Did You Know...

...that the difference between monsters and dinosaurs is that "monsters have fur"?

Home

We traveled for 20-some hours yesterday. It's a necessary evil with international travel, but it puts this unfortunate pall over one's memory of an otherwise perfect trip. I will have to remind myself, when asked about my vacation, not to rant about the Keystone Customs guys who LOST someone, causing a shut-down of the whole international terminal in Houston. Or the 42 metal detectors we went through. Or the weird, but well-intentioned, Dutch airplane food. That was just the very end, the price of coming and going. When I asked, I will talk about:

The Turkish people. They're the most welcoming bunch of folks you could want to meet. Even the ones that are rough around the edges. They have immense national pride and it's well-deserved. We liked Turkey better than Spain and almost as well as Italy (yes, you heard me — someone call the EU Chamber of Commerce!). No evidence of the current Turkey-U.S. spat.
The East. There's magic in being somewhere that is not quite Western. It's Western enough, mind you — that's why we felt comfortable going. But the combination of Islamic elements (call to prayer, covered heads) and Asian elements (architecture, geography) was eye-opening.
The food. Consistently very good. Grilled meats and vegetables. Rich yogurt sauces. Eggplant prepared a thousand different ways. Not as weird or mysterious as you'd think: just earnest and delicious.
The big scenery. The hot-air balloon ride was the perfect climax to two weeks of eye-candy. Three different seas, lush hillsides dotted with grapevines, the moonscape of Cappadocia, architecture that is a religious experience (as it was intended).
The small scenery. Six little old ladies in their best headscarves carrying wrapped presents on a bus. The calf in someone's house. Shop windows filled with fezes and other wonders of felt. Grapes piled high on the roadside. Our breakfast table.

Our trip will not be tarnished by the many long hours home, or our sadness at its ending. We had something good to go home to: Lu. She was very cuddly last night, and kept saying, "I missed you guys. I'm so glad you're home."

Cappodoccia By Air

We took a hot air balloon ride at dawn yesterday. Really amazing -- not only that I got in the balloon and kept my eyes mostly open but what we saw! Wow. The view of this otherworldly landscape was even more breathtaking from 900 feet in the air.

These are some so-so iPhone photos. Really good ones to come when we get home.

The Moon

Cappodoccia defies description. I say this as a way out of describing it well. The rocks aren't quite earthly -- their formation from above is evident in their formation. They look like the combined creation of JRR Tolkien and George Lucas. When I think about telling Lu about them, I get as far as "rock palaces where fairies live." The photos are better than my troglodyte words (thanks, Jo).

Because Lu's Who You Really Care About

Gentle readers, I know that reading about our Turkish adventures is probably boring you. A quick Lucy update: she is in El Paso with Baga and Opa. When I talked to her this afternoon (for the 30 seconds she deigned to speak to me), she was on her way to get a manicure. Seriously. She spent a week with Nini having all kinds of fun, and now she is very busy between visitations and viewings by her adoring El Paso public. Aren't we so mean for not taking her with us?

Meet the Flintstones

We are in Central Anatolia/Cappodoccia staying in a CAVE HOTEL. And lest you think we are roughing it in any way, notice that it is a very nice cave.



Among the fanciest hotels we have ever stayed in. In a CAVE. Did I mention the part about the cave? And the twin faucets of red and white wine? We are a modern stone age, very fancy family.

Leaving the Aegean Today

St. John's tomb.


The garden of our hotel in Kirazli. We are sad to leave it.

A Very Old Building

This is the library at Ephesus. The books didn't make it.

Dolmus

That is the Turkish word for stuffed -- they use it to describe grape leaves stuffed with rice as well as local taxi-buses. And us, after all this Turkish food. We have eaten:
--Lamb stewed in tomatoes
--Chicken kebabs that put all others to shame
--Lavosh bread right out of a wood-fired oven
--Baba ghanoush, yogurt sauce, hummus and spicy couscous
--Tiny lamb-filled ravioli in yogurt sauce
--Tomatoes! Oh, the tomatoes!
--Cucumbers, olives, peaches, melons, all grown near where they're eaten
--Fresh fish right out of the Bosphorus

Writing this list has made me hungry and I just finshed eating my eggs...

Wedding Day in Kirazli

We awoke to the sound of gunfire this morning. This, a mere hour after our predawn awakening to the call to prayer blast sung by a tone-deaf imam. We heard the first shots and Jason wondered if it was gunfire. Surely not, I said. Then, unmistakably...gunfire. We didn't panic (well, I did a little, but only thinking my mom would KILL me if I got myself shot in Turkey). Jason went out of the room to check it out and he ran into the hotel owner, a darling Welshman who said, "Not to worry, we haven't gone to war. There's a wedding in the village and that's how they celebrate." Here comes the bride...heralded in a hail of gunfire.

We are near the South Aegean staying in a gorgeous little hotel. The village, Kirazli, is remote at best. If I asked a movie scout to find me the quintessential rural Turkish village, this is what they'd come up with. Goats, donkey and toothless old neighbor lady included.

Today on the Bosphorus

We rode a big boat, a ship really, up the Bosphorus Strait to the place where it empties into the Black Sea. We ate at a restaurant on the dock: the prettiest salad of arugula, tomato, carrot and radishes with just olive oil and lemon. And fried calamari and whole bluefish (the head and all). Then we climbed up a smallish mountain to the ruin of a castle for a dramatic view of the Black Sea. I watched the colorful ships headed to their exotic ports and I found myself forming Lu-like questions: where are they going? What are they carrying? I even made up Mom-like answers: maybe they're going to Albania and they're carrying amethysts. On the boat ride home, we called Lu and told her we were calling from a SHIP and we'd seen a CASTLE.

Now I am back at the hotel on the rooftop restaurant. There's just a little dusting of sunset left over the Marmara. Jason was taking a nap, but the call to prayer (and accompanying barking dogs) woke him up, so maybe he will join me soon.

I can't believe I am here writing something you all will be reading in a place where it is lunchtime. I never stop being impressed with how big and small the Internet can make the world.

Turkish Bath: Not So Spa-Like

Jason and I went to world's oldest day spa yesterday: the ancient Cemberlitas baths. In the ladies' area, there's a giant slab of steaming travertine where you sit and wait (prudishly, if you're an American), wrapped in your table cloth of a towel, for one of the bath women to start your service. The bath women, regardless of their age, build or amount of body hair, where nothing but string bikini or thong bottoms. This shocked me, but put me somewhat more at ease with my own table cloth situation. My bath lady came over, roughly freed me of my table cloth and started scrubbing me with a dry loofah. She removed 34 years of dead skin, plus some that was still alive. Then she soaped me up and washed me like a dog. A well-loved dog, but without any ceremony or regard for my modesty. She rinsed me, then sent me to another lady who was wearing more clothes. This lady covered me with so much oil I could barely keep myself on the slab of travertine. The massage was great. I went back to the hotel clean, greasy and happy, if liberated of my dignity and some of my skin.

Sunset on the Sea of Marmara

We are sitting at the rooftop cafe of our hotel. The sun is setting on the Blue Mosque behind us. We can see across the Sea of Marmara to the Asian side of the city. It's so weird that we are here.

Istanbul? Constantinople?

Is hard to believe that in 15 hours, we will be in Istanbul. We will be gone for two weeks, traveling throughout Turkey. I don't know how we'll manage to be away from Lucy that long. I must have kissed her 42 times this morning. She was annoyed. "MOM, stop. I am trying to make wonderful music." She continued banging chopsticks on a pot.

Jason dropped her off at school, then called me as he drove. He said, "My heart hurts." Mine does too.

Tennis, Anyone?

When I was 12 years old, I took tennis at camp. I somehow managed to hit myself in the face with the racket, knocking the two front brackets of my braces off. It's a great way to meet people in the cafeteria in seventh grade.

Luckily, Lucy seems to be showing more aptitude than her mother. Ben and Mary Ellen took her to play tennis in the neighborhood this weekend, and according to Ben, she showed pretty good coordination and remarkable strength (ie, she held the racket). Come on, scholarship!

A Bad Idea

This afternoon I found Lucy in her room. Holding a golf club aloft. As near to the ceiling fan as she could get it. Standing on tiptoe. As though to stick the golf club in the ceiling fan. Which was turned on.

Some questions came to mind:
1) Why did she have a golf club?
2) Why did she want to stick it in the ceiling fan?
3) What would have happened if she'd been 4 inches taller?

Oh, and why wasn't she being supervised? All I know is, when I was little, I played with dolls and books. When her dad was little, he cut his leg open with a saw and set the desert on fire. You be the judge of whose genes are winning.

Outside at Night

We went outside after dinner to catch bugs, but we ended up lying on the grass looking at the stars. We didn't see the moon. "He's going to get his pajamas on, and then he'll show up," Lu said. We also didn't see any fireflies. She said, "They must be fast asleep."

Big Decisions

Lucy can't decide if she wants to be a doctor or a princess for Halloween. I am trying hard to play it cool.