I don’t think I have to say too much about these— as I mentioned in my previous post I was invited to the Kervansaray Lara 5-star resort last night, and I kinda went nuts with the picture-taking. Here are some of my favourites.

Reception, from the top of the escalator.

Elevator 24.

The main hallway.

The television lounge.

One of the bars.

Another bar area.

Elevator 22.

Strange-but-beautiful coloured light rods, which gradually change hue over time.

The big red monster in front of elevator 21.

The chillout room.

An excellent time was had by all— the hotel is as wonderful as it looks. the food is great, and the drinks are even better. So… what did you do with your Tuesday evening?

I’m a lucky girl— a friend of mine invited me out to dinner this evening at the Kervansaray Lara, one of the big five-star all-inclusive hotels here in Antalya. I’d been in this hotel briefly before, but had never got a chance to really explore it. Well, let’s just say I’ve taken about a million pictures so far, and although I don’t want to waste my evening here on the computer, I couldn’t resist taking a moment to share this one photo, because it made me giggle, and because it doesn’t really fit in with the theme of all the other photos I’ll post tomorrow.

Basically this is a machine that makes fruity-slushy-icey-sno-cone-type drinks, and the joke here is the play on words with Aspendos, the ancient Greco-Roman city near Antalya. Get it, Icependos? Anyway, it’s not knee-slappingly funny, but I did think it was clever in a cheesy way. Incidentally, the Icependos machine is broken tonight, so I can’t report what they taste like. The Blonde Natashas here are good, though.

I hope everyone’s having a great evening. More photos of this amazing hotel tomorrow.

Well, my hanging-out-and-labeling trick worked again, second day in a row. I ran 15 minutes non-stop with almost no distress and no frustration. It remains to be seen whether I can keep strong when the runs get longer, but so far it’s looking good.

I’m a little bit concerned about the blister on my right arch, because it’s getting bigger, and even when it’s taped up it’s still painful. I’m going to do my best to favour that foot today, and of course tomorrow is Wednesday, so I’ll be taking a break from running (yay!). If anyone has any tips for blister recovery, please let me know.

I’m sure that ten weeks from now my physical concerns and issues will be of such increased magnitude that I’ll look back on a foot blister and laugh that I ever even gave it a second thought. That’s scary and exciting at the same time.

New concerns: soon the weather will be hot enough (even at five in the morning) and my runs will be long enough that I’ll need to start working out the logistics of how to carry sufficient water with me. I’m sure there’s plenty of online wisdom about this; I’ll consult forums and such.

Earlier this month I announced I was going to run a marathon next March, and then after having spent the following week or so floundering around buying things and trying to get my head around the enormity of the task, I realised I had no focus except the vague cloud of “marathon,” and as we all know if you focus on nothing, you’re sure to hit it (see also: several past marathon attempts, all with no clear plan and all ending in failure). So this past weekend I decided to get organised in order to gain confidence about the huge mountain of work ahead of me.

I always feel better when I get things written down— usually the situation is not as dire as I think it is once I see it all laid out in front of me. So in hopes of quelling my rumbling anxiety, on Saturday I started to make a training calendar (I used good ol’ iCal, since I wasn’t using my iCal for anything else). I started out by taking a notebook (a real one, you know, paper and all that) and writing down everything that I would work into a training schedule if the world were perfect and I had endless resources. I decided I wanted to do running (obviously), some other cardio activity (swimming seems obvious), some core stability training on the Swiss ball, yoga, and something involving meditation or some other kind of mental concentration discipline. As it turned out, when I mapped all these things out, they didn’t take up as much of a day as I expected. I can get them all done before lunch time and relax in the afternoon. I also made a space on my calendar to keep track of my weight and my daily food intake; if I’m going to launch myself around Antalya for 26 miles, I need to do myself the favour of getting the rest of this extra weight off. The exercise will help, certainly, but I need to stop shoveling goodies in my mouth like it’s Christmas.

The race is on a Sunday, so I designated Saturday as my full rest day, and when the time comes that long runs are a possibility, Sunday will be the day for those. There will also be a break from running on Wednesdays, which is when I’ll fit in the swimming or whatever I decide on. Swiss ball work and yoga (I subscribe to Yoga Today, which is free and unbelievably great) will happen every day of the week, as will meditation. Everything starts at low levels and builds gradually over time. When I added it up on Saturday, I learned that there were 260 days between then and the race. I was panicked about that before, but now that I have a written plan it appears to be plenty of time.

So I went out for my first “real” training run yesterday morning (Sunday, day 259 if you will). I set a goal for the week: by Friday, the last training run of the week, I want to be running 15 minutes non-stop. I’m not a beginning runner, but I am quite a bit out of practice, so I thought this was a reasonable goal.

Three minutes into my Sunday run I didn’t think my goal was so reasonable anymore. I started my run at 7:00 in the morning, and as soon as I hit the road I realised I’d started much too late. Already the heat and the sun were almost more than I could take, and I was feeling like a big fat radiator bouncing up and down the street. I finished the session without dying, but only just, and to be honest I walked most of it. Still, there’s only one first day of training, and it can only get better from there. I went home and did the rest of my training work and felt at least somewhat accomplished, but during the run I was really unhappy, and I didn’t feel much better about it afterwards.

Last night I thought a lot about how I could improve my approach. As a habit I listen to a lot of Gil Fronsdal’s teachings via Zencast. You don’t have to be a Buddhist (I’m not) to get into Vipassana meditation and the practical daily applications Zencast offers, and I recommend this podcast to anyone who wants to shake up their brain and explore something new. Gil talks a lot about “hanging out” with feelings as a coping device (a technique which is often used by mental health professionals to treat phobias). He uses the example of boredom and restlessness during meditation, and he advises that the best way to hang out with that is to label it in your head (“boredom,” “restlessness,”) and if you just keep hanging out and acknowledging those feelings by labeling them and accepting them rather than judging or acting on them, eventually the bell rings (to signify the end of the meditation period), and then you’re free to go and it turns out it didn’t kill you to sit there after all. I wondered if I could apply this technique to my unhappiness and frustration with running.

I knew that one thing I was going to have to do, aside from getting up earlier, was get rid of my timer. As I mentioned before, I already ditched my heart rate monitor months ago because it was making me obsessed with numbers instead of running. But on Sunday I noticed my watch was doing the same thing— I couldn’t stop myself from looking at it every three seconds to see if it was time to quit yet. That’s no fun, and it keeps my brain from being open to things like awareness of the feelings in my body and perhaps, god forbid, enjoying the scenery. But of course I still need a way to time my runs, so I came up with an idea: I made an iTunes playlist approximately 15 minutes long (this week I’m enjoying songs from the new Chemical Brothers album), and popped it onto the iPod Shuffle. I added a track of silence at the end to make sure I would know when to stop running. So now all I have to do is start the iPod when I start my run, and simply run until everything goes quiet. No watch to obsess over, and great music to run to. I decided to give it a try this morning and combine it with the “hanging out” and labeling techniques.

I went out at 4:50 this morning (day 258). The weather was much, much more tolerable. I walked for a minute or so, and then fired up the iPod as I started to run. Within a couple of minutes I was really unhappy and desperately wanted to slow to a walk again. I labeled those feelings in my head. “Unhappy.” “Tired.” “Want to quit.” “Fed up.” “Hate running.” “Unhappy.”

I know you all know the phenomenon by which repeating a word over and over causes the word to start mutating in your head, until it sounds alien and eventually loses all meaning. Well, today I discovered the same thing happens with labeling feelings. You really get into your labels, and the very act of labeling causes those labeled feelings to distort and then dissipate. So after a few minutes, “unhappy” and “tired” became “blank” and “I’m not sure what this one is. Neutral, I guess.” I labeled those feelings and hung out with them, too. Then some outside stuff I was experiencing started creeping into my labeling: “mountain.” “Brick wall.” “White cat.” “Chemical Brothers.” I felt myself smiling. “Smiling.” The fact that I was busy labeling things meant that I had no room in my head to tell myself all those stories about how I could just quit and go back to bed, or about how I’m too out of shape to run a marathon, or about how it’s ridiculous to put myself through this when I’m clearly not cut out for it. We all know the stories we make up in our heads, every excuse in the book about why we shouldn’t succeed at doing something difficult.

In fact, I was so busy labeling things that when the music came to a sudden halt I nearly tripped and fell over my own feet .

And that was it. On the second day of training I ran 15 minutes non-stop, accidentally. I wasn’t supposed to do that until Friday. And at the end of the run I was settled and happy and completely devoid of all the negative thoughts I’ve usually filled myself with by that point. My experiment worked. I’m going to try it again tomorrow.

I think I’ve really hit on something here— as I was walking home I thought to myself that if it weren’t for my current poor state of physical fitness, I might have continued to run like that for several hours, just noticing things and labeling them and not judging or criticising or feeling sorry for myself. Later in the day when I really didn’t want to do my yoga class, I labeled my way through that, as well, and honestly I think I connected with the poses today in a way I never have before. I’ve never paid this much attention in my life.

So I’m feeling good about this training stuff.

Incidentally, the new shoes are working out well so far— they’re a lot less like new shoes than most new shoes are. I do have a strange blister in the arch of my right foot, but I’m pretty sure that’s due to my flip-flops and not the runners. I’ll tape the blister for a couple of days and see what happens.

257 days to go. “Confident.”

I was so pleased to read in the Turkish Daily News that once again there will be an exhibition of sand sculptures over the summer in Antalya. We went to the one last year (which I believe may have been the first one ever in Turkey— sources seem to vary on this point), and it was absolutely breathtaking. Some of the sculptures were several metres high and tremendously intricate, and obviously took weeks in the making.

One thing I remember distinctly from last year was that I was shocked at the lack of barriers around the sculptures, given that sand is not exactly the most robust medium and people (especially children) aren’t really good at keeping their hands to themselves. There was surprisingly little vandalism, though, probably due to the excellent security staff on site. But I remember holding my breath every time a breeze picked up, because the bottom line is that these things are delicate. If there had been a rainstorm I don’t know what they would have done, as trying to cover the sculptures would have been impractical to say the least. Luckily for the artists, we don’t often have rain in the middle of the summer, but as I said before, this year has been a little bit freaky in terms of climate. In fact, it drizzled here even this morning, and this evening resembles a night in March more than a typical night in June. So we’ll see how it goes. In any case, I’m armed with a camera now, so expect a full photo report of the sand sculpture exhibition when the time comes… weather permitting, of course.

At least once a week I get asked some variation on this question: what’s it like to live in an Arab country? Answer: I don’t know. I’ve never lived in an Arab country. But wait, Turks are Arabs, right?

No, that couldn’t be more wrong. But it seems to be such a common misconception that I thought I’d take a few minutes here to clarify a few points that often leave people confused:

1. Turkey is in the Middle East, and Middle East countries are by definition Arab. I know a lot of Turks who would disagree with the first part, and a lot of Israelis who would disagree with the second part. Not all Middle East countries are Arab, and many Turks think of Turkey as identifying more with Europe and other parts of Asia in terms of political and cultural likeness. I personally think of Turkey as a bridge between Europe and Asia, but there’s a lot of room for debate on that subject.
2. Even if you don’t call it a Middle Eastern country, Turkey is still adjacent to all those Arab countries, and Turks are mostly Muslim, so they must be pretty much the same as Arabs. That’s like saying that Germans must be French because their country is adjacent to France and they’re Christian just like the French. Turks are, ethnically speaking, Ural-Altaic peoples, more closely related to Mongols and Chinese than to Arabs. In fact, historically the line between “Mongolian” and “Turkish” is rather blurred. In Western schoolbooks we tend to identify Genghis Khan and Attila The Hun as Mongols; most Turks see those figures as Turkish or at the very least, Turkic (and though Turkic they certainly are, “Turkish” is a more dynamic term and may or may not apply).
3. Like all Middle Eastern peoples, Turks speak Arabic, so that makes them Arab. This is just flat-out wrong. Although it’s doubtless that some Turks do know how to speak Arabic, the language of the Turkish people is, oddly enough, Turkish. Turkish (wiki) is an Altaic language, which linguistically has more in common with Korean or Japanese than it does with Arabic. Arabic is a Semitic language, more closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic (wiki), and having very little to do with any Altaic language, much less any Turkic one. I think where the confusion lies with this is that most Turks are Muslim, and Arabic is the language of Islam, and many people confuse religion with ethnicity. Also, up until 1928 most Turkish speakers wrote their language using Ottoman script, which to an untrained eye looks indistinguishable from Arabic. But in modern times Turkish is written using the Latin alphabet, albeit with a few modified characters.
4. Turks look like Arabs, so it’s an easy mistake to make. Have a look at the photo above, taken in eastern Turkey by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Do those men look Arab to you? Of course not. And even within the group, their facial features cover a range from European all the way to East Asian. The truth is, Turks vary in appearance greatly throughout the country— some have fair skin and light hair, others have dark skin and light eyes, and still others have features like those found in Altaic peoples thousands of kilometres east of Turkey. That’s not to say that some Turks don’t resemble some Arabs, but then again I know a few Germans whom one might mistake for French at a glance. It doesn’t mean it’s okay to lump them all together.

As a bit of a side anecdote, by coincidence I stumbled upon a forum a few weeks ago (sorry, I can’t remember the url) where a Korean man was making some very interesting points about ethnicity versus cultural development in Asia. At one point he was giving some narrative background about Turkic languages and Turkic peoples, and then someone else in the conversation used the term “Central Asia,” which set the Korean guy off on a huge discourse about how the whole concept of “Central Asia” was an invention by the Russians to try to solidify the Soviet hold on those areas, and that if it weren’t for the tremendous Soviet pressure on those nations to conform to Russian culture and language, i.e. if they’d all been left to progress “naturally,” then we’d probably now be referring to that entire gigantic region as the United Nations of Turkistan. Someone then asked the guy exactly where he would draw the borders of this theoretical Turkistan, and the Korean man suggested that even Korea and Japan wouldn’t be out of the question. He mentioned that when he and his family had visited eastern Turkey, they often got mistaken for Turkish because their facial structure is so similar to the Turks living in that area.

This got me to thinking about my own observations over the past few months, starting back when I discovered the Azerbaijani television network and was shocked to hear that the spoken language would be nearly indistinguishable from Turkish if it weren’t for those Russian-sounding words they throw in from time to time. And they’re starting to use a Roman script like we do, but when they were Soviet they were forced to use a Cyrillic script, and in addition some of them still use an Arabic-based script as well. But the spoken Azeri language is pretty much like Turkish (I imagine that this is much like the minor differences between spoken Norwegian and spoken Swedish). Same goes for Kazakh, and Turkmen, and Uzbek— Emirhan says he can understand people in all those languages, with some minor vocabulary adjustments.

So that got me thinking about how far east the similarities would carry, and I went to YouTube and started watching some Mongolian programming… unbelievable. I expected it to sound something like my stereotype of Mandarin Chinese, but it doesn’t— rather it sounds a lot like Turkish with some heavy Russian influences (some of the grammatical structures are Indo-European rather than Ural-Altaic, but only some). I was shocked at how much I understood. Also, one of my friends who comes from the western part of China speaks a regional Chinese dialect that she claims is “so close to Turkish, it’s scary.” She said she’s actually had small conversations with Turks and been able to hobble along with basic to moderate understanding.

I don’t know much Korean or Japanese, but Emirhan said Japanese people who speak Turkish almost never have a strong foreign accent. They sound like Turks. And the few Japanese people I’ve met here who learned Turkish have all said that it was an easy language for them to learn, and the pronunciations came naturally. I don’t know any Koreans in Turkey, so I can’t comment on that, but I know what the guy on the forum means when he says that some Koreans and some eastern Turks get mistaken for one another. And it’s possible that you could throw a couple of Mongolians into the picture and still be unsure as to who comes from where. This is one of the reasons why Turks get so annoyed when Westerners assume that “Turkish” and “Arab” are the same thing. Turks have more in common with the East Asians than they do with the Arabs. The only thing Turks ever shared with Arabia was a writing system, and even that’s now long gone, as it never really suited the Turkish language well anyway.

It all gets even more spooky when I think back to a year or so ago when I thought Emirhan was pulling my leg about this supposed theory that Native Americans are Turkic, and then when I did the research to back up my claim that he was talking nonsense, I discovered instead that in several ancient Native American languages, the word for “sky” is the same as the Turkish word, and the words for many of the colours are the same as in Turkish, and so on. Apparently a lot of experts in the field agree that these Americans also orginate from somewhere in the United Nations of Turkistan. And then there are the similarities in some of the faces— again with the high cheekbones and the slightly angled rectangular eyes. Of course I can’t say for sure that that’s where Native Americans came from, but certainly it’s an interesting theory.

So back to my original point, if you were unsure before about whether Turkey was an Arab country, hopefully I’ve cleared that up. But even if you were familiar with Turkish ethnicity before now, perhaps it’s still worth a look at some online resources if you’re curious to learn more about the great mystery of these highly nomadic and charismatic people. I, for one, am always on the lookout for new clues, but I’m not kidding myself— this is a puzzle that will never be completely solved.

Edit, May 2009: I’m closing comments on this post, just because it’s been almost two years, and I think everything that needs to be said has been said. We’re now to the point where people are either starting to repeat what others have said, or are going off-topic. I’ve deleted some of the off-topic comments where it was obvious that certain contributors were using this thread as a place to voice their propaganda, which may have its place elsewhere, but is irrelevant here. The point of this article was to clear up misconceptions about race, not to start a flame war about which race is better than the others. So… yeah, comments closed.

When you live your life moving from country to country, the longer you’re nomadic and the more places you go, you start to forget which place has which things and which place doesn’t. So it was in the interest of pure scientific research that I felt the need to buy one of these new Chocolate Disc Cornettos, because I honestly can’t remember whether we had Cornetto in the United States or not. They have them in England, certainly, and all over Europe and the Middle East, but it’s been so long since I’ve bought ice cream in the US that the only thing I recall is that I loved Blue Bell (and those of you who aren’t from Texas won’t have a clue what I’m on about with that).

In any case, for those of you who haven’t seen a Cornetto before, for whatever reason, this new Chocolate Disc variety is a fine specimen indeed. On top is the chocolate disc (natch), which has some kind of nut pieces embedded in it. Below that is chocolate chip ice cream with a thick rope of caramel running straight through the middle from top to bottom. The whole thing sits inside a chocolate sugar cone, and inside the bottom of the cone is a solid inch of chocolate, which serves the additional purpose of blocking the ice cream from dripping out. All in all it’s a master piece of engineering. I only bought it because I felt it was my duty to report it to the masses, just in case you hadn’t seen one before.

This might freak out the vegetarians, be warned, but it’s one of my favourite dinners, and since our housemate Emrah made it tonight I couldn’t resist sharing. What you see above is breaded and fried chicken lungs with Turkish rice and fried potatoes. Chicken lungs taste pretty much like liver, so perhaps that doesn’t sound so freaky now. Normally I would say no to two starchy carbs in the same meal (not to mention bread on the side), but since I’ll be running later it’s okay.

This isn’t the healthiest meal in the world (salad was served on the side, does that count?), but we don’t do it very often, and I’m exercising a lot of portion control at the moment, so I don’t feel so bad about it. And anyway, anything that tastes this good has to be enjoyed without guilt.

The main point of our shopping trip yesterday was that I needed new running shoes. My Asics are not all that old, but there were a few issues. One, they’re men’s shoes (I have wide feet, and many times men’s shoes fit me better), and so I always thought they were ugly, even uglier than running shoes usually are… there must be some law that says running shoes can’t be sexy, because every running shoe in history has been ugly. Two, Emirhan’s always had his eye on my Asics— he wears them about as often as I do, and since his feet are bigger than mine, the shoes are now loose and slip a lot. His excuse when borrowing my shoes was that he was planning on buying me a new pair anyway, so yesterday I finally gave him my Asics for good and held him to his promise of getting me some new runners.

I never thought in a million years I’d own a pair of running shoes by Adidas. Even Asics was a bit pop-culturey for me; normally I go for Brooks or New Balance or something geeky like that. But yesterday when I saw these A3 GigaRides in the Adidas store, I couldn’t believe how cool they looked. I told myself that silver running shoes this sweet could not possibly be suitable for actual training. Everyone knows that quality running shoes are required to be ugly. But I decided to try the A3s on and see what they felt like.

I was shocked— they felt great. They’re a better fit than the Asics and they offer more support. They were comfortable and performed well in my (albeit weak) test run through the store. They were ridiculously expensive, but that’s just a fact of life with running shoes, and Emirhan’s opinion was that if I liked them so much and they were going to help me get through my training, then they kind of pay for themselves in usefulness. So we bought them. I’m giggling with Product Love. I can’t wait to start training in earnest.

And speaking of training… I had a long talk with an old friend of mine, a guy who has known me since I was a teenager and is familiar with how I work best and where my strong and weak points are. Coincidentally, he is also an Iron Man triathlete and accomplished distance runner, so he knows a thing or two about running as well. I contacted him because I had done a lot of research on the internet about marathon training and preparation and had discovered that marathons and pregnancy have a lot in common— everyone on the internet has a different opinion about the best way to proceed, they’re all willing to fight like pit bulls about it, and in the end I just end up thinking that none of these people are me, none of them can possibly know the unique requirements of my specific person, and perhaps I’m better off making my own decisions, regardless how ill-advised. After all, that’s how I ended up in Turkey, and Europe before that— by going against what everyone thought was right for me and sticking to my gut instincts. In fact, that’s how I’ve made most of the major decisions of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever chosen the popular option. So I asked my friend what his take on the training issue was.

To my surprise, he agreed with me. He said I should spend less time listening to the advice of others and more time trusting what my body tells me. I’m not new to running, so it’s not like I need someone to hold my hand through every little step of training. He said that if more runners would spend less time making up arbitrary blanket “rules” of training and more time focusing on their individual needs (which by definition will never match anyone else’s on the planet), there would be a lot more people capable of finishing super events like the Iron Man. Problem is, people try to make middle-of-the-road guidelines that fit everyone, and the result is exactly that: middle-of-the-road. Mediocre all around. No one standing out in any way.

So that decided it for me. I’m going to do what I always do with everything: take what I’ve learned from various sources and combine bits of this and pieces of that and make my own special regime. It may not suit anyone else, but it’s going to suit me. It will incorporate all the running I need and all the rest I require. It will also include supplementary training like yoga and meditation (I’m a big believer that endurance starts from a the metaphysical rather than the physical). It will be tightly organised around a modified diet and lifestyle. When March rolls around, I am going to be a marathoning machine from top to bottom, focused and prepared. I may not be the fastest runner on the race day, but that’s okay. I’m there to win in a different way.

So there you have it. I’ve got all the gear I need, and I have a plan— now I just need to get to work.

I’m going to bed early tonight and setting the alarm for the crack of dawn. My new shoes need breaking in.

I guess I’m not going to get my wish— it was downright hot today, which means summer is coming. It seems like there was a disproportionate amount of complete nonsense at the bazaar today; perhaps the shirt makers were suffering from the heat as well. In any case, I don’t have a lot to say about some of these, but that’s because they ramble on and speak for themselves. I mean… well, you’ll see.

[click on each image to see a larger version]

The Pooh school of economics.

Dude, we’ve got no rules and no limits… hey, you can’t go over there, the road is closed.

Very strange kids’ underwear— I was especially intrigued by the word “Helper” on the right side.

This is completely random— cherry blossy fantastic revue dart.

We’ve all been to parties like that, where you wake up the next day thirsty in the desert, and your hole… well, you get the picture.

How very philosophical… and it’s repeated all down the front of the shirt.

Yeah, I think I’ve decided not to start culture everyday.

Oh hai boyz, I has an executive form lol.

Everything’s pretty much in order here, except that this is clearly a women’s strappy top.

Winter, on the other hand, will wear any old crap.

If you want to see more of these, the bazaar archive is here, and don’t forget that the online bazaar shop is coming very very soon!