More photos from our time in Istanbul

One of the things we did in Istanbul was to go to a carpet shop to learn about how carpets are made. Last year we met Cemal, who owns a shop in Sultanahmet. They have recently expanded their business and brought in a loom to make pestemals. Pestemals are thin towels made of silk and cotton and used in the Turkish bath (hamam). When you go into a Turkish bath they give you a pestemal to wrap around yourself for some modesty. Cemal has taught all of his staff to weave, and they have been weaving pestemals in the shop for sale in addition to their carpet business. Any time any of them don't have customers they go to the loom and weave. Turkey was traditionally a big stop on the silk road, but there isn't a lot of silk spinning and weaving there now, so this is part of an effort to maintain traditional handicrafts (though weaving is not traditionally done by male shopkeepers!) The loom is a large traditional one, but also quite functional, and the sight of someone weaving in the front of the shop tends to draw a crowd. Cemal also has a small spindle for spinning silk for demonstration (they don't actually spin the silk in the store. He says there are a very small number of villages where silk is still spun, and he contracts with women in those villages to spin and dye the silk for him). Here's a photo of Cemal at the loom
The yellow, blue, and white circle on the top of the loom is an evil eye. The evil eye is based on the idea of envy as a force that has power to cause damage or injury. The idea is that if someone envies something you have (your loom, your child, your success, etc), this envy is itself a strong enough force to bring ill luck on you. The evil eye repels the force of the envy. If the evil eye breaks, this means that it has repelled a particularly strong evil force, and you should consider that you have narrowly escaped something horrible.

Behind Cemal on the bottom shelf are stacks of striped pestemals that he and his staff have made on the loom over the past year or so.

Cappadocia

Well after finally reading everyone else's blogs and securing a computer and converter (thanks Ivan, Brandon and Ariel) I can relate to you today's events albeit probably out of order and how I remember them.

This morning began like every other under the Anatolian sun for me. Which means waking up, showering and then a morning dose of turkish music on Turkey's version of MTV. At 9 AM we boarded the bus and headed out to see the underground city. With its long tunnels, cool in the summer and hot in the winter, we were in for a journey. Labyrintine in structure it's hard now to imagine that people lived, cooked and pressed their wine down there. Don't worry while it may been deep underground it was well-ventilated.

After the underground city we visted some more Fairy Chimneys that make Cappadocia famous. Some with religious frescos dating back to when Turkey was prominently Christian. We learned from Dr. Clark, in his "Heaven Earth/ Theology Geology" talk that this region's fairy chimneys are created from compressed volcanic material produces by Anatolia's now inactive volcanoes. They gain they conical shape though from the presence of basalt stone on their caps. Tosun, our guide, further elaborated by explaining that this soft material is easily chiseled into and whole cities (mentioned above) can be carved into them. Dr. Clark further explained that Christianity it Turkey was largely ascetic in nature, with monks denying themselves any form of physical pleasure, allowing the body's to waste away in order to focus on the spiritual rather than material world. This monastic movement he explained is very different from Adventism which is more Old Testament in it's outlook (that physical pleasure isn't always bad), with our church's focus on health and nutrition it can be seen we favor a more holistic form of worship.

Another intersting event to mention was our visit to some of Tosun's friends who actually live inside one of the cones. While to many of us a rock cone may sound uninhabiatble their house was very beautiful. The owners had painted the inside rock white and even carved out windows and a fireplace. Not a bad way to live! Also there had an amazing terrace with a portico with white grapes dangling from above. After some grapes and Lunch we headed out to our last stop of the day Goreme Open Air Musuem where we saw some carved Christian churchs, complete with caverns and Nilmini's expressed favourite, graves!

The very last thing on the agenda tonight was Hayden and Sterling's presentations on Classical Ottamen and Arabesque music respectativly. It was informative, Hayden noting how Eastern instruments our more flexible able to do half and quater notes between Western notes and also utilize more "moods" than traditional Western music. Sterling explained how Arabesque music was created to address the nostalgia for folk music and sounds during Turkey's westernization.

Now I hope I've relayed everything as succinctly as possible, if not pray forgive as I am tired and using I borrowed computer (thanks again Ivan sorry you have to wait up for it)

-Nolan Hollis von Esch

Some photos

One of the days when we were in Istanbul we went out to a restaurant where I know many of the staff. Last year my mother-in-law really enjoyed the bread there, so her sole request when she knew I was going back to Istanbul was that I learn how to make the bread so I could teach her. Before the students arrived I had arranged with Yunus, one of the waiters at the restaurant, that I would come back some day and he would teach me to make the bread. So ... one evening when we'd eaten dinner there, Amanda and I stayed behind browsing in a store for cherry tea. After we were done we ran into Yunus who told us this was a good time for him to teach us to make the bread. Amanda was game, so we went into the kitchen of the restaurant and he and the cook proceeded to teach us the finer points of making "puffy bread." The cook was quite insistent that there was an art to rolling out the dough, and Amanda was putting too much muscle into it - it's a smooth, light twisting motion without much pressure (umm hmm ... obviously it takes practice). The dough needs to be thin before it goes into the oven. The idea of oven temperature or proportions of ingredients seemed foreign to them, so we got a list of ingredients and the idea that the oven needs to be hot (our closest comparison to the oven is something like a wood-fired pizza oven, which apparently many people in Turkey have in their homes). My mother-in-law and I will play around with the recipe and see if we can come up with something that approximates this bread. I'm going to try broiling it to see if it works (failing that, perhaps a metal box over a campfire?) One of the ingredients you might not expect to find in bread is yogurt (yogurt shows up in a lot of things in Turkey). There's also a coating of egg yolk and carbonated water and black sesame that goes on top right before it goes into the oven.

So, after the bread was rolled out thin, we baked it for five minutes and here Amanda is removing it from the oven:


Then Yunus brought it out to us and we ate it with feta and spiced butter (and tea on the side) as a sort of post-dinner snack. Yumm!

If anyone is interested, we'll let you know if we can replicate it.

Clearly apologies are owed ...

After a long flight home exhausted and nearly delirious I arrived at the Los Angeles airport to greet my husband and kids. The kids kept going on and on about a bag of bad tennis rackets and Pokemon and Alex and asking if I'd brought Turkish delight and chocolate eggs I figured I must be more delirious than I thought. Finally we got it all sorted out. They had read the blog that I couldn't access while I was on the plane, and they were very happy that I had Turkish delight for them (not so happy that I hadn't been able to locate any Kinder Surprise Eggs in Istanbul, but they seem to be getting over that).

So to clarify: no I did not drop you all. Let's reframe this: through nine days in Istanbul I helped you learn how to explore Turkey for yourselves, initially providing frameworks to help you understand your experiences and showing you how to get around, and then backing off some so you could do your own explorations. For this last part of the trip I passed you off to Tosun, a Turkish tour guide who is very competent and helpful, and I hope you are making use of his presence to talk with him about his opinions on some of the things we've already discussed.

I do apologize, though, if it wasn't clear to all of you that I was going home early. My kids are still little and for them having me gone for 11 days felt like "a year" (in their own words). I thought I'd made it clear to all of you that I was headed home at the end of the Istanbul portion of the trip, but apparently not (though I might have thought the 2 hour debriefing and overview of what to look for during the rest of the trip should have tipped off some of you if you were unclear on this!)

In any case, I have been very pleased to catch up on your travels and hear about your experiences through the blog. Do take some time to talk with Tosun and Şayeste about their views on modern Turkey. Try to set up a time to talk with them as a group about how they understand the "Kurdish problem," what they think of the current government, what they think should be the role of the army in Turkish society, and what they see as the problems and opportunities for Turkey at this point in time.

I know some of you have a hard time posting photos on the blog. I'll post more tomorrow.

Cappadocia, Turkey

Happy Sabbath everyone!

Today we had our second and last Sabbath here in Turkey. However, this time we spent the Lord’s Day traveling around Anatolia and checking out amazing new sites.

After having breakfast in hour hotel in Konya, we all got our luggage ready and boarded the bus that would take us to Cappadocia, our next destination. We left the hotel at around 9:30 and traveled east for about an hour until we arrived at Sultanhani. In this small town we visited the largest and best-preserved caravanserai in Turkey. Once inside the fortress, Nolan gave out a very useful presentation about the history of caravanserais in general, and the one in Sultanhani in particular. Apparently the Seljuks built this fortress in the 13th century and used it to provide shelter to the merchants that used to travel in the Anatolian region to trade or sell their goods.

By the time we finished taking photographs of the caravanserai, and drank a cup of tea in a teahouse across the street from the fortress, it was almost lunchtime. That had been planned ahead, however, and after heading east for about another half an hour, we stopped at a restaurant to eat. After about an hour, we were back on the road and we drove non-stop for another hour and a half until we finally arrived at Cappadocia. However, a short distance away from our hotel, we stopped one last time to check out Ushisar Castle. This place was unbelievable! The castle, along with other small houses and tombs, where carved out of huge rocks. The castle is situated up a high and steep hill, and the houses stand at the skirts of the hill and beyond it. The top of the castle provides a magnificent view of the city and other small towns and cities around it. It was particularly interesting to observe the contrast between the modern brick and cement houses and those that had been carved out of the stone that stood near them. It was a breathtaking experience!

After another short drive through the city, we finally arrived at the final destination of this day: Perissia Hotel. We all had a couple hours of free time and then it was dinnertime. A few delicious plates of food later, we all met in the lobby of the hotel for our last experience of the day: the Semâ ceremony (Whirling Dervishes ceremony).

As we approached the entrance of the caravanserai were the ceremony was about to take place, we all noticed the geometrical figures that were carved on the stone doorframes– part of the characteristic Seljuk decoration. We all walked past the entrance and into the courtyard. Past this courtyard, straight ahead of us, was the entrance to the hall where the Whirling Dervishes ceremony was about to take place. The whole group sat on the first three rows of the small and short bleachers, and from there we were able to watch first hand the magnificent ceremony. The instrumental music, the dervishes’ greetings, the reciting of the Qur’an, and of course, the whirling, all composed an exciting and interesting ceremony.

Experiences like the ones we had today are making this cultural trip evermore interesting and fun. Every day we’ve spent here in Turkey has been fascinating; however, now that we are traveling a lot more, days are now passing by faster and faster. We are getting closer to the end of the trip and pretty soon we’ll be back home. Nonetheless, I’m sure that we will keep enjoying and learning from this wonderful experience until the very end.

4 September 2009 - Konya

I was awoken by the rattling noises and the sunlight seeping through the window. It took me a few seconds to realize that the rattling noises were from the train and that I’m on it. I looked at my watch and felt the train slow down. I jumped because I thought that we were already in Ankara and I would have to leave the train right now. But I’m still in my pajamas!

Since Amanda (my roommate) was still in bed, I felt a little relief. The rest of the morning was quite uneventful. We all got dressed, ate a small breakfast and got really to leave. We arrived at Ankara at 8:00am. We got onto a big tour bus and drove towards Konya. After an hour, we stopped for breakfast on the way.

The breakfast was not too bad. They even had chocolate and cornflakes cereal and I think most of group had some of those. I’m not a vegetarian but I’ve been missing vegetable dishes a lot lately. Turkish food doesn’t have that much vegetables. Vegetarian dishes usually come with lots of carbs, maybe a little bit of beans and a small portion of greens. I wish there were more vegetables options apart from salads. Anyway, I’ll stop complaining now.

After breakfast, we continued to drive to Konya. We arrived at our hotel at 12:30pm to check in. Then we went out for lunch close by. It was pretty good. They served sweet rice with a side. After lunch, we visited three places. We first visited the Mevlana Museum. Mevlana was an important philosopher. Most of the artifacts did not have English captions so it was hard to tell why some of the things were important. I found the different Qurans from different time periods very interesting. The oldest one there was from the 11^th century. They usually contain a small space for text and a lot of decorations and designs around the text. After this, we went to the Inceminare Museums. We saw Ottoman tiles, domes, and beautiful Arabic calligraphy. I especially like calligraphies because they are so intricate and beautiful. We also got to visit Alaattin Mosque. The unique thing about this Mosque is that it is very long width-wise and it is full of rows and rows of pillars. So people call it a forest.

It was then 5pm so we stopped for a drink and then we had free-time. Ivan, Hayden, Brandon, and I started to head back to the hotel by going through the Bazaar. But we were really tired after a while so we decided to back to the hotel. I planned to catch up on my journal-writing but Brandon used the computer for a whole 2 hours while I watched Czech MTV at our hotel. By dinner time, I had a headache. We ate a buffet dinner at the hotel and had our little vespers in the meeting room of the hotel. It was very interesting because we talked about the connections between Turkey and the Bible. Unfortunately, I found it difficult to follow because of the increasing headache.

Last Day in Istanbul

Two things:

One – Unfortunately I was on a train at the time I originally wrote this and there was no WiFi access, so I apologize for the lateness but it was sort of unavoidable.

Two – I want to say Happy Birthday to Nolan whose birthday was actually yesterday but I couldn’t post this for the above reason.

Today was the last day that we were in Istanbul, so I decided that it was necessary to do some last minute shopping at the bazaar before we left. I came across these guys who I’d seen before at their store just outside the bazaar. They called me Obama, and they really wanted to sell me a pair of jeans. I told them that I was looking for a shirt, and they conveniently were selling just the ones I wanted. So they showed me the shirts, I chose one, and they of course asked me to try on some jeans. Since they were kind enough to show me, I reluctantly complied. The jeans were actually pretty nice, and they did say Giorgio Armani. I asked how much and he picked up his calculator and began furiously punching in numbers. While he was typing away, I was wondering what exactly he could be adding up, price per fiber? So he flipped the calculator around to show me a three-digit figure: 243 TL (lyra). At that point, those jeans didn’t really look that amazing, and I started calculating how I was going to get out of the situation without offending him too much. But as soon as they realized this, the price miraculously began to drop. “120 lyra”, he says. I shook my head as I started getting up, and the price kept dropping. “100 lyra… Ok, 90 lyra… 80 lyra?” Now that I think about it, if I had stayed longer maybe he would have just given me the jeans. But the real problem was that I realized how much of a huge price range he’d gone through. There’s also a point where you feel kind of bad for the guy because he’s dropping so low, and I mean he does have to make a living. Maybe I’m too compassionate; maybe I buy into these cons to easily. Whatever the reason, I finally agreed to get the jeans and two t-shirts for 80 TL. I walked away prideful about the great deal I had made. It wasn’t until later that I realized the tag said Giorgio Armani, and the jeans said Emporio Armani. What the heck? Oh well. I finished the shopping with just enough time to make it back to the hotel by noon.

After we were all done packing, we set off to take a tour of the Bosphorus. You know, it’s so weird writing what happened during the day because so much walking and talking and trams and sightseeing goes on that by the end of the day the morning feels like it happened a week ago. But the Bosphorus was very relaxing. It was sunny with a nice breeze, and we just chilled and talked about how we used to love Pokémon. I was a little surprised that the 10 lyra Bosphorus Tour didn’t come with a free tour guide, but I kind of preferred to see it for myself anyway. The tour didn’t last too long, and after it was over I wished it had been longer. But the next event on our list was the mosque that we’d been talking about going to for the last three days. Prayer time was going on, and I felt a little self-conscious since I was wearing shorts which aren’t the best thing to wear in a mosque. But I think going to that service and talking with the imam (via translator) was very helpful and gave me some good insight into the minds of Muslims. The thing about people who grow up with a set religion is that they become close-minded about other religions. I know it’s true because I’m one of those people. I was taught that Christianity is the right way and the only way. If you’re of any other religion then you need to convert to Christianity or you’ll go to hell. But from seeing these Turkish Muslims who have likely been Muslim for their whole lives has changed my perspective, because they think exactly like me. They believe that Islam is the right way to get to heaven (or paradise) and probably the only way (not sure on that one). They just aren’t as forthright with their judgment of other religions like Christians are. But our religions are so far ingrained inside our minds that the possibility of any other religion holding more truth than our own is unfathomable to us. That’s why I can’t imagine how people can change religions. It’s like your whole life (views, motivations, actions) has to shift to adjust to the new religion. By the way my mind is set right now, I know there is no way I could depart from Christianity in the near future. It would just feel so wrong to do that and I’m not sure if these feelings are coming from the part of me that has attached and rooted itself inseparably to my religion or if it’s the Holy Spirit who is urging me to stay close to the Truth. All I know is that God is just and merciful at the same time, and if we’re trying to follow Him to the best of our knowledge and abilities then we can’t go wrong. So this mosque experience was very eye-opening for me and I’m really glad we finally got to sit through a Muslim prayer service. Because of it, I now have a more objective view of different religions instead of a close-minded one stuck on Christianity.

To make a big mark on an already full day, something really unexpected happened. After a quick dinner, we dragged our luggage out of the hotel’s storage and loaded up the bus to go to the train station. We were all in the bus except Dr. Clark and Dr. Mallery. Then the bus started pulling out. We called to the driver to let him know that we were still missing a couple of people. He pulled over to the side, and it turned out that another bus had needed to pass through the narrow, cobblestone road and he’d just moved out of the way. So Dr. Clark got on the bus, and we asked him where our instructor was. The next three words that left his mouth left us confused for a second. “She’s not coming”, he explained. Since Dr. Mallery had periodically left the group throughout the trip (to go on secret missions?), we could only assume that she would eventually be meeting us in Ankara, so we began interrogating Dr. Clark for answers. When he told us again that she wasn’t coming with us for the rest of the trip, I couldn’t help but laugh. I realized that it was some kind of bad joke that maybe Dr. Clark or even Dr. Mallery had conjured up. It wasn’t until minutes later as evidence piled up that the truth became quite clear… We had lost our leader. The knife of reality plunged deep into our hearts as we rode away in our bus of grief. Well, maybe I’m being a little overdramatic here. But it really did come as a shock to most of us (*cough* Amanda and Nolan *cough*). I’m also sure that Dr. Mallery didn’t mean to cause us to feel the way we did. She had a perfectly good reason to drop us like a bag of old tennis racquets to see her kids. I, too, may have even probably had the possible thought of thinking about doing the same thing if it had somehow in another life been my kids. But despite this minor setback, we will press forward into the unknown. Despite our inability to communicate with the natives now, we will press on! Despite our inability to navigate through unknown territory or locate local contacts now, we will press on! Despite the loss of our goal-oriented, experienced leader, we will press on! On to Ankara!