If you guys aren’t subscribed to LeahAndMark.com, you need to be. They’re two American adventurers making their way around China, armed with every communication gadget imaginable. Prepare to be immersed in stories, photos, and video that will amaze you. So far they’ve eaten half the food in China, met two-thirds of the people, and even visited a hospital for babies. Now they’ve gotten away from the big city and it’s all about train rides and countryside. The journey is fascinating to follow— if you only subscribe to one new thing in April, this should be it. Link

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.

Okay, Wednesday we did a day trip to Cairo, which ended up being a literal day— we were gone nearly 24 hours. It was one of those bus tour things where you go to see the Pyramids and whatnot, and we had a great time.

I guess they’re not as cavalier about smoking here as they are in Turkey— in Antalya you see the airport police leaning against the wall and smoking right under the big NO SMOKING sign. In the Cairo airport, they put them in an enclosure like zoo animals. It always makes me a little sad how people sprint in a stampeding panic from a one-hour flight to go have a cigarette. If they were sprinting off the plane to get a shot of whiskey or a armful of heroin, we’d be appalled and try to hospitalise them and get them the help they need. But for some reason helpless uncontrollable desperation is acceptable if it’s cigarettes.

There is a strong police presence in Cairo. They sit around in the back of trucks a lot, just watching and waiting. The police all carry fully automatic weapons, which made me mistake them for soldiers, but apparently they’re just metro. Yikes.

I wish I’d gotten a picture of the wild traffic, but all I got was this shot, and it looks pretty normal, except… see how almost everyone appears to be changing lanes? They’re not, they’re just driving with complete disregard for the lines. As you can tell, our own bus is straddling lanes as well. I don’t even know why they waste money painting lines on roads in this part of the world. It’s unnecessary.

First view of the Nile.

First view of the Pyramids.

This is the biggest one. I’m too lazy to look up the name.

This is the second biggest one, with Emirhan and a camel thrown in for good measure. Those camel guys try to sell you a camel ride at an advertised price of 50 pounds, which would be about 8 dollars. Then they take you out for a ride into the middle of nowhere and ask for the money once you get out there. You give them the 50 Egyptian pounds, and they say no no no, they meant 50 British pounds (about 100 dollars). The misunderstanding is your fault because you should have asked for clarification before you agreed to the price. If you refuse to pay the 100 dollars, they just leave you out there in the desert, so of course you pay, and of course it’s now 200 dollars because the other thing you forgot to clarify was that it was 50 pounds one way. A round trip costs double.

Okay, this is a view of Cairo from the side of one of the Pyramids. You can see the very distinct line between sun and shadow. I had my jacket zipped all the way up with the hood on and really had to concentrate to keep from shivering while I took the photo. In the sun, though, it was about 18°, and t-shirts were more than enough. On the bus we had to have the air conditioner on.

Okay, this is the view of the Sphinx they never show you in photos. You can see the height of the people standing next to it— it’s just not very big. That’s Emirhan in the foreground. We didn’t get any photos of us together because our tour guide put the fear of god in us about letting other people hold the camera. He said sometimes thieves dress as Egyptian police so tourists will trust them, and then they run away with the camera. We don’t have the kind of income that we can just replace this camera, so we stuck to taking turns with it.

Now you’ve seen a Coke bottle from Egypt. Pretty cool, huh? I had to have it, so Emirhan got it for me. Will this be the start of a collection of Coke bottles from around the world?

It’s three in the afternoon and I’m just now kind of surfacing. Yesterday was a day that may very well be beyond description. Nonetheless, I’ll give it my best shot… tomorrow. Today is a day of rest.

More photos and stories forthcoming, I promise.

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]

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.

As I mentioned before, I like long, slow journeys. I prefer not to fly if there’s an alternative. This has nothing to do with phobias, but rather with my upbringing. When I was little my dad always insisted we go everywhere by car, even if the journey took several days, because he wanted me to understand how far apart things really were, how large our country really was, and how the journey to somewhere could be just as rewarding as the destination. Those lessons stuck with me; to this day my favourite part of traveling is not being somewhere else but getting there. Emirhan, on the other hand, likes to fly, so we compromised: we flew up to Istanbul, but we took the bus back. Turkey doesn’t have much in the way of passenger-quality railways (and no railways at all down here on the Mediterranean coast); luxury bus companies are very competitive here and nothing at all like the grubby bus lines they have in other countries. The vehicles are new and comfortable, there’s an attendant who brings food and drink, and the bus stops at interesting places along the way. I love Turkish buses, even if it does take twelve hours to get home from Istanbul. It reminds you that it really is that far away.

Our trip was an overnight one, so I didn’t get many photos of the first half (everything was dark). We stopped at about 5:00 in the morning for breakfast. Soup is a popular breakfast food in Turkey; my favourite is lentil with lots of lemon and crushed red pepper.

The rest stop had a sucukerie— miles and miles…

…and miles of garlic sausage.

By the time we finished breakfast it was light outside. The Turkish countryside is gorgeous.

Check out the mosque in the distance.

Sometimes I think Turkey is the most beautiful place in the world. You’d never be able to tell from an airplane.

And then we got stopped by the jandarma.

Everyone had to hand over their identity cards. Most people left the bus to smoke. Emirhan took pictures.

We were home a couple of hours later, exhausted. Thus ends the saga of our little trip to Istanbul. I hope you enjoyed tagging along as much as I enjoyed sharing… I’ll have something new to talk about tomorrow.

So where were we? Ah yes, Kınalıada, the henna island.

The thing that first struck me was the serenity. The quaint village-like feeling. Oh, and the gigantic hills with slopes that put San Francisco to shame.

We walked all the way to the top. The view of Istanbul was well worth it.

I guess even the most tranquil places bear signs of modern life these days.

But mostly this island resembles my stereotype of what a village in Afghanistan must be like.

Emirhan near the summit of the island, with Istanbul behind him.

So much of this place seems abandoned.

This is probably one of the few places left on earth where motor vehicles are prohibited. Your transportation choices are animal-n-cart, bicycle, or walking. Imagine growing up in a place like this. Every time we saw a child I thought about that, about how different my childhood was.

There is a small town down near the ferry station. Again, it felt strangely European.

While we were waiting for the ferry back to Antalya, I spotted a bit of choice Turklish on the bag of a girl standing a few feet away from us. I am so impressed with the zoom lens on my camera— I didn’t even have to move from my spot to get this shot, and the patch on her bag was only about three inches high. I felt like a spy. This has possibilities.

Next up, the trip back to Antalya, which we did not do by plane…

Day two of the Istanbul adventure, starting with…

…breakfast. Hotel breakfast served at the bar, in fact. I love buffet anything, and if all the olives you can eat are included, so much the better. Olives are a staple of the Turkish breakfast, and my thanks to whichever deity is responsible for that.

Yeah, the two carpet guys thought I was taking a photo of them, but no— I was taking a photo of the sign for one of my favourite Istanbul institutions, the internet laundromat. Put your laundry in the machines, hang out on the internet until it’s done. Genius.

We were looking at the carpets in this store window when I noticed we weren’t alone. What a great life, Turkish carpet store cat. I want to come back as that.

Emirhan kept asking me if I’d been to “the islands,” and despite the fact that I’ve been to Istanbul many times, I had no clue what he meant. So this time I got whisked away on a boat, an hour’s ferry journey to Kınalıada, nearest of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara. The journey itself was as interesting as the island, but then again I love journeys. This is a photo of Dolmabahçe Palace as seen from the ferry boat. I’d like to see the inside of it sometime, if that’s possible.

I have this thing about shipping, in the traditional sense of the word. I’m a fan of slow, long journeys, and ships are just about as slow as you can get in this age of air freight and high-speed trains. Every time I see these huge cargo ships I spend a tremendous amount of time wondering where they’ve been and what they’re carrying.

Also, they just look cool. And now I want to learn what the history of the Yang Ming Line is. It’s a great name.

I can’t even remember what this building is (Emirhan can remind me I’m sure), but I remember thinking that Istanbul has so much interesting architecture beyond just the mosques and palaces that people think of as typically Turkish.

This is the Kadıköy ferry station. It looks very European to me, which is odd because it’s on the Asian side of Istanbul.

Emirhan tells me that this tethered balloon is used not only for sightseeing, but can also be rented out for events such as weddings. Interesting.

The first glimpse of Kınalıada from the ferry… just a teaser of what’s to come.

I’ll do a separate post for the island photos, because they deserve their own separate attention. It’ll have to wait a few hours, though, as I’m absolutely sleep-deprived and must get at least a bit of rest now. So I’ll see you on the other side of that nap.

Right, here’s the second installment— once again, explanations along the way.

We have a bathtub! It’s the smallest bathtub in the universe, but it works, and I soaked for about an hour. Heaven.

As I was getting ready for my nap I heard some soft mewing coming from outside— turns out there was a mama kitty out there with her babies! Sorry for the blurry photo, I had to use the extreme zoom because I didn’t want to get too close and scare them.

This is my Spanish next-door neighbour— she came out on the balcony to feed the cats.

In the evening after Emirhan returned we went out in search of snacks and pretty things. We found both. This is that same park sculpture from earlier today, and it’s even cooler at night.

We walked all the way down to the water, where you can see one of the bridges linking Europe to Asia. Apparently they just installed those lights about a month ago. They change colours periodically. It’s gorgeous.

Then we walked along the waterfront to the Galata Bridge, which crosses the Golden Horn. That’s Galata Tower in the background, and the lights below the bridge are restaurants and shops.

The New Mosque at night.

Then we were tired and decided to take the tram back to the hotel. Emirhan waited for the tram on one of these cool book-benches, while I wandered around like a tourist, taking photos.

Oh, we picked up some more midye dolması on the way home. As you can see, they’re just mussels stuffed with rice. We got a whole bag full for 5 million, and they were amazing as usual.

So now I’m going to turn in early tonight, because tomorrow’s another big day. Have a great evening, see you guys tomorrow.