Hey folks, I’m doing a bit of routine maintenance and updating today… so if the site acts wonky, rest assured I’m on it.

Edit: That all seems to have gone entirely too smoothly. So I guess we’re back up again.

Out with the old…

…and in with the new:

I promised you guys a new layout this year, and here it is. I hope you like it, but to be honest I’m so in love with it right now that I probably wouldn’t care if you absolutely despised it. I’m a romantic that way.

The idea for the layout came from the fact that in ten years of site design and web authoring, I don’t think I’ve ever, ever made a site with a white background, though I’ve often wanted to. So this time I decided I was going to do it. And I like the result. It feels clean somehow.

And of course, once again we have Rachel Kelso to thank for her amazing skills with a camera. She’s responsible for about 90% of the coolness on this site.

Anyway, I’ve been php-ing for about twelve hours, so if you’ll excuse me I’m going to lie down and relax for a while.

See you guys tomorrow.

It appears I’m an unobservant idiot— I haven’t received any blog comments in my e-mail for about three weeks now, and I thought it was because you guys suddenly decided you didn’t love me anymore. Then today when I was digging through my admin panel I discovered nearly a hundred comments that I hadn’t been aware of. Upon doing some research, it appears that the most recent WordPress upgrade broke comment notifications for some blogs, including mine. I’ve implemented a code fix to the relevant php file, so hopefully that’ll unbreak that. We’ll see. I’ve also gone back manually through those missed comments, and hopefully I’ve responded to anything that needed attention (i.e. those of you who asked for a response from me on a specific issue or topic). If I missed something important, let me know.

So, I’m sorry if you thought I was being lazy or ignoring you— neither is the case. I’m just not very observant.

Well, hello there! You might be wondering where I’ve been, but chances are you were already on top of that story. The good news is, I successfully completed my NaNoWriMo novel (yay!), and melissamaples.com has just recently had its one-year anniversary (double yay!), so things are fantastic over here and I’m ready to start getting back into the swing of things and making some changes and improvements to mark the start of my second year here.

The first thing on the agenda is a little experiment— the weekly bazaar is one of the more popular features with our ever-growing readership, and in recent months people have started commenting more and more frequently that they wished we could have a bazaar giggle every day of the week instead of just on Thursdays. So, in light of those suggestions (and because change is a good thing), effective immediately the weekly Thursday Is Bazaar Day feature will be slimmed down into daily doses for your Turklish reading pleasure. There will be at least one new photo everyday, and they’ll be ones you haven’t seen before, fresh and chuckle-worthy to get your day started off the right way, seven days a week. I do take your feedback seriously, so hopefully this is a move in a direction that reflects what you’ve been asking for.

There will be a few more changes around here, most of which will be cosmetic. The site is pretty as it is, but I think we’re all ready for a new layout, yes? There will probably be some shuffling of content as I start to incorporate more useful information into the site, but I’ll try to keep the confusion to a minimum, and as always the blog will remain on the front page, so those of you who come here looking for light-hearted fun won’t have to change a thing about the way you view the site.

Lastly, I want to thank each and every one of my readers for making the first year of melissamaples.com a wildly successful one— it’s gone better than I ever could have imagined, thanks to your loyalty and patience with me. As I ramp up the changes here, please do keep those comments coming and let me know what you think. Your opinion is important to me, and what you guys want directly affects the content you see here.

So, let’s get our bags packed and head swiftly into our second year together, shall we?

Here’s to a new year full of the mysteries and delights of the language we like to call Turklish.

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.

I know this is the first time in my life I’ve ever made a mistake, but yesterday it seems I accidentally commented out two of the bazaar items and they didn’t appear in the original post. I realised my mistake this morning, and since they were both really funny I thought I’d just mention it here for those who don’t read via RSS and therefore don’t get updated feeds. Anyway, sorry for the mix-up, check it out when you get a minute. Link.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’d be making some changes to the site, including reorganising the categories in the sidebar so that they actually meant something and better reflected the content they hold. I’m starting to implement that particular change tonight, so as early as tomorrow browsing by topic will be much easier.

It’s possible this can have one semi-negative side effect— some RSS subscribers may receive apparent reposting of older items. I apologise in advance if this becomes annoying… on the other hand, I hope you discover something interesting that you missed the first time around. Thanks for bearing with me while I try to make the site easier to navigate in preparation for some even bigger changes yet to come.

I know, I know, I went AWOL for a couple of days, but I swear, I have a genuine forged note from my parents explaining my absence. No, seriously, one look at this photo of me and you can probably tell what a rough couple of days it’s been. Friday the internet was broken in the hotel, and then once we got out and about we never stopped until we were on the bus back to Antalya (stories and photos of all this later, I promise). Then we got home later than expected yesterday and the day turned into a write-off, basically [insert stress and emotional drama and attempts at getting back to normal here]. Anyway, today’s a new day, another chance to turn it all around. I’ve just had a brief glance through the SD card at all the photos from the past two days, and I’m pretty excited about the things I have to show you. Unfortunately I have quite a busy day ahead (practical catch-up from being gone half the week), but I vow to find some time this evening to do some virtual catch-up as well and get some photo posts up. So until this evening, y’all have a great Sunday.

Okay folks, Emirhan and I are off to Istanbul tonight (or rather the wee hours of tomorrow morning). We’ll be back maybe Friday or Saturday. I’m not sure exactly how this will affect my blogging over the next few days (a lot depends on whether I can snag a free WiFi connection somewhere), but what I do know for sure is that there will be no bazaar post tomorrow (sorry, but I can’t go to the bazaar if I’m not here!), and that I’m going to take a truckload of photos in Istanbul to make up for whatever blogging I can’t do while I’m there. So either way, you guys will get to see some cool new stuff, but it might have to wait until Saturday. We’ll see. Anyway, have a great rest of the week, and hopefully I’ll be back in a few hours with reports of amazing free WiFi. Wish me luck.

Okay people, listen up! It’s time to talk meta.

Yesterday I received this comment:

You’re lucky to have visited such wonderful places. I just wish you can share more photos to us— people who are stuck in our office chair and couldn’t get more than the four corners of our computer monitor.

Well, funny you should mention… in fact I have been thinking the same thing for a long time, that blogging is great but a lot of the fun of blogging from various parts of the world is being able to share images with people halfway across the planet, to convey the beauty and personality of a place in a way that words just can’t do. But unfortunately, with finances being what they are, all I ever had to take photos with was my less-than-adequate cameraphone.

Until today, that is.

Generous reader and friend Martin Murray heard about my dilemma a few weeks ago, and kindly offered to send me a digital camera, along with all the goodies I need to get me photoblogging (SD cards and card readers and whatnot). I was taken aback by the offer, and I gladly accepted it. The camera arrived this morning, and let me tell you, it’s fantastic. It’s certainly a lot better than anything I could have gotten on my own. So Martin, thank you. I owe you big time.

This means that now’s a good time to announce some changes and improvements around here that I’ve been planning for a while. This week marks six months of melissamaples.com, and it’s time to review what’s behind us and look forward to the future:

• You’ve probably already noticed that recently I’ve been posting a lot more frequently. That’s going to continue and increase over the next few weeks as I get in the stride of true full-time blogging.
• Now that I’m equipped to go out on all those expeditions I’d been postponing due to the fact that I had no decent way to take pictures, you can expect to see a lot more photo-essay type things like yesterday’s story on Meis (for which I was lucky enough to have a guest photographer). The Turkish riviera is an amazing place, and I plan to show you and tell you all about it.
• There’s going to be a reorganisation of categories in the sidebar, to reflect the direction things have actually gone (as opposed to the way I predicted they would go six months ago). This means the categories will actually mean something and be useful.
• I’m also considering sprucing up the look of the site… nothing major, just a bit of freshening up for the summer.
• So many of you have said that you’d like this site to reflect more of my personal experience. The camera will help tremendously with that, as I can start documenting my adventures with photos, but also I’ve got a few ideas for themed projects that hopefully you will find entertaining and that will also give all of us a way to interact more directly. First up will be a series of posts following my ridiculous struggle to speak Turkish, and I’m also talking with some people about bringing in some guest bloggers and maybe even starting up a podcast. We’ll see what you guys respond to best and take it from there. My main goal is to have fun and make sure everyone who visits here has a fun time.
• And finally, don’t forget, the online bazaar shop will be opening very soon— several of you have mentioned specific t-shirts and other items you’d be interested in having, and those designs are nearly ready to go, but I’m still taking suggestions for other designs as well. So if you ever thought you’d like to own a particular shirt or bag or anything else from the bazaar, now’s your chance to speak up.

Thanks for making these past six months amazing for me; I’m looking forward to the next six more than you can know.