Well, last night was the First Annual Melissa Maples Jack-o-Lantern Extravaganza, and… wow. Much alcohol was consumed, four pumpkins were butchered into the finest faces you’ve ever seen, and a great time was had by all.

My original idea was that we’d all carve at the same time and I’d talk the guys through it as we went, but I soon realised how impractical that idea was. There wasn’t enough kitchen space for all four of us, and Ali and Emrah don’t really understand me well enough when I’m explaining things in English. Also, none of them really had any clue what I was talking about when I said that we would carve faces into pumpkins (Halloween is unheard of here). So I came up with a Plan B that I would go first with Emirhan watching and me explaining, and then he could do his next with the guys watching and him explaining in Turkish, and then he could supervise the guys while I opened the wine.

When I unveiled mine on the balcony, the unanimous response was “Woooooooooooah.” Then they got what the big deal was, and suddenly there was tremendous enthusiasm to participate in a project which had previously elicited only shrugs and “whatever” responses.

Emirhan decided to counter my blatent evil with a mischievous smile.

While Alican was drawing his masterpiece…

…Emrah was already in the carving stages.

Emirhan supervises the guys.

After we were all done, Emirhan wanted to take photos on the balcony, but it’s difficult to get the hang of a camera when you’re drunk. I also reminded him that it’s just good manners to remove your foot from the frame before taking the shot, but did he listen?

Clearly he didn’t. Take two was no better than the first, and no less blurry or footy. We love him anyway.

Oh my god, I am so glad this mess wasn’t my problem. You should have seen what the floor looked like.

Nonetheless, the result was worth it. From left to right: Emrah, Emirhan, Alican, and me.

The biggest surprise of the night was at my expense— apparently in Turkey they have these strange pumpkins that are solid all the way through (you can kind of see it in the photo of Emrah above). There’s no mushy seed part in the middle; the seeds are just embedded in the (rock-hard) flesh, similar to an apple core. That was a bitch when it came to carving, because you had to cut out the middle of the pumpkin as best you could with a knife, and then spoon-scrape the rest out. My arms and shoulders are really aching today. Two of our pumpkins were solid, and the other two were normal hollow ones.

So tonight is going to be all about relaxing— sadly there will be no trick-or-treaters or costumed goblins roaming the neighbourhood, and you can’t find candy corn here (or at least I can’t), so I’ve been told we’re going to bake a chocolate cake and watch horror films all night. Sounds great. A couple of the local nightclubs are doing costume parties, but we’re not really clubbers (I know you’re shocked). I wish there was something as cool as a haunted house here. When I’m king of the world every city will be required to have at least one haunted house on Halloween.

What are you guys doing tonight, anything special? If you want to show off your costume, link to your flickr in comments— I want to see what everyone is wearing tonight.

Hope you guys have a great Halloween. We’re doing our best here.

Apropos of nothing, I spent some time today rigging up a ceiling-curtain-track-sliding-sock-camera-sling. We have those ceiling-mounted curtain tracks all around our bedroom, and I thought since we’re not using them for curtains I might fix us up an AV gateway in the sky. You can take the girl out of sound tech, but you can’t take the sound tech out of the girl.

So far I’m pretty pleased with SockCam:

To be honest, that possibility (the one you’re all thinking of) didn’t occurred to me until long after I took the first set of photos. But no, we’re not planning on getting into the home porn industry anytime soon. I just did this for a bit of (clean) fun.

Yesterday I finally found three pumpkins that weren’t chopped up into pieces and were a decent shape for jack-o-lanterns. This is great because after not being able to find any pumpkins at all last year, and so far this year only seeing those long skinny ones, I was just about to entertain Emirhan’s Plan B of trying to make a jack-o-lantern out of a watermelon.

I nearly panicked yesterday when I told the guy which pumpkins I wanted and then I stopped paying attention while I thought he was bagging them up, and I turned back around to discover him with a huge butcher knife, getting ready to attack my pumpkins. I screamed “NOOOOOOO!”, which stopped him just in time. I told him I wanted the pumpkins whole. He wrinkled his face at me and said, “but you’ll never be able to carry them home like that, just let me chop them up into more manageable pieces and bag them for you.” I had to scream at him again to get him to stop, and explained that if he cut the pumpkins they would be useless to me and I wouldn’t pay for them. I had brought my gigantic backpack, so I’d put one in there and he could bag the other two and I’d carry one in each hand. I only live a block away, it’s not going to kill me to carry them. I really had to fight him on this issue, and to begin with he kept trying to get me to take these other phallus-shaped pumpkins because he said that the ones I chose were the most flavourless of the bunch. I tried several times to explain that I wasn’t planning on eating them anyway, but it was lost on him. He really thought I was completely crazy.

No one here has ever heard of Halloween. It’s my favourite holiday.

Anyway, I rescued the only three suitable jack-o-lantern pumpkins in all of Antalya. Go me.

Well, I thought they were the only three, but then Emirhan surprised me yesterday by bringing home a fourth one. Four pumpkins + four people = one jack-o-lantern each. I’ve been roped in to teach pumpkin carving class— finally something I’m qualified to do! We’ll probably carve on Monday or Tuesday. I spent some of my time this morning looking at flickr’s collection of jack-o-lanterns and trying to get ideas. I’m really looking forward to taking photos of the finished products.

You guys doing anything special for All Hallow’s Eve?

Wow, you stay away from the bazaar for a couple of weeks and they change all the Turklish on you! We’re mostly back to kids stuff now (yeah, I know, uh-oh), so hang on tight.

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Okay, these are maternity pants. My advice: don’t get them for your pregnant wife. You know, unless you don’t need your nose to be in one piece.

Well let’s see, there’s me, and campfire makes two… and then last night after breathing the campfire smoke this gigantic F kept hovering around me everywhere, so I guess that makes three.

As long as our team isn’t Summer, I’m in.

<fighting urge to make off-colour “they have web sites for that” remark>

And speaking of equal opportunity love…

You would not believe the self-restraint I am having to exercise today with these captions.

Yeah, every Turk’s dream.

It’s kind of like “novelty” but with more love.

Ah, I see you’ve been hanging out with Grandpa after dinner again.

If you want to see more of these, the bazaar archive is here, and you’ll want to head down to the store to fill your closet with Turklish goodness. See you guys tomorrow!

Before I left to attend this meditation retreat, I mentioned that I had read many accounts of others who had also attended Goenka-sponsered Vipassana courses. Most of the reports were positive, some not so much. At the time I was really looking forward to being locked up for ten days with myself, and I pretty much rolled my eyes at the small percentage of accounts I read where people had come back traumatised or convinced they’d been unwittingly sucked into a cult. People on the internet are dramatic and crazy sometimes, you know? I never for a second predicted that I would jump on the “it might be a cult” bandwagon. After all, I’ve been practicing Vipassana for a year and expected that this retreat would be more of the same that I had already been doing, albeit on a more intense scale.

That was not what happened at all. This retreat was like no other meditation I had ever done. I think it’s possible (though I wouldn’t like to declare firmly either way) that perhaps Goenka is using legitimate Vipassana practice as a veil to conceal something entirely different that goes on at some of his retreats. So I decided to leave my retreat early, for my own emotional well-being, and I took a few days afterward to collect my thoughts and write them down. The result is the document below, which I’ve compiled into a handy PDF so you can download it and read it when you get a chance, or skip it if you’re not interested.

I would like to stress that I don’t believe my experience is at all a universal one, and if you are booked in or are planning on attending a Goenka retreat, I urge you not to cancel. Go, do the retreat and write up your own report when you get back. It will likely be wildly different from mine because no two experiences in this world can possibly be the same. You should never base your own spiritual path on anyone else’s, because we are all different and all perceive things differently. As my grandmother used to say, don’t let anyone else drive your bus. The majority of people who attend Goenka retreats come out refreshed and renewed. You’ll never know until you try.

So anyway, if you’ve got some time to kill, download the PDF and have a read. It’s a longish essay (22 pages), but with any luck you’ll find it entertaining (i.e. there are photos— I know where your buttons are). The layout is rough, even by my amateur standards, but hopefully the content doesn’t suffer as a result. Think of it as my personal “I nearly got sucked into a cult” scrapbook. Construction paper, glitter pens, and glue. One to show the grandkids.

I’m glad I got a chance to write this up now, because it served a double purpose: as a kind of closure for me, and as practice for the extreme amounts of writing I’ll be doing next month as part of NaNoWriMo (NaNoers: friend me and we’ll suffer together!). People have suggested that I use this essay itself as part of my novel, but alas, NaNoWriMo novels have to be fiction.

Please feel free to ask any questions or make comments; I think the goal of these things should always be to expand one’s knowledge and insight, and discussion is of course a big part of that.

The document itself is safe for work, though there are occasional swear words and a couple of analogies that you might not want your kids reading. But it’s not any worse than anything they’ll hear on prime-time TV tonight, and they might learn something.

I hope someone gets something out of my having written this, and I hope it doesn’t turn people off from Vipassana or meditation in general, both of which are legitimate, ancient practices with significant benefits to those who follow them. I still sit daily, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But as with any spiritual path, sometimes things branch off and some followers wander from the main road. That’s probably not a bad thing.

retreat.pdf

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Hello folks, and welcome back to the show! Quite a few of you have written in already, asking me to make with the meditation retreat storytelling. Apparently word got around that it didn’t all go as expected, and you guys are nothing if not drama-lovers.

So I promise that behemoth of a saga is on its way— I’ll get it posted this evening. But first, here’s an apéritif, something to ease us back into that lovely autumnal Antalya groove. While I was away, our faithful reporter Emrah Taner liberated my Olympus film camera (which hasn’t really seen the light of day since I got the digital) and documented his favourite parts of Antalya. I thought I’d share a few of his snapshots with you this morning; enjoy.

Hadrian’s gate, in the heart of the city.

As you can see, most of the tourists have cleared out of the quaint little shopping streets, prices have plummeted, and the weather is gorgeous in October. So if you wanted to visit Antalya, now’s a perfect time.

At this café you can order the best of Turkish cuisine while listening to traditional Turkish music. The ducks totally know where the pulse of Antalya is at.

The coastline of the old town.

I absolutely love this staircase down to the sea.

And this is your reward when you get to the bottom. We truly live in the most beautiful place in the world.

Many thanks to Emrah for permission to use his wonderful photos.

Now I’m off into the city myself to obtain that most necessary of Halloweeny accoutrements: the jack-o-lantern pumpkin. Last year I didn’t have any luck finding one, but this year I have determination the likes of which you could never fathom. Nonetheless, don’t hold your breath. I’ll be back this evening with a full retreat report and hopefully a damned pumpkin.

I’ll cut to the chase: I’m going away for a couple of weeks. It’s not a holiday, as such— it’s a Vipassana retreat up near Istanbul. I’m leaving tonight, (i.e. Wednesday night, the 10th), and I’ll be back on the 24th.

Those of you who are familiar with Vipassana retreats don’t need to read any further… if you’re not familiar with Vipassana but don’t care all that much, suffice it to say I’ll be engaging in some hardcore silent insight meditation for ten days, with some travel time on either side. That’s about it.

The semi-long version of the story is that about a year ago I started dabbling in Vipassana via the online teachings of Gil Fronsdal [wiki]. I had wanted to try meditation for a long time but didn’t really know where to start, so like most of my peer group I turned to the internet for help. I stumbled upon Zencast, and it pretty much snowballed from there. I’ve never had any formal training, just my little bits of practicing at home and whatever I’ve read online.

Vipassana is an ancient form of meditation that focuses on insight and seeing things how they really are, without changing or judging them. It’s a practice that dates more than two millennia back to the Buddha himself, whose teachings have been passed down through generations all the way to a handful of Vipassana masters who still teach today. I like the idea of being an objective observer of things I should normally feel very subjective about (for example my breath and the state of my body), so I found the concepts of Vipassana very attractive. It has to be said, though, I’m not the most diligent meditator— consistency is key with these things, and I’ve hardly been sitting every day. I started to think maybe a meditation group or a teacher might be the next step.

Then a month or so ago I made the observation that not only had I never seen a Turkish Buddhist, I’d never even met any Turkish people who meditated (meditation being a secular practice in itself open to those of any religion or no religion). I started looking online for Turkish meditation groups, and since Vipassana is a particular interest of mine, I narrowed my search to see where in the world Vipassana retreats or sittings are held. At first it didn’t look like there was much going on in this part of the world, but then I found the web site of S.N. Goenka, a Vipassana master whose ten-day intensive retreat courses are held, quote, “all over the world.” Yeah, sure. All over the world except for Turkey, I thought. But lo and behold, when I looked at the list of course locations, there was a name and a contact address for Turkey along with a note stating that the next retreat would be held in October 2007. I fired off an e-mail asking for more information and waited a couple of days for a response.

Meanwhile, diligent researcher that I am, I started digging around for blogs and forums where I could read the opinions of those who had already taken a ten-day Goenka Vipassana course. I soon discovered that there is a huge amount of controversy surrounding this method of Vipassana and indeed Vipassana in general— I won’t bore you with the details, because you know how to Google stuff if you’re curious, but in a nutshell there appear to be a lot of people who fiercely defend this method as a tool for exorcising one’s personal demons, and a lot of other people who say it ruined their lives. One thing all seem to agree on, however, is that the retreat changed them forever.

So of course then I was even more curious, and by the time the organisers of the retreat wrote me back I’d pretty much already decided I wanted to go. I filled out my application and it was accepted the same day. I leave on a bus tonight to travel across the country (which reminds me, Turkish bus travel is something else I wanted to talk about— perhaps when I return from this trip, yeah?), arrive at the site tomorrow afternoon, and then I’ll be locked up with my fellow students for ten days, waking before dawn and meditating for ten hours everyday, eating only before noon and not communicating with anyone in any form (not even eye contact or hand gestures). It’s bound to be quite an experience.

Part of the strict code of conduct for the retreat states that we’re not allowed to have journals or writing materials, which means I’m just going to have to remember everything and write it down later. Since I’ve once again signed up for NaNoWriMo this year (what is it with me and controversial methods?), I figure that at the very least this retreat will be a good opportunity to dig up some internal conflict, create an empty female protagonist, and on the first of November I can just shove all the demons into her and turn her loose in novelworld.

In any case, I’ll be back here two weeks from today— I’ve not got any guest writers or anything lined up, so the blog is going on retreat, also. You’ll have to live without the bazaar for a couple of weeks, but when I come back I’ll have lots of stories and photos, and after that I’ve got lots of changes planned. We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of melissamaples.com, and I want to take it into the second year revitalised and fresh. I hope you’ll join me.

I wish you all a great couple of weeks, and I’ll see you when I get back.

This is exactly the sort of thing I would love— fried egg liqueur. Ingredients: sugar, grain alcohol, egg yolks. Any drink where the first ingredient is sugar is bound to be fantastic. My guess is this probably tastes like a cross between egg nog and Advocaat, both of which I adore. But I’m not paying 10 euros for 50cl. Not yet, anyway.

Have you tried girl liqueur? I bet you have, you dirty slut. No, seriously, it sounds pretty good: raspberry, lychee, vodka, and cognac. But again, I’m not paying 21 euros for stuff I could mix together at home for less than half that price.

Jesus, listen to me, I’m turning into my dad. Next I’ll be saying I’m not paying 12 cents extra for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese when the Value-Rite one tastes just as good.

Cyprus Is Just England In The Med, Exhibit A: three-pronged flat power sockets, only found in the UK… and Cyprus.

Cyprus Is Just England In The Med, Exhibit B: UK-style number plates, albeit with fewer numbers. It’s a small island.

Cyprus Is Just England In The Med, Exhibit C: check out the road markings— they drive on the left. Except for the ones who don’t. It is still Turkish here, after all, so you drive on whatever side you feel like at the time.

I actually like this airport. It’s quite pretty as small airports go.

This is Fehmi Ercan, of airport-naming fame. I was too lazy to read what he’d done to deserve having an airport named after him. You can Google it if you’re really that curious.

Standing in line to show my boarding card, I saw this gem standing in front of me and couldn’t resist a photo. Think again, Covergirl! Take that, Maybelline!

Anyway, I got my visa, so… job done.

Yesterday Emirhan surprised me with tickets to see the season-opening concert of the Antalya Symphony Orchestra. I’m a little embarrassed that we’d never gone before— I’d avoided even researching the possibility because I thought tickets would be really expensive, and not worth the paper they were printed on (I have extensive experience working with orchestras in areas where orchestral music isn’t really a priority, and have been underwhelmed to say the least).

Well, was I wrong. Antalya’s orchestra is a fine ensemble, tight and professional, and under the direction of İbrahim Yazıcı they were positively wonderful. It was a well-rounded evening ranging from Bernstein to Rimsky-Korsakov, from Mozart to Milhaud, and at a price of 6 lira (3 for concessions), I couldn’t believe the amazing value.

Joining the orchestra in the first half was world-renowned pianist Özgür Aydın, a man who plays refreshingly impeccable Mozart, and who came back for two encores during which he delighted the audience with both Chopin and Rachmaninoff. He plays without the irritating arrogance that ruins so many young confident pianists, and I’m definitely hoping he comes back for the Antalya Piano Festival in the winter. My only gripe about the evening was that venues and ensembles worldwide seem insistent on using Steinway pianos, which I find come across a bit… grandmotherly, especially when having to cut through an orchestra, but that is hardly Özgür Aydın’s fault. I’d love to see what he could do on a piano with a more robust character.

I’m a little bit sad now that I missed that Antalya Piano Festival two years in a row simply because I assumed tickets would be expensive. What an idiot not to find out what the prices were! I’ll definitely be checking it out this year, and as well we plan on attending as many concerts of the Antalya Symphony Orchestra as possible this season. Wiki

The most popular creditcard in use is, the americanexpress card. You can get different facilities if you use capital one card. The citi visa card gives the facility of low ongoing APR and no annual fee. Most of the credit cards have credit card security code, which normally consists of three digits at the back of the card.

At last, a day of rain, the first rain we’ve seen in five months. And of course, the first thing people do is run away and hide where it’s dry. Silly people. I walked around with abandon, no rain coat or umbrella, enjoying the glorious weather and soaking up the Turklish.

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Errr…. I give up.

There’s bound to be a Bush foreign policy joke in there somewhere.

We call it a Long Island Iced Tea.

Hey buddy, go fun yourself.

If you’ve never had your needs and desires pushed, I highly recommend it.

The code is unknown! It’s secret! Oh what the hell, it’s five. I was never good with secrets.

The breath test showed he was over twice his possible limit.

Way to prepare your fat, weak baby for the harshness of the real world. Those preschool bullies can be nasty— better to toughen the kid up now.

What the… is bear promising us favours in the future? Shame on him.

If you want to see more of these, the bazaar archive is here, and you’ll want to head down to the store to fill your closet with Turklish goodness. See you soon.