me to understand this wonderful country – and Görüşürüz!

Farewell tour

I know something you don't know

The end is getting near. In a few days we'll be boarding a bus for Istanbul, visiting our dear friends, the Şamlı family, and finally jumping on a plane for Canada. Part of me is really longing for familiar food, familiar language and familiar friends, but there's a big part of me that's going to miss this place terribly.

There's still a lot of Turkey we haven't seen. Last week and a bit of the week before we tried to make up for that failure and show our Turkish daughter Begüm some things she hadn't seen yet. We did a lightning tour of south-central Turkey.

We started off in Cappadocia, which we'd seen briefly at the end of March in preparation for the solar eclipse - but Begüm had never been there. We repeated much of the tour we'd done before, walking through familiar moonscapes that astonished her. We stayed in an even nicer place than before, the Gamirasu Cave Hotel. If you needed a reason to visit Turkey you have one now. This is my lifetime favourite hotel. Nice people, great food, amazing scenery, and rooms - not all in caves, but some - that are clean and appropriately decorated. At dinner our first night a local man was playing an oud or some similar instrument, and eventually a Turkish woman at another table got up and began dancing with the host. (Turks are the world's best dancers, IMNSHO).

The last morning we got up in time to be picked up at 4:05 a.m. for our balloon ride. Oh my goodness! We had a long wait while they dealt with some tourists getting a short trip as their package tour, but finally we headed off in a minibus for the launch site. The 15 or so of us who had paid for a longer trip were to fly in balloons piloted by the owners, a Swedish man and a New Zealander woman who have been handling balloons for more than 20 years each. The wind was coming from an unusual direction, so we took off from a small parking lot to the east of the main wonders of Cappadocia. We drifted over valleys and ruins we'd toured on foot the days before, seeing things from an entirely different point of view. We travelled above the highway and the main street of Göreme, waving at women hanging out laundry and men enjoying their morning coffee. Finally we came down in an unused field, being caught and held by the company's contingent of strong men who then became exterior decorators, covering our basket with flowers and preparing a morning cocktail of cherry juice and champagne.

It was a great experience. Don't miss it.

We drove - or I drove - to Konya after that, with a side trip to try to find Tuz Gölü, Turkey's second-biggest lake, which is so salty that crystals precipitate out of the water. We drove and drove along a road that the map said would lead us to the lake. Finally we came to a fence and a gate and a young man making welcoming gestures. Turns out that the lake has been sold to a private company, a salt manufacturer. Tuz Gölü has always supplied a large proportion of the salt Turkey uses; now it's privately manufactured. The young man was a tour guide hired by the company for the summer. He got into our car and drove with us to a place where we could get a good look at the lake.

We wanted to go to Konya for two reasons: Çatal Höyük and Mevlana's shrine. We got to both of them. I'd first read about Çatal Höyük in Scientific American in the early 60s, when they were discovering the earliest (at that time) traces of agriculture and city life there. We saw many artifacts and wall paintings from Çatal Höyük at the Ankara museum and were really looking forward to it.

There's not much there now but a couple of grassy hills and a building or two covering excavations in progress. Really it's just another hill like millions that dot the Turkish landscape; it must have been pure luck that led the first archaeologist to dig there. Perhaps if someone else digs someplace else they'll find someplace even older. But it still thrills me to look at walls put in place 9000 years ago, and see (in the Ankara museum) carbonized knitting preserved by a fire. One of the buildings had a painting on its wall that looks like a map of the city, and in the distance there's an erupting volcano. You can see exactly the same mountain today, but it's covered with snow at this time of year. That place was one of the highlights.

Mevlana's shrine was another. Mevlana (Rumi) was a great Muslim mystic and poet, the founder of the Sufi order. His shrine is a place of prayer and peace, and it felt holy. He was a great man whose faith transcended labels, and I felt deeply moved to be in his presence.

I think we all liked Konya, which surprised us, since it's supposed to be one of the most conservative and narrow-minded cities in Turkey. Not that we could see.

From there we drove to Antalya on the Mediterranean via Isparta, hoping to see the fields of roses that are said to be harvested at this time of year to make perfumes and things. Alas, they told us the season was late, and I saw only one field full of single-petalled roses, the oldest and most perfumed sort.

So we got to Antalya, me driving and Ron navigating - the reverse of the usual situation, although I'm not sure it would have been any easier if I had been navigating, given the quality of Lonely Planet's maps. We circled the downtown for what seemed like hours trying to find the entrance to the ancient castle, where we were supposed to be staying. We finally had to enlist the help of a taxi driver. So we got to a pleasant pension with a pair of doves nesting behind the shutter of our bathroom window, and we spent a couple of days experiencing the tourist hub of Turkey's south coast. Very ancient and very pretty.

And then we moved on to Olympos, west and south along the coast, where we stayed at the Turkmen Tree Houses. This was our chance to kick back and do nothing, really have a holiday. We must have been among the oldest people there, but it didn't matter. The beer was good and the beach was great. We went to see the Chimaera our first night. This is a fire that emerges from the rocks of a nearby mountain in several dozen places. The ancients thought it was a monster encased in rock; modern science says it's methane gas that spontaneously ignites. Whatever, it was worth the hour-long climb in the dark and the equally harrowing descent.
The next day Begüm tried out sea kayaking for the first time while Ron and I did absolutely nothing - wonderful!
And the next morning we drove to the airport and came home.

Now we're sorting through stuff deciding what we need to take home and what we can leave here for when we come back next spring. It's hot and sunny in Izmir, no rain any more, and the spring flowers are beginning to realize life's tough after all. I'm beginning to enjoy our klima for its cooling properties - what a wonderful invention that thing is. Probably the next time I write we'll be back in Canada!

On the road

Just a quick note from an internet cafe in Antalya to let you know we're alive and very well. We're in the middle of our farewell tour of Turkey with Begüm. We started off back in Cappadocia, touring places we saw at the end of March and doing a balloon flight as well. Wow! There will be pictures on Flickr when I get home and upload them. We stayed in an amazing cave hotel beside a river near a small village. The villagers had lived in caves in the cliffs across the river from the hotel, which felt like a former monastery. Unfortunately the cliff rocks started falling into the river, so the villagers moved into houses on the hill above. The hotel seems solid, though. One of the many good things about the place: we heard our first nightingale. Non-stop waterfalls of music all night. I didn't want dawn to come.

Then we drove - or I did, since Ron still doesn't have his replacement licence - to Konya, home of the Sufi mystic Mevlana (Rumi). I achieved a lifetime dream when we visited the remains of Çatal Höyük, a neolithic village where the earliest traces of grain cultivation have been found. Also traces of knitting.

More to come - the rest of the gang wants to leave. Check back later for more.

A picture I didn't take

Today is a holiday in Turkey - Ataturk's birthday, which is known as national youth and sport day. The kids have the day off school. I was looking over the edge of our rooftop terrace this morning watching our 8-year-old downstairs neighbour Mustafa playing football with his friends (they're pretty good) in front of our building when I saw another kid coming down the street. He was about the same age, but he was pushing a huge bin on wheels half-full of recyclable stuff he'd picked out of the garbage bins along the street. As he stopped outside our building and sorted through our waste the kids went on playing. And I wished I had my camera, and then was glad I didn't.

This is still a country of contrasts. Our neighbours aren't rich, but they can send their kids to school and give them time to play with their friends. Not all kids are that lucky.

Skype anyone?

We are just discovering Skype, the Internet telephone program. If any of you use it, get in touch. Our Skype name is Turkladians.

Ankara and the east

"Oh no, not another Roman theatre." You can tell you need to get out of the Aegean region when that's your reaction to a bunch of ruins. So we did.

Bronze-age stag
Originally uploaded by MomLes.

Our friend Timur was being confirmed in the Anglican church in Ankara the last Sunday of April. That was our excuse. Ron put on his travel agent hat again and arranged a couple of tours to make the trip even more worth doing.

As usual, there's too much for a blog, but I'll try to put down the highlights at least.

Saturday, April 29.
Arrived in Ankara about noon and got settled into the hotel. It was in Ulus, an older downtown district that reminded me a lot of the part of Izmir we live in - decrepit. We headed out for a walk in the general direction of the Archaeological Museum.

We strayed through the traditional market, encountering several displays of quite unusual meats. The whole area really felt like Izmir but less cosmopolitan, more provincial. Almost all of the women were covered and several wore head-to-toe coverings. And we noticed, looking for some excellent wines that are produced around Ankara, that there was no place to buy alcoholic beverages.

We had our introduction to the museum, a quick couple-of-hour pass through. We were surrounded by classes of elementary school students, and then a couple of hundred naval cadets came through. The government expects that at least some students from every school in the country will visit Ankara every year, and every military trainee in the area starts off with a tour of Ankara's main sights. We had a pleasant chat with some of the navy types, and lots of the kids wanted to test their English on us.

Exhausted, we made our way home and had a vigorous nap. We awoke to the sound of cheers echoing up and down the street - crowds of men in the coffee houses and beer halls in the neighbourhood watching a couple of big football games on TV. We hadn't had supper yet, so we decided to join them.

I'd never been in a birahane- beer hall - before, at least not in Turkey. They're male territory. But I wanted my dinner and a beer to go with it, and I wanted to see the football, so in I went. The hosts were very gracious. It was a family-run place, and the teen-aged son of the family waited on us. Soon his father and mother came over to greet us and shook hands with us both, partly, I think, to make it clear that I was welcome. The food was excellent, the beer was our usual favourite Efes lager - as good as Kokanee - and the right team won, so it was a good evening.

Sunday we headed off to church. The Anglican church is on the British embassy grounds, and you need to pass through a security system and leave your passport with the guards before they'll let you in - quite different from our church in Izmir on a busy street corner. I met the suffragan bishop of the Anglican Diocese in Europe, Bıshop David; and Fr. Geoffrey, the archdeacon of our area; and Engin, a Turkish man who was minister of his own independent church in Istanbul, has been trained recently at Wycliffe College in Toronto, and hopes to move his congregation over to the Anglican church.

Timur and eight others of all ages and origins were confirmed in a fine service. We had lunch with him in a revolving restaurant, walked to a nearby mall to meet his daughter, and felt like we'd had a day in any major first-world city.

Monday, May 1 we moved back 3000 years into Hittite times. Our guide and his driver picked us up at our hotel and drove us three hours east to the village of Boğazkale and the nearby ruins of Hattuşaş, capital of the early Hittite empire. Awesome, and a refreshing change from amphıtheatres. Anatolia is so old. It poured rain some of the time and we picked up impressive clods of clay on our shoes, but that didn't matter. We saw Hittite stuff; that was what counted.

Tuesday our guide picked us up again and took us around Ankara. First stop was the museum again, where he pointed out things that we hadn't known or noticed on our own quick tour. He sensitized me to the variety of ways the mother goddess turns up in ancient symbols - lions and leopards are her special beasts - and the gradual appearance of the sky god, symbolızed by the bull or stag, who first partnered her and then supplanted her (but not really, even now).
Then we had the mandatory trip to the Anıt Kabir, Atatürk's mausoleum. I was surprised at how interesting it was, and how huge. Our guide treated it with the respect I would give to the most holy of holies. Atatürk was a friend of his grandparents, so I could understand that, but most other people were in awe as well. (I think Atatürk was a remarkable man, but I get uneasy when he seems to be worshipped.) It was a most impressive monument and gives you a sense of the importance of that great man to Turkey.
Finally we had a quick run through a fairly dismal ethnographic museum. We'd asked for it, expecting something as good as Izmir's. It wasn't.
We hadn't managed to get to the Kale, the ancient castle on the central hill, so after we got back to the hotel and rested up a bit we grabbed a taxi and went up there for dinner. There are lots of decent-looking restaurants there; we chose the first likely-looking place and enjoyed an excellent meal with pleasant Turkish music from a trio on folk instruments. Definitely worth doing.
Verdict on Ankara (mine, at least): okay, but it sure doesn't feel like the capital city of a world power. I'm glad we chose to live in Izmir.

Wednesday, May 3
Back to the Ankara airport - a truly dismal place; good thing they're building a new one - to go to Van. We were met there by Şükrü, our guide for the next 4 days, and Ahmet, our driver. Dumped off our luggage at our hotel in Van, grabbed some lunch (delicious; I have a new favourite Turkish food: ali nazik kebabı. Looks simple enough to make; I will try it soon). Then we got into the car and drove to the south end of Lake Van (passing a couple of road signs pointing to Iran, which was only a few km away) for a short boat trip to the island of Akdamar, where there is a 10th-century stone Armenian church with quite wonderful reliefs of Biblical scenes.
Back to Van again to walk up to the top of the ancient kale, started by the Urartians and used by various forces since then. From the top of the hill you have a view of what's left of the old city of Van, destroyed by Ottoman forces at the end of WW I - the Armenians and Russians were working together to establish an independent Armenia until the Russians got distracted by a civil war, leaving the Armenians to fight it out on their own. There's not much left of the old city except some bumps in the grass and a couple of mosques.
On the way down we were accompanied by one of the inevitable little boys who hang around asking for money. But Şükrü got him sidetracked into picking up garbage, with a bit of help from the rest of us. By the time we got down he had a couple of bags full and a couple of coins from his new friends. Maybe that will start a new trend among tourist-bugging brats?

Thursday
Back into the car to drive southwest through Kurdish country to Mesopotamia. The only signs we saw of military presence were the roadblocks we encountered a few times. It seemed to me that they were more interested in checking trucks for gasoline smuggled from Iran, which is a huge business in the area. Anyway, with our experienced guide and driver we felt completly secure.

From the relatively modern (i.e. Roman) city of Bitlis on down to the Tigris we followed a scenic river gorge, as beautiful as the Fraser River gorge if you keep your eyes focussed at least 5 metres above the water level. From there on down it's garbage. Bitlis, and everyone else downstream, seems to dump its garbage into the river and the trees are festooned with plastic bags and other filth. And women wash their clothes in the river, and children play in it, and people drink from it. If anyone reads this who has any power in Turkey, please do something about the garbage! It is beyond disgusting!

We had a quick look from the walls of Diyarbakır, vast and ancient; and a look at a mosque that used to be a really old (2nd century?) Christian church marking the place where St. Thomas began the conversion of the area on his way to India. That was special. Diyarbakır is on the Tigris River and so marks the eastern boundary of Mesopotamia.

More driving until we got to Şanlıiurfa, where we stayed in the best hotel we've had in the last year: the Edessa (that was the old name of the city). I wish we'd had a week in Urfa. It reeks with history and is quite beautiful. It's full of sites linked to the Islamic legends about Ibrahim (Abraham) - stories I'd never heard. This site summarizes them a bit. Urfa is called the "city of prophets" because so many others are tied in with it as well - Job, for instance. It was also a major centre for the early Christian faith, and later many Islamic scholars lived and worked in the area.

We explored Urfa's market a bit on Thursday evening, climbed the Kale and visited Abraham's birthplace on Friday morning, and then drove down to Harran, just north of the Syrian border. Another place I wish we'd had days to explore, or maybe months to soak up the atmosphere in. It was the birthplace of the Biblical Leah and Rachel. We saw the Kale, met some kids - got a couple of (I don't know what to call them) dangly good-luck things and a photo in exchange for some candy (Şükrü's good idea), and visited one of the ingenious beehive houses. The people here are ethnically Arabs but culturally unique. They're nominally Muslim, but the facial tatoos on some of the women show that moon-worship isn't dead yet.

Back into the car through land that's yielding three crops a year now thanks to irrigation, and up to the water's source, the Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates. I used to think irrigation was a bad idea. Having seen it make a difference to the lives of people who no longer need to struggle for a subsistence living from the land and now earn real money, I think I've changed my mind.

We spent the night in the worst hotel we've experienced recently, the Bardakçı in Kahta. It's recommended by Lonely Planet (won't be next issue, though) and had been fine the last time our guide was there, but it has certainly fallen on hard times recently. We were the only guests. Hot water appeared not to be an option. Mutter, mutter, mutter.

So we got up far too early on Saturday morning after sleeping badly in a smoky room, didn't have a shower to improve our moods, and drove to Mt. Nemrut through stunningly beautiful countryside. This was the peak experience of the whole week and one of the great ones of the last year.

We drove to the start of the trail along a terrifyingly slippery muddy track to find the place shrouded in dense fog. We had a glass of tea at the shop at the bottom of the trail, hoping the weather would clear, but to no avail. So out we trudged into the wind and fog and cold, climbing 300 metres to the east terrace.

In the mid-first century BC a small-time king of the Commagenes, Antiochus Epiphanes, decided he was the saviour who would unify the world's religions, ensuring deification for himself. He erected two sets of immense statues of the gods shared by the Greco-Roman world and the Persians and placed his statue among them. He was buried in a tumulus above them, at the very top of the mountain, thereby increasing the height of the mountain 75 metres or so. His kingdom lasted a few years after his death before succumbing to the Romans. By the time the statues were discovered by a German road engineer in the mid-19th century earthquakes had broken the heads off the bodies and generally wrecked the place.

The heads are sitting upright at the base of the statues now, making for quite an eerie effect if you come upon them in the fog as we did (funny how all Turkey's tourism posters show them against a brilliantly blue sky). There are two terraces of them, on the east and west sides of the mountain. They are awesome. Even in that utterly miserable weather I would not have missed them for anything. I'm sure they're wonderful on a sunny day, but the struggle to get there and the misery getting back down the path soaked through the skin into our very guts made them even more special. Go there. See them.

Back down to the dump in Kahta to change into dirty but dry clothes (still no hot water for a warming shower). Then to Gaziantep, our last stop.

There are two things you must experience in Gaziantep, Ron had learned: baklava and the mosaic museum. His sources are right. If the mosaics and the baklava aren't the best in the world I'd like to see where they're better. Between Şanlıurfa and Gaziantep the countryside is dotted with pistachio orchards. They must use the entire crop in their baklava. Ohhhh.... And the mosaics, rescued from a Roman resort town (I think) that was about to be submerged for an irrigatıon project, are so subtle in their shading and beautifully preserved - worth a detour from Istanbul, I think.

It was a day of real highs and lows, though. Ron discovered he and his wallet had parted company sometime between changing clothes in Kahta and having lunch in Gaziantep. No great harm done - he had almost no cash, and no one had used his credit cards by the time he reported their loss - but a big nuisance. Almost all better now, though. MasterCard got a new card to him within 36 hours - very impressive, we thought.

My thoughts on the southeast: don't miss it. Travel with a good guide (our guide was from Yuki Tours) unless you love driving among crazy people and feel really secure in Turkish - the accent is so different there we felt like we were hearing another language entirely. And allow more than a few days to see the place. It's worth it.

Life's short and then you die - but life goes on

That's the way I feel after all the ruins and things we've seen recently. People think they're building for eternity, but eventually the plants and the critters take over anyway.

We spent a couple of days last week in Pamukkale, Aphrodisias, and places like that around Denizli in southwestern Anatolia. Although we thought we'd be going to Denizli by train and getting around by bus, we ended up driving (I still find it hard getting up at a decent hour in the morning). That turned out to be a good thing because it allowed us to stop when we felt like it and explore back roads - always worth doing.

The first unscheduled stop was in the ancient city of Tire about an hour southeast of Izmir. To get there we drove through the market garden area of Izmir, even passing a couple of artichoke fields but missing our chance to get a picture of these oversized thistles. Tire goes back several thousand years, but most of its oldest buildings are "just" 5 or 6 hundred years old.The "new mosque" dates from the 18th century and is particularly lovely.

We had lunch in Tire outside a restaurant in a park above the city, then continued through the valley of the Küçük Menderes, takıng off cross-country at an appropriate point to get to the Büyük Menderes valley. The Menderes River was known as the Meander in antiquity and lives up to its name, wandering back and forth across its fertile flood plain. The mountains we went through are the same sort as we had in the Kootenays (mica schist with quartz intrusıons), and I kept looking at them and saying "There's gold in them-thar hills." Not surprisingly the main city of the area is Aydın, which means gold. We went through vıllages that surely haven't changed much in the past few centuries (except for the satellite dishes), and past men and women working near-vertical fields with oxen pulling ancient ploughs. That's surely the only way they could cultivate land like that.

The area between Aydın and Denizli is a major cotton-growing area, producing the world's best quality cotton because it's still picked by very skillful hands and not machines. But the industry is suffering from cheaper Chinese and Indian competition. One of the cotton spinning mills was bought by an Indian company recently and physically moved to India.

We got to Pamukkale by evening and settled into a pleasant pension - the Allgau - run by a woman who was born in Germany but moved to the area as a teenager when her parents went back to their home village. She's a lovely person, does everything at the place and speaks English fluently. She's the reason we'd be happy to stay there again.

Pamukkale (cotton castle) is an amazing sight. From a distance it looks like a white gash across the hillside. Close up you can see it's a huge travertime (a form of calcium carbonate) deposit laid down over millennia by thermal springs. In Hellenistic and Roman times there was a huge city - Hierapolis - above the springs where people came for rest and healing. Until recently there were modern hotels among the ruins and people came from all over, especially eastern Europe, to bathe in the mineral pools. They were damaging the site so badly that the government closed and removed the hotels and people can swim only in artificial pools at the bottom of the hill. There's some grumbling about that, but it was a good move because those deposits are a world treasure.

We prowled around Pamukkale and Hierapolis for most of a day, then explored the village Karahayıt to the north, where the thermal deposits are red and black. Next time that might be the place we stay, Lonely Planet to the contrary. It seems quiet and friendly and very pretty.

The next day on our way home we prowled through more ruins. Laodicea first, one of the churches mentioned in Revelation. That's where the futility of building for eternity began to hit home. Exploration and excavation are barely underway. A major commercial center of the Greco-Roman world is now a huge deserted hillside. And Colossae confirmed that in a really big way. All that's left is a barren mound. The people St. Paul wrote to are buried somewhere under there, as are many, many thousands of years of others. Life's short, and then you die...

Everyone said we shouldn't miss Aphrosisias, so we didn't. It is indeed a fine archaeological site, Greco-Roman again, the home of a sculpture school so full of magnificent carvings. But we're close to experiencing ruin burnout. One theatre is pretty much like another. Each one is amazing, but they're all so much the same. What we'd like is something like Barkerville or Williamsburg, where you can see and talk to people living as they did in ancient times. The ruin of an ancient theatre would come to life if you could see people rehearsing and setting up to stage a play there; the ruin of a tavern would come to life if you could try some wine made the ancient way... Maybe it would take too much time and money to do something like that, but it would be a huge attraction.

So we drove back down the Büyük Menderes valley to Selçuk next to Ephesus and found the Basilica of St. John, which we'd missed on our last visit. That was a place I liked very much. It was built in early Byzantine times where St. John is supposed to have written his gospel, on a hill overlooking Ephesus. His supposed grave is under where the high altar would have been. Pope Paul VI celebrated mass there in the 1960's, and it felt to me like a holy place. I'm glad we got there.

It was a beautiful trip. This is the time of year to travel in Turkey, while the weather is still cool and everything is green and flowering - and there are no tourists! If you don't have kids to hold you back and restrict your travels to July and August, why wouldn't you come now? The locals say the weather changes from rainy winter to sunny summer on April 15, and it certainly did this year. So if you've been thinking of coming to Turkey, don't wait for summer - do it now!

We're going to Bergama again in a few minutes to buy some rugs from the co-operative there (they say 90% of the money goes to the women who make the rugs, and I hope they're right). Then it's off to Ankara for our godson Timur's confirmation this Sunday and the rest of the week exploring the east (God and the PKK permitting). Back for a weekend, then we're going to the Phyrigian Valley to see some more ruins. Begüm comes back soon, and we hope to do Cappadocia and the south with her. And then we go home :-(

Stay tuned for further adventures.

I'm still around

Really I am. But that daughter of ours pointed me to a couple of web sites and I've been far too absorbed with them to do my blogging.

The dangerous sites are Clipmarks (www.clipmarks.com) and LibraryThing (www.librarything.com). My clipmarks are at http://clipmarks.com/clipper/MomLes. Play with these sites at your peril.

However, I've uploaded some new photos to Flickr, and maybe later today I'll finish adding comments to them.

Just a thought: If you've ever considered coming to Turkey, do it in late April. The weather is utterly perfect (the rains are over and past, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land). The trees are full of migrating birds, and the hills are covered with flowers. And there are no tourists! Come now if you ever come.

An afternoon at St. Mary's

Vandalism at St. Mary's
Originally uploaded by MomLes.

This Saturday evening we're going to hold the Easter Vigil at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Bornova, so Monday Bülent and I went there to clean up and see what we need. As usual, there was a little more vandalism to the church. It really isn't anything personal or anti-Christian; it's just that the poor building doesn't have anyone around most of the time and is vulnerable to the attentions of people who like to hear the sound of breaking glass.

It's kinda discouraging trying to keep this church going. It was built in the late 1850s by the Whitall family, one of the English families attached to the Levant Co. in Izmir. At that time the company had the monopoly on the opium trade and was thriving. When it became possible for more than just a few privileged European companies to trade out of Turkey, their fortunes declined, and it's just a memory here. There are still a few families descended from the Levantines - families with 300 years of history in Turkey, whose members are still citizens of England or France or Italy. This church is part of that history.

We try to hold services once a month here at 5 p.m. on the third Saturday of the month. Sometimes no one comes - it's hard to get the word out among the scattered members of the old community. If possible, the members of the other church of the chaplaincy, St. John's, will turn up, especially the Turkish members who want to support our work and preserve the history of the place. This Saturday there should be lots of people. The Vigil service is very special, and we have (as we should) several adults to be baptized.

Bülent, Shadi and I had a picnic lunch on the steps of the church. While we were eating some of the kids from the high school next door were staring at us. When Bülent went over to see what they wanted they asked him, "How did you get in?" He said, "I have the key." So they asked if they could come and see the place after school. And they did.

We had maybe a dozen teenagers - 16 or 17 years old, I think - looking around and asking questions. They were interested in it both as a church and as a historical site. I begged them to think of it as their own, and to keep an eye on it to try to stop the vandalism. I think they will, having seen the beautiful inside.

The women at the tomb

I'm very grateful the attacks have concentrated just on the plain glass (except for the stained glass crucifixion scene behind the altar, where Christ has a hole in a most unfortunate place). There is some wonderful stained glass there done by one of England's most famous artists.

Poppies in Bornova's field

The grounds are a little wild, not getting all that much attention. That's fine with me. There are some wonderful flowers growing wild in the grass and nettles: irises, freesia, poppies, and other things I can't identify. Later, when the rain stops and the heat comes, the grass and flowers will die and we'll have a big clean-up job, but now things should be allowed to run riot.

There's a war memorial at St. Mary's in memory of three of the sons of Bornova who died in the Great War. Two fought in the French army, and one was a British airman. Ironically Turkey was on the other side, but these men never fought against Turks, and their homeland (did they think of Turkey that way?) is generous in honouring anyone who acted with courage - witness its care for the Anzac graves in Gelibolu (Gallipoli).

A few days in Austria

Last week (Sunday to Friday morning) we were in Austria & Bavaria - another of our flying visits to get a feel for the world around us. It left us wondering if we'd been visiting another planet.

I was a little under the weather still from the bug I picked up in Cappadocia, so I didn't get around as much as Ron. We did our usual thing: find a couple of tours to get a look at the area, and wander on our own some of the time.

Monday morning we had a tour of Salzburg city that included a 24-hour city pass that gave us free admission to the tourist places and use of any city bus. Ron used it in the afternoon while I stayed in the hotel room wrestling with the wireless system and sleeping.

Our hotel, by the way, was one of the nicest we've encountered in our recent travels. It was the Best Western Zum Hirschen, just near the railway station. I particularly enjoyed the softest down pillows and the comfiest down duvets I've ever experienced.

View from the castle

Monday night we had dinner and a concert at the Archbishop's castle fortress overlooking the city of Salzburg. This is the view from the restaurant window as sunset approached.

Tuesday we raced into Vienna on the train to see Mozart's Die Zauberflöte at the Volksoper. We were back in Salzburg again by Wednesday afternoon after walking around Stefansplatz and taking a short bus tour of the downtown area. We liked Vienna, but I noticed the large number of unemployed young people hanging around in the Metro system with their pit bulls and other unfriendly beasts. I also noticed that the stores I visited had very few staff members. I wondered if both situations were the result of a very high minimum wage, which makes it impractical for businesses to hire many staff members. And yet how do you ensure that everyone gets fairly paid? Turkey has a high level of official unemployment, but you don't see a lot of people hanging around feeling sorry for themselves. I think most people keep busy, whether they're officially employed or not, maybe helping Uncle Mustafa at his little shop down the street in return for non-monetary considerations. Strong family and friendship ties here make up in part for the lack of a social safety net.

Back in Salzburg on Thursday we walked around a bit and took a bus tour of the German Alps. Very pretty countryside indeed. And to finish up we went to a dinner concert in a restaurant attached to a monastery (supposed to be the oldest restaurant in Europe, dating from the 9th century or so). We were seated at tables of 8, arranged so that English-speakers sat together, and so did French-speakers, and so on. Our table had a couple from Ireland, one from England, a couple of Americans and us. I was wearing the dress I'd worn to the opera on Tuesday, complete with the string scarf I bought in Cappadocia. We were talking about having gone to the opera, and the English couple said they'd been there, too. And she asked, "Were you sitting in the 4th row of the balcony, with a pillar between you?" We admitted that we had been, and she said, "We were at the end of that row. I thought I recognized that scarf." Once again my 1 YTL scarf got noticed. I really must pick up a bunch more when we're in Cappadocia again next month.

That's the end of our foreign travels for now. For the next couple of weeks we're going to stay close to Izmir, maybe renting a car now and then and going for trips around the area. The weather is almost perfect just now, everything is in bloom, the temperature is ideal for getting out and about, so we need to catch up with things around here. At the end of April we'll be going to Ankara for the confirmation of one of the men from our church - our godson. This will be my first chance to meet the bishop of the Anglican Diocese in Europe, who works out of London. After that we plan to see some of the eastern part of the country, trusting that the troubles between the Kurdish people and the government won't get worse. And finally, when our Turkish daughter Begüm comes back from school in Canada, we'll take her for a tour of Cappadocia and the southwestern part of Turkey. And then it's back to Canada. I wonder what that will be like?

Twilight at 2 p.m.

Twilight at 2 p.m.
Originally uploaded by MomLes.

We did get to Cappadocia to see the solar eclipse. We left Sunday afternoon, the 26th, and got back on the afternoon of the 30th just in time to meet Shadi's partner Jason - here from Rhode Island for a week or so - and do the laundry before taking off for a Sunday-to-Thursday in Austria.

Cappadocia is quite another part of Turkey. Izmir has always been a point of contact with the West. It isn't really very Turkish; Smyrna was a city in the Greek region of Ionia for ever and ever. When the Ottoman Empire assumed control Izmir was opened to Europeans from Britain, Germany, France and Italy. There's been a significant Turkish presence here only since 1922.

Cappadocia is quite another country. It is mainland Anatolia. Its history dates from the Hittites. And its history has been shaped by its geology. Up until about 10,000 years ago the area was being covered with ash from its three volcanoes. Over time the ash has been carved into fantastic shapes - many of them sort of like Alberta's hoodooes. Quite early in human history people found that these structures were soft and easy to dig into, so they hollowed out shelters that evolved into whole cities of homes and even churches. There are also cities dug down into the rock, some as many as 9 stories deep.

We took hundreds of pictures, a few of which are on my Flickr site, and picked up a couple of nice souvenirs that will end up decorating our friends' and families' places if we can bear to part with them.

In Cappadocia many of the people selling things at tourist sites are women who have made what they sell. The first day of touring I walked into a little shelter belonging to a woman who proudly showed me a scarf with a tatted edging. We talked a bit - or she did, and I nodded - about how much harder tatting was than crocheting, which edged most of her other scarves. So what could I do but buy one of the two she'd tatted? And then she showed me how to wear it. The women of that area have quite a distinctive way of wearing their scarves, and when I emerged wearing my scarf properly arranged I got a lot of good-natured kidding from the guides and drivers. But one of the other women in our little tour group got the other tatted one and we felt quite comfortable together.

The next day I found a woman selling the simplest imaginable scarf: pieces of thread arranged into a mesh pattern and joined with dabs of a glue gun. It cost all of 1 YTL - maybe 75 cents. Now I wish I'd picked up a dozen, because a couple of stops later, while I was wearing it carelessly tied around my neck, a French woman came up to me and said "Madame! Comme c'est belle! Ou avez-vous trouvez cette belle echarpe?" Well... I've never been complimented by a French woman on my clothing before! Talk about a moment to treasure.

Anyway, the whole point of the trip was to see the solar eclipse, and we did. And I really don't know what to say about it. It was all I'd hoped and more. A couple of the people in our group had seen one off Madagascar and had come back for more - I can see why. Their help in pointing out what to watch for added a lot to the experience. I didn't know about ground waves - ripples running over surfaces near you as the sun shrinks to a point source and the wave nature of light becomes more obvious. They also showed us how to make a pinhole camera with our hands - as the sun gets really tiny even the circle of your thumb and forefinger is small enough to show its true image on the ground. But they remarked on how different this experience was from their last one, where the darkness seemed to come rushing up at them like a storm. This time the air was hazy enough that it was more like a gradual sunset and long twilight. A long, eerie twilight with no shadows and with sunset colours all around.

A cold twilight, too. None of us expected how cold we'd be. My goodness it was cold! And it took so long to warm up!

That's why, some of my Turkish friends would say, I caught a cold that day. It couldn't have had anything to do with the unfamiliar North American flu germs shared with us by the other members of our tour group. It must have been the cold. So I got back to Izmir on Thursday afternoon with a blocked ear, plugged sinuses, a sore throat, a wheezing chest, and feeling like death warmed over only slightly. But it was worth it.

Earth Observatory has an image of the area taken from the International Space Station at about the time we were at totality. Kinda neat seeing it from above.

What in heaven's name is going on?

Got off the bus on the way home from church this morning and heard the most unearthly drumming and tootling. There, just ahead of me, was a parade of gentlemen dressed in what I assume are Ottoman uniforms. The ones in front were marching with swords, swinging from side to side and looking fierce. Behind them were some equally fierce bell-janglers, then some trumpet and horn players, then some drummers, and finally a guy in the back of a pickup whacking a couple of bass drums. The truck had the web address of our local lokmaci - maker of donuts in syrup given out free in front of homes or businisses in memory of a departed loved one I caught them on video - you can watch a couple of the little segments here.

Now we really must leave to go on our solar eclipse tour.

Bergama

Mother and newborns

One fine warm day this week we decided to rent a car and head north to check out the area around Bergama, about 100 km from Izmir, to see if we could find any locally-made carpets. We left the highway and headed into the part of the mountains where we'd heard Turkmen shepherds wove traditional patterns.

Almost first thing we got a clue that there were plenty of sheep in the area - this mother and her two lambs so young their umbilical cords were still attached. Mother moved away with great dignity on being photographed. Lambs tried their first gambols - quite successfully, too, if a bit wobbly.

Bergama

We didn't find any weavers on our way to Bergama, but we settled into a hotel highly (and rightly) recommended by Lonely Planet and stared out the window. This is what greeted us: a full frontal view of the Acropolis.

Carpet

That evening we walked around the lower city and found a carpet shop - one of several, but the man looking after this one seemed particularly friendly and relaxed. He showed us dozens of carpets, including this and some others made in the area from traditional designs. We were quite pleased that his starting prices seemed to be in our range. We'll be back.

Byzantine decoration

The next morning we went to the museum across the street. This is such a quiet time of the year that we were the first visitors of the day - while we were there another tourist couple arrived, and that was it.

There were a lot of the usual statues and things from the Hellenistic and Roman periods of the town, but there were also a very few Byzantine items. I was struck by how Celtic they looked, including this bit of architectural ornamentation.

Arch at the acropolis

Then we went to the Acropolis. Started in Hellenistic times (after Alexander the Great & before the Romans) and renewed by the emperor Hadrian, it's far more interesting to explore than Athens' Acropolis. You can climb over everything and even break your neck if you choose to be careless.

This arch looked down over the city, a monument to the Romans' ingenuity in discovering this simple and elegant structure.

The real treasure of Pergamon, as Bergama was known in ancient times, was its library. When Marc Antony looted it to give to Cleopatra, he took 20,000 scrolls. Parchment was invented here, because the jealous Egyptians stopped shipping papyrus to Pergamon.

Healing water

Then we headed to the Aesclepion, an ancient wellness centre. Galen, the 'father of medicine', was born in Pergamon and came back after training at all the best medical schools of the time. He became famous treating his home-town's gladiators. He also worked at the Aesclepion, using both physical and spiritual methods to help heal.

The waters of the healing spring still flow and are still used by local people today as a remedy for whatever ails you.

Turtle at the Aesclepion
Originally uploaded by MomLes.

The Aesclepion still seems to be a good place to live, at least as far as tortoises are concerned. This was the second we saw. He/she was heading straight for one of the healing pools, perhaps looking for some juicy worms or greens or something on the way.

On our way out of town we discovered the carpet weavers' co-op building and took a tour. It was set up to display and sell the local weavers' work - the village women get almost all the proceeds. We saw how they process silk (they raise silk worms here) and how they know the carpets. There were some beautiful designs, slightly more expensive than the shop in town, we thought, but excellent quality. We'll definitely be back.

Tomorrow we're off again, this time to Capadoccia to see the solar eclipse and a bit of the local scenery. So stay tuned.

To Greece and Back

Parthenon and flowers
Originally uploaded by MomLes.

We're back from Greece and wrapped up in Izmir life again. I haven't finished tidying up the pictures on Flickr yet, but I've got more to write about here so I urge you to go there to catch up with what we did and saw: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lesliel. It was great! I like Greece.

Taze! Taze!

This is a picture I've been wanting to get for months. Shadi took it in her first week here. This guy walks around our area every day with a tray of gevrek (called simit in Istanbul - big donuts covered in sesame seed) shouting "Taze! Taze!" (Fresh! Fresh!). He also delivers the mail.

We have a roommate

Life has become even more pleasant the last week with the addition of a young American to our little family.

Shadi Khadivi is a Fulbright scholar, an architect working in New York who was born in New Mexico and grew up in Texas (daughter of an Iranian family). Her Canadian partner Jason discovered my Flickr photos and got in touch a couple of months ago. We emailed back and forth and soon felt comfortable inviting Shadi to stay with us while she found a place to stay here. Then it became clear that this was the right place for her.

Shadi's work here is to document the old houses of the Basmane district, and the people who live in them, through photos and art. It's an "interesting" part of town, not the sort of place tourists feel comfortable in, the home of some of the people who have come here from eastern Turkey to find work. There are still a few pre-1922 houses standing (using the term loosely) there, and there's lots of life in and around them. Shadi discovered the area during an earlier trip and want to get to know it well.

It's good having her around. She's quiet and doesn't get in the way at all. She's also intelligent and interesting. I'm looking forward to learning lots from her.

This last week we've had a couple of chances to explore some of the Izmir we know with her, but she's quickly making friends of her own and going places with them, too. She's also taking Turkish classes every morning, and rapidly catching up with us on the language front.

Another adventure this week was getting my new cell phone working. The ones we borrowed from Begüm's family were showing their age a bit, so we picked up a new one for Ron at the Rome airport, and I found one for me on eBay that Shadi brought with her. It was properly unlocked and equipped to function here outside the U.S., but I couldn't find any way of getting it to work with my Turkcell SIM card. So I went to a phone shop, who sent me to a Turkcell office. The woman at the desk there spoke very fast and responded to my "Slowly please, I don't know much Turkish" by talking louder and faster. Finally she said "Do you have a Turkish friend?" "Yes." "Well come back with him, then. Goodbye."

So the next day my friend Emmanuel gave me a whole morning. We went to another Turkcell place and learned that they couldn't help us - go to Alsancak. Emmanuel checked at another Turkcell place, and they said Alsancak was wrong - go to Çankaya. Then he asked at a phone shop and they told us not to let Turkcell touch the phone - they'd break it for sure. The guy at the phone shop put a SIM card from another company, AVEA, into my phone and it worked properly. So we got an AVEA card and I have a new phone. I could never have done it without my friend Emmanuel. (He spent the afternoon helping Shadi get a bank account and a work permit. What a guy!)

In a few minutes we're leaving for Athens. We need to get out of the country to renew our visas again, so we thought we'd do some sightseeing in mainland Greece for a change.

A trip to suburbia

Today was another lovely day, so we decided to try to get to the Kuş Cenneti, the bird sanctuary (bird paradise, literally) on the other side of the harbour. We hopped onto the bus that the web site said would take us to a place where we could get another bus that would go fairly close.

We rode from one end of the bus line to the other - about 45 minutes - through parts of the city that have become fairly familiar by now into the definitely upscale suburbs across the bay. I'd never been so far west in this area; Ron used to teach English at a car parts plant near the end of the line, but he'd always been driven there by one of the students, usually in the dark, so it was all new to him, too. We passed blocks and blocks of new highrise apartment buildings, most of them finished. We even saw some townhouse developments built in an Ottoman-revival style, like Victorian-style townhouses you'd see in Toronto suburbs.

The bus route ended at a huge new shopping centre out in the middle of a field that would soon be more apartments. No sign of a bird paradise there! The bus driver asked where we wanted to go, and we told him, and he responded with the fastest Turkish we'd ever heard. It seemed to boil down to "You can't get there from here".

Okay, so we went shopping. Got a new toaster at a sort of two-storey Canadian Tire that had signs all over the place saying "You can't get this any cheaper anywhere". Trouble was, we knew we could get most of it for about half the price from the sidewalk vendors near home. We did see some really wonderful mosaics that we could imagine in Ron's brother Earl's front hall - just beautiful! - but we couldn't imagine how to carry all 100 kg or so home on the plane. If we can find a way, get ready to tear up your floor, Earl.

So we wandered around the shopping centre feeling quite uncertain which part of the universe we were in. It could have been Calgary or Vancouver or Toronto, but the food court had kebap joints and there was a traditional Turkish toilet in the washroom (as well as a couple of less traditional ones) with a lineup to use it. No doubt about which country we were in at the supermarket, though; the shopping cart drivers were unmistakeably Turkish.

I didn't like the place. There was so much fuss about security - I set off the alarm leaving the store with the (paid-for) toaster and thought I was going to be shot. Nobody seemed to enjoy working there. There was no life in the place. It felt so good to get back to our home neighborhood where our veggie sellers don't mind giving us free Turkish lessons and people take the time to enjoy themselves and each other. The suburbs are definitely not to our taste.

Someday soon we must rent a car and get out to the Kuş Cenneti before someone notices that there might be a problem with bird flu and closes the place. The brief glimpse I got of a couple of Dalmatian Pelicans last month from a harbour ferry just whetted my apetite, and I want to see the flamingos.

It's spring

It's spring
Originally uploaded by MomLes.

While our poor friends in North America are reeling under winter's blows, we're finally coming out of the dark, cold tunnel and emerging into warmth and sunshine. What do you do in the spring? Play with water, of course. A nice warm (18C) day is a good excuse to wash the terraces and bask in the sun.

In the shadows in behind Ron there's a cherry tree (I think) just starting to bloom.

Good things can happen on buses

We get around in Izmir mostly by city bus or metro. We're fortunate that we live a couple of blocks from the south end of the metro (subway) line, so we can get a few places downtown quickly and easily, or go all the way out to Bornova at the north end of the line in 20 minutes. But the church is a fair way from a metro station, so I end up taking the bus quite a lot. And that's almost always an adventure.

Izmir has an odd fleet of buses. I suspect they're hand-me-downs from other cities. Downtown there are a few red double-decker buses that look like they came straight from London. Most of the buses out our way are long, articulated things. They're far too long for Izmir's crowded streets. It's not unusual for one to end up stuck in an intersection when the light changes - although red lights seem to provide no good reason to stop for our intrepid drivers. Only once have I been on a bus involved in an accident, though, and that was clearly the other driver's fault: he opened the door of his parked car right into the path of the oncoming bus. I wish my Turkish had been better then - I might have learned a lot of useful words.

The buses are heavily used and usually packed. We often have to stand - although young men and sometimes women give me their seats more often than not. I didn't think I looked that old. Is it because of my age or because I'm a tourist? Anyway, it's very kind.

Standing can be quite an adventure. The drivers are erratic at best - they take off from a stop like Indy drivers, pedal to the metal and God help anyone not hanging on. Then more than likely they have to jam on the brakes. Good thing people are usually packed in - we hold each other up. I've been caught by helpful people, and I've done my share of catching too.

People are much less shy about touching here than in cold Anglo-Saxon Canada. The other day I was sitting with an empty seat beside me, and an elderly lady (probably all of 65) was about to sit in it when the bus started up with its usual energy. I grabbed hold of her hand and helped her get into the seat, and instead of pulling it away in embarrassment as I probably would have done she gave my hand an extra squeeze as she thanked me. That was nice.

Another time I was sitting up front where I could watch people getting on. We pay the bus fare using a card read by a machine beside the driver. (It's a most useful card - you can get into most things run by the city with it.) A successful transaction gets one beep, but if you don't have enough money in your card (you can refill them at most corner stores) you get three beeps. An elderly lady got three beeps, tried again, got three beeps again, and just kept on going. The driver didn't say anything then (a young guy would have been out on the street pretty quickly), but a few stops later, when the lady showed no sign of coming up with the money, he turned around and said something like "Ablacım, are you going to pay me?"

The thing that got me was the word Ablacım. Abla means "older sister", and it's a nice way of addressing a woman who's probably a little older than you, or whom you respect. The ending -cım means "my dear". So he called this troublesome old lady "my dear older sister". I could forgive him a lot of rough starts and stops for that.

Before the old lady could come up with the money someone else came and paid her fare.

That's why I like Turkey.