You may have noticed the lack of non-bazaar photos over the past couple of months here. That’s because the day after I took the photos of our local rose garden back at the end of April, my little trusty point-n-shoot (which was a generous gift from one of this blog’s readers) gave up the ghost. This left me without a digital camera, aside from my phone, which does take good pictures for what it is, but is hardly what you’d call a real camera.

I guess I’ve been kind of jonesing for a while about the situation, wanting to do something photographic, and since film photography gets really expensive really fast (though I do love my film cameras), I decided instead to head down a different road and take the opportunity to get all my old photos organised. I’ve had a flickr account for a couple of years now, but it’s mostly been sitting there rotting because I host my blog photos locally on my own site, and anyone else who asked to see photos usually requested that I e-mail them. But now that I have a big photo archiving project in the works, it made sense to have a place to put my pictures where people could see them. After all, what is the point of getting everything organised if no one gets to benefit from it? So I upgraded to flickr pro, and that was one problem taken care of.

The other problem was significantly larger: 95% of my photo archive is non-digital. I have boxes and boxes of prints sitting in an attic. Thing is, that attic is not in this country. When I moved to Turkey, there was a weight limit to how much stuff I could bring, so photos were a pretty low priority when compared to essential items. That means my pictures are still in England (which is where I lived before here). Luckily, I managed to talk kind and wonderful Lily into going through those boxes, and scanning in the best shots. I’m starting to get those photos uploaded to flickr now, and hundreds more are on the way.

This project, however, has done little to distract me from the fact that I don’t have a camera. In fact, it has made the jonesing worse. So many people are doing fantastic work on flickr, and I was shocked to discover that a good portion of them don’t have expensive equipment. I was particularly impressed with the cheap-n-cheerful Nikon D40, which is just about the only DSLR camera remotely near my rock-bottom price range. For a pro photographer chances are it wouldn’t be acceptable, but for the likes of me it would probably be just fine. Certainly I like the photos I’ve seen that were taken with it. I think most of what I like about photography has to do with the eye of the photographer rather than the equipment.

So I started researching the D40. And that made me want it more. I talked to some D40 owners. All said the camera had performed way over their expectations, especially given that it’s the cheapest DSLR out there.

Nonetheless, even though it’s only a few hundred dollars, that’s still a lot of money for me, not something I can just slap down at the cash register without a thought. I agonised. I weighed the pros and cons of making a major purchase. By this afternoon, I’d found the online shop with the best price on the D40, and I was toying with that “buy it now” button. Do I click? Do I not click? I get myself in this panic every single time I buy anything at all.

Then a most unexpected sign came from the heavens… or at least, from twitter:

@melissamaples I love your photos and a dslr would be a great addition for you, hope you will be able to swing it.

Oh, how can I not respond to encouragement like that? Terry gave me the confidence to click that “buy it now” button, even though I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to work out all the financial stuff. Life is short, Antalya is changing everyday, and I want to record it with photos.

So it appears I bought a camera, and now I have to figure out how to replace the money I used. No sooner did I have that thought than I got a message from PayPal - Terry sent a generous donation, “to help with the cost of the camera.” I could hardly believe my eyes. Thank you, Terry. I hope the photos you start seeing here pretty soon make the donation worth it for you. I’ll do my very best to show all of you exactly how Antalya looks through my eyes. Really, sometimes I think it’s the most beautiful place in the world.

I own a grown-up camera! I’m pretty excited. Of course I’ve purchased it at that most awkward of times, Friday evening, so I don’t expect that the next-day free delivery thing applies to me. I’m guessing they’ll send it Monday, and I’ll have it Tuesday-ish. I hope I don’t have a what-have-I-done heart attack before then.

If anyone would like to be flickr friends, please do add me. I only have about a hundred photos there now, but Operation Scan-and-Upload is well under way, and my photostream is growing everyday. When I get the D40, watch out.

If anyone else would like to make a donation (however small, every bit helps) to the Pay For The Camera I Already Bought fund, you can use the gold donation button at the top of the sidebar on the left-hand side of this page. I will pay you back in the form of awesome This Is Antalya and Life of Melissa photo posts, you have my word.

Thanks again to Terry, and to all of you who have been such amazing supporters of this blog for nearly two years now. I appreciate the continual kindness you have shown me through RSS subscriptions, comments, e-mails, story and photo submissions, donations, and connecting with me on every social network out there.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

So, Last day of April. For some reason, my years always naturally separate into thirds. I can’t think of a year in terms of quarters or halves, for some reason. It’s the first third, then the summer third, then the autumn-and-holidays third. Not sure if that makes sense in anyone’s head but mine. If you cut it into quarters, then June gets separated from July and August, and clearly that can’t be right. Obviously.

Anyway, May Day is tomorrow, and coincidentally I’m thinking about my own rescue. I’ve been doing really well with my 2008 goal list— I’m right on target to have it all squared away by the end of the year. But for all the success, there’s little sense of accomplishment, or fulfillment. The only completed goal I think I’ll feel remotely positive about soon is having bought an air conditioner, but seeing as summer seems to have postponed itself, I haven’t had the chance to test that theory yet.

So tomorrow, to mark the middle third of the year, I think I’m going to do some tree-huggy new-agey stuff and maybe start a detox or something. I keep having these not-serious-but-annoying health issues, most of which I think have to do with my eating habits and my stress level. I already use meditation and yoga as part of my daily routine, but I think it’s time to stir both those up a little, maybe kick them up a notch, and do something about my food intake. More vegetables wouldn’t hurt. Less junk wouldn’t hurt, either. I’m not necessarily talking about drastic changes, because I’m realistic like that, but I would like to start feeling better and being healthier. Summer third is a good time to do that, I think.

Anybody else got any special plans for summer? Four months is a long time, we could make some significant progress on a few things. What do you say?

I’ve spent the better part of the past week with food poisoning. This means I’ve seen more of our bathroom than anyone or anything else, and in the aftermath I’ve been so weak that sometimes I’ve had to go back to bed because sitting in the recliner in front of the television was too strenuous.

Luckily I seem to be nearly back to normal now, though I’m still sleeping more than I’d like, and every muscle in my torso aches with exhaustion. Those of you who have had food poisoning know exactly what I mean. I haven’t had it since 1997, though, so I guess every eleven years isn’t such bad luck.

Emirhan was a great nurse, very attentive, except that he’d never dealt with food poisoning before, and didn’t understand just how seriously I meant it when I said I absolutely could not listen to him talk about food, or even say the very word itself. He quickly learned to keep his mouth shut after the first mistake, and subsequently ate quietly in the other room, never asked me if I wanted a bite, and never mentioned the F-word again.

Anyway, I’m back on solid food now, not quite a hundred percent but nearly so. Let’s hope it’s another eleven years before I have to go through that again.

Yesterday was my quarterly visa day. I have to leave the country and re-enter four times a year. This usually involves either a boat trip or a plane trip, and this time it was a quick flight to Cyprus.

I hadn’t been over to the airport side of town in a while— our city is changing, developing. Antalya can be so beautiful on days like this.

Look who I met on the way to the airport:

He was just wandering around the airport grounds. It’s not surprising, because there are quite a few turtle/tortoise species in this area (the airport is near both a swampy region and the beach). I tried to make friends with him, but he seemed distressed by my presence, kept making this hissing noise and pulling his head inside his shell when I got close (I still think that’s the best trick ever, wish I could do it). So I snapped a photo and then backed off, at which point he stopped hissing and continued on his way.

This particular visa day was a hassle as usual, but it was probably the second best one I’ve ever had. I had some quick-turnaround flights for which I was worried about delays, but they went off without a hitch. I literally landed in Cyprus, hurried through all the international arrivals hoops (immigration officer: “and how long will you be staying here in Cyprus?” me: “twelve minutes”), walked out through customs, and headed back to departures to check in for my return flight. By the time I checked in and got to the gate, the flight was already boarding.

The flight from Ercan to Antalya is 23 minutes, during which time they serve a meal. I’m not kidding. And I’d just had a meal half an hour earlier on the first flight. Basically as soon as the wheels are up they start throwing trays at everyone, and then you gulp your food while they stand there with the trash bag, tapping their feet. It’s crazy. And it’s a big plane, too. But they’re determined you won’t leave the flight hungry. Ah, Turkish hospitality.

My first day in England was eye-opening. I had been told to dress comfortably for international travel, and so I had worn my standard Texas errand-running uniform— denim shorts and a t-shirt. It was great for the flight, but when I arrived in Manchester the following morning, David, who picked me up at the airport, looked at me and laughed.

“You’ll probably want to dig your coat out of your suitcase before we go outside,” he said.

I squinted at him and tried to assess if he was joking or not. Surely he didn’t really mean I needed to wear a coat. It’s frickin March, for god’s sake! On what planet would one even need to think about a coat in March? I mean, we’re almost in summer, what the hell?

I decided he was trying to trick me with this coat nonsense, which was just as well because I didn’t actually have a coat. There was probably a light jacket packed in with my cargo stuff, but that was on a pallet somewhere waiting to board a freight plane in San Antonio. In my suitcases I had only packed all the obvious stuff one would need in March: shorts, t-shirts, flip-flops, bikinis. It was, after all, nearly spring break, and since I was told we lived near the coast I figured the beaches would be packed within another week or two. Obviously I didn’t have a job, so I was planning on spending my days relaxing and enjoying the rest of spring. Hence the wardrobe choices.

David begged me, “please, let me buy you a coat in the airport.” I laughed at how far he was taking the prank. No one buys clothes at airport prices. Then he offered me his coat, and that’s when I noticed all the other people carrying coats. In March.

I started to wonder how many people were in on the joke.

Then we stepped outside the airport and a blast of wind and freezing rain shrapnel pelted me in the legs and sent my hair flying 90 degrees out to the side.

David told me to go back inside, and he went and got the car.

During the drive to Blackpool I gazed in utter amazement at the weather. David half-joked that I was probably wanting to go back to Texas. What he didn’t know is that all my life, I had pretty much been confined indoors in front of the air-conditioner from April until October, because I have never been able to handle heat. It makes me crazy to the point where I want to take hostages. I’m not a fan of direct sunlight, it hurts my eyes, and I sweat so easily that even mildly warm days reduce me to a stinky, soaked-through, dripping mess. I hate summer, have always hated it, and I had no idea that there were places outside Antarctica where one could find cool weather in the summer.

So England was heaven.

Then I saw a field with little white dots scattered across it. It was hard to see what they were through the rain-spattered car window. I wondered, but I didn’t think too much about it. Then a mile or so up the road I saw another field of white dots. What the hell could that be? I rolled down my window a tiny bit to peek out.

Teeny tiny eensy weensy baby sheepies.

I squealed. I’d never seen any sheep at all before in real life, much less bebeh ones. To this day, that is my fondest memory of “how stuff is in England.” In March the landscape just erupts in tiny sheepies, everywhere. Everywhere, all over the whole damned island. It’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

Later I learned a very sobering lesson about not approaching the baby sheepies for cuddles, but I’ll save it for another time.

And that was my first couple of hours as an American living a non-American life.

Ten years ago tonight, I boarded a plane at JFK and left the United States.

A couple of years ago I learned that when I left, my stepmother had bet the farm I’d be back within six months, because, quote, “she’s too wishy-washy to commit to an act that bold.”

Hmmm, well. Here I am. She has a point about the wishy-washy, though. Had it been any other context, I might have bet the same way. But for some reason moving has never scared me. A place is a place is a place, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly bold about choosing one place over another, unless of course the place you choose is riddled with people who shoot at each other in the streets. But if we’re talking about percentages of people shooting at each other, I suppose staying in San Antonio might have been the boldest decision of all.

Anyway, I guess I have some more to say about this, some reflective stuff about what being a traveler means, but I’m still thinking, so maybe tomorrow I’ll elaborate. I really think of March 5th as my anniversary, beacuse of course the transatlantic flight was an overnight one, and I landed in Manchester on the morning of the 5th, never having set foot in England before. I always thought of my anniversary as being the date when the new part of my life began, rather than the date when the old part ended. So I guess tomorrow is the big day, really.

Nonetheless, marking the close of a decade of adventure is worthwhile, I suppose, so… what’s appropriate to say? Thank god my stepmother was wrong, because if she hadn’t been I’d probably be living in rural Texas in a double-wide, for which my dad was planning on setting up financing because he wanted me to stop renting. He was the real estate broker for the company that sold the plots of land on which you could either build your own home, or purchase one of their luxury double-wide mobile homes. The land was in the middle of nowhere and the plots were mostly owned by silver-haired seniors. Basically it was a do-it-yourself retirement community for those who were still independent. I was 25 at the time. It makes me laugh to think about the possibility that that might have been my life, especially when I consider everything that’s happened to me over the past decade, both in Europe and here.

I guess I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed thinking about it all.

More on this tomorrow.

Well, since I haven’t been around here much lately, I thought it only fair that I let you in on what I’m up to these days, since it’s taking up so much of my time. We’re nearly a third of the way through NaNoWriMo, and I have to say things are going much more smoothly than they did last year. In fact, I think this is the best attempt at a novel I’ve made since my first novel back in 2002.

The idea for this year’s story came from a key (pictured above) that I found on the floor of the room I stayed in at the Vipassana Retreat That Went Horribly Wrong. I thought it was a cool-looking key, so I stuck it in my bag, and then promptly forgot about it. I came across it when I was unpacking after I got back from the trip, and since I had been in plot-storming mode in anticipation of NaNo, I came up with this idea: what if a girl found a key that she thought was no big deal, but it ended up changing everything? I took that idea and ran with it. I’m still not exactly sure which direction I’m running or where the finish line is, but that’s half the fun of NaNoWriMo. My current word count is 13363, so I’m right on target.

As I finish chapters I’ve been uploading them on my Vox, which also has an RSS feed. Obviously the posts on Vox display in reverse chronological order, with the most recent first, so if you want to read from the beginning you’ll have to scroll down to the bottom.

NaNo is about quantity rather than quality— the idea is to get the damned thing written in November, and save the editing for December. So please don’t write to me about my typos or misspellings or awkward word choices or the fact that my plot doesn’t make any sense. I have put the chapters up as-is for now because people asked for them, and therefore they’re all first drafts. The repairs and rewrites will come later, I promise. The important thing right now is to have fun and be a word factory.

If anyone else is NaNoing, please post links to your novels in the comments, and by all means do add me at the NaNoWriMo site.

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?

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

[871kb, control-click (right-click on a PC if anyone still uses those) and choose the appropriate "download" or "save" option— you guys are smart, you know how your browser works]