Summer Christmas wishes

Just a couple of days ago we received a wonderful piece of California by mail. From some good friends who love Disneyland and--apparently--also enjoy dressing up in Hawaiian print shirts for photo shoots with Mickey Mouse. This is the second time I'm receiving hilarious family picture cards in the mail all the way to Patagonia. The cards always a funny allusion to summertime. I love it so much that we've been thinking how sappy good it would be to send our family and friends something similar. Though we are way too late to do anything in time for Christmas and don't really have people's addresses to send real mail, something may be in the works. Stay tuned...

Summer has sprung, mostly. The mornings have been sunny and calm, with gusts picking up before noon, when the gray moves in and moves out fast as the wind sometimes with rain, sometimes without. Temperatures have been in the high 50s, sometimes low 60s, you know, T-shirt weather. As I write this the guy with the weed whacker is grinding down our forest of weeds with a tremendous buzz. (The organic grasscutter sheep deal fell through.) Lawnmowers aren't here yet, so if anybody is ready for a career change, I'm sure you could come down here with your John Deere and make a small fortune mowing weeds.

Serkan and I leave tomorrow to Torres del Paine where we'll be working together. We'll spend Christmas eve there, but hope to be back in time to make a some phone calls to the motherland on Christmas day. Happy holidays & love.

Los blue jeans

The days have been beautiful here, sunny, almost windless and warm enough to go outside with just a sweater. Because of this I’ve been walking around a lot instead of taking the colectivo type taxis, which pick up various people and drop them off in the center or wherever the passengers want along the colectivo route, for only .60 cents! On election day, which was Sunday, the town was eerily quiet. The only cars around were those of carabineros. Two police officers parked alongside a long grassy walk nudged at a drunk (passed out in a fetal position near an unbroken swingset) with their feet similar to how one might pet a mangy dog or test to see it's still alive. I guess this is a pretty typical sight. Though today--with the blue skies and emptiness, and the fact that nobody can buy liquor on election day until the last vote is cast--it felt somehow more poignant and ironic.

It was one of those days. Feeling simultaneously far away from home and at home. Flashes of home swoop in on me often. When I look and I am surrounded by sky, whose multi-layered cloud texture has the most character of anywhere I've ever been. The mountains, yet snowcapped, jag into it, jutting up straight from the sea. On a clear day on the right hill, you can see all of this. And I think, wow, I live here. Cool. But the distance is wrought with ambivalences. Sometimes I can describe them perfectly, to myself at least. Other times, like right now, I can’t even imagine my way back inside of them. Liquid flighty moments. Drippy and on air at the same time.

Maybe the other side of the flux is a pull to usefulness, which has something to do with how at home I feel. I'm a bit of a vagrant. This is a vagrant land. People come and go (including us), so developing close friendships proves rather difficult. Finding my niche of purpose would raise my comfort. Of course, right now I'm in between jobs. Relieved to have ended one and not sure which basket to put my eggs in for the next one. It's a tentative space. For the most part Americans feel defined by their jobs. I mostly refused to let this happen to me in the States (especially in my early years of employment as a administrative assistant or glorified secretary). What made this refusal easiest though was that I was always working to pay for school. In that way I still identified myself with some role: that of a student. Each part of living, a means to an end. Just living and being--outside of roles--well... it's still a struggle.

In the mornings I try to write my way back into an old niche. It's like putting on an old pair of jeans. They still fit and sometimes they are surprisingly comfortable. Other times, they're too big and I need a belt or they are recently laundered and I can hardly button them up. It's impossible to tell how they look.

Housekeeping

Shortly after 5 a.m., the clouds seem higher than they are, and more dispersed. All orange-bellied with neon-bright underscores. I steal peeks of it through the big bedroom picture window and jump back under the covers to try to sleep some more, but it’s useless. Instead I squeeze some sunniness into a cup and drink fresh grapefruit-orange juice for a pre-breakfast snack.

We have been busy getting the house in order. Making it livable. Serkan had found this furnished place for us to live before I arrived. Of course, when we returned to Natales from Ushuaia about three weeks ago, I was excited to see our new home. It is by far the best place I’ve lived in Puerto Natales. But that first night my nerves were on edge and I actually cried to see the condition of our new place—which if you compare it to other houses here, it really wasn’t bad at all. We arrived here around midnight after 15 or so hours on a bus with a long snowy delay at the Chilean-Argentine border because of Chilean government workers being on strike (again). We hadn’t eaten for the last 10 hours, so we were pretty much starved and exhausted.

So I lacked imagination that first night, while Serkan with his infinite patience, comforted me. I’m sure being back in the super comfort of the U.S. didn’t help me feel less overwhelmed about all the work this place would need. But we woke up the next morning, ready to tackle house work. Sanding, painting, scrubbing, spraying insect killer, unpacking boxes and bags. It’s been an ongoing project, but it finally feels like home. No more salmon pink walls in the bedroom or diarrhea yellow in the bathroom. No more horrifying lace curtains stuffed with earwig eggs and exoskeletons.

I’ve been pretty obsessed with insect prevention. When we first arrived, hundreds of Patagonian pill bugs would appear inside the tub just about every morning. And elsewhere of course, but not in such huge quantities. Luckily, these insects don’t creep me out that much. But getting rid of them and vacuuming up their dried-out shells was a daily affair for a while. Their colonies have dwindled though we have not obliterated them. I’ve vacuumed and cleaned places in this house that haven’t been cleaned in years, if ever. I’ve scrubbed with bleach and worn through several sponges and gloves and practically erased my own fingerprints.

All this in preparation for the tijeretas (earwigs) that are sure to arrive around February. These silly little bugs have me in a panic. I have nightmares about them, even though I’ve only seen one live one since we got here. When they come, they get into everything. They show in the food containers, in the teapots, in the mate bombilla, in the washing machine, sometimes even in the bed. When sipping mate during a major tijereta infestation, the critters get sucked up through the metal straw, and suddenly a skinny wiggly thing is crawling on your tongue. Thank goodness this hasn’t happened to me yet! But, yes, I am mildly obsessed. They’re not here yet, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure they don’t come. Now that the inside is clean, we have a pretty big yard to tend to. Some friends bought a little black lamb, an organic lawnmower, so we’re hoping to fatten him up for a few weeks. (And, no, this lamb is not going to be eaten for Christmas dinner.)

It may sound weird to have to do all this to a place that we are only renting for probably less than a year. But that’s how the houses are here. We are really lucky to have found a well-furnished house with heaters in every room. Some places you rent here might not even come with a kitchen sink. The fridge, stove, kitchen and bathroom sinks are still considered furniture, something that renters supply themselves. That said, I haven’t seen a rental that didn’t come with at least one heater. And it’s cold enough here to live without a fridge. I hope it doesn't sound like I’m complaining too much, because really I just want to give some context.

After all the poison, paint and love we’ve put into this place, it truly feels home. It’s our little nest and I love it. I have a sturdy writing desk where I’ve started to work in the mornings. I rough sanded it to get rid of the pink paint splats and to give it a rustic look, filled it with family and travel photos, and topped it all with a square of glass.

Reflections on Patagonia

Cucciolo is the name written across the top tube of a 1940s bicycle in the window of Ramos Generales, a panaderia cafe in Ushuaia, Argentina. The bike dons a cucciolo motor, from the earliest motorcycle days. Stump footrests have replaced the pedals, but everything else about this little puppy (which is what cucciolo means in Italian) is bicycle. Prison pajamas in bumble bee colors and long-john style down to the box weave and flimsy little cap hang flatly against the wall and stop the bike in its tracks. Against the black and yellow stripes leans a shovel. A long toothy saw, rusted and rough to the touch, fences in these antiques wherein tripacks of Cape Horn beer crop up within the frame like flowers.

It's taken me almost three years of living in Patagonia to make it down to Ushuaia, self-proclaimed southernmost city in the world: population 60,000, in case you're wondering how much it takes to make a city. I came here to meet up with Serkan on his trip and we've been reunited for a couple of days after we parted ways in Santiago, where I headed north to visit family and friends for a few weeks and he--more responsibly--headed south to start working and find us a flat.
I have missed him madly, but even so I found leaving this time sadder than other previous times. Maybe it is the family growing, kids growing up and new babies on the way, or that all of my friends are starting to make families of their own. Or maybe just that I have grown into the idea of having a family. For years I didn't know how to have a family. Now I feel it surrounding me in a way that I could easily describe as cozy, comforting.

Even though I haven't actually been to my new home in Puerto Natales yet, I am starting to feel back to normal here. It's always strange to arrive to Punta Arenas again. And every time I do it, I'm perplexed and exhilarated, simultaneously feeling at home yet light years away. This time I am here with my husband, so I need probe no further. And yet...

There is something beyond that fact that welcomes me home, but I can never quite pin the feeling down. Is it where I've come to grips with all my past sadnesses and let them go? It was the first place I visited when I started traveling in South America, straight to the farthest point possible. But it just as easily could have been Machu Picchu, the salt plain, the jungle or the desert if it weren't for the weather. It was March and, so, autumn. I'd chosen to travel on March 17, St. Patrick's day, you know, for good luck. The Patagonia season ending, my trip beginning. The distance, the seasons, time flipping over on itself--all of it is somehow symbolic, which I of course don't need to say.

So I still don't know what is so welcoming to me in this utterly inhospitable landscape? This desolate beauty so far off the grid. It toughens you a little, increases everyone's sense of loneliness, so while the buildings are wretched and the people usually unreliable, a sense of community pervades. Happiness is easy. Life is simple. And joy just is. Fleetingly, sure, but so are our moments--our presents. In more developed places happiness tends to be complicated, as it often assumes that we have to get such and such thing before we can be truly happy.

The pampas on the three-hour busride home from the airport are utterly barren. Yet pink flamingos fish gracefully in rain lakes and boggy puddles. Lovestruck caiquenes (Upland Geese) pair off and mate year after year--unaffected by the violent winds. Trees can't grow on the plain yet a random mix of cameloids and big exotic birds abound.

As much as I sometimes whine about it, I also love coming back here. Somehow it represents freedom. Freedom from what? I suppose it's something like freedom from myself. We're the only ones who truly have the capacity to commit ourselves to bondage. We are our own captors. The prison pajamas stare me down, their pattern mirrored by the teeth in the saw, the spokes in the bicycle wheel and the window reflecting passersby back to themselves. Sometimes they see through the display, and our eyes may meet before one side of the glass looks shyly away--beyond it all and out to the sea.

Journey's end...

We all get a little tied up in the regime of dailiness even if every day is exactly different. For the last month, the days of our eastern European honeymoon wore us onward. The rigmarole of entering a new city, figuring out how to get around, foraging for meat-free food, and finding lodging in hostels or with friends for 11 countries of time becomes routine. Leaving becomes routine. Departure is my favorite part of being on the road. No, being on the road is my favorite part of being on the road, and the first step of this requires departing. Destination: known, occasionally in advance. Though arrival is a slippery process and somehow the knowns wiggle around a little and always change.

This is going to spiral into another meditation on home, and it feels like there's not much discovery in that at present, for me or for you. Each day, I find, to be a shawl that I worm into or strip off depending on how chilly it is. Maybe the unworn days wear me and carry me forward and I suppose I hope they do. Increasingly I need to layer the days on for fall, the loose yellowing leaves feathering down and the gusts that scrape them red like a rake against each other and the asphalt.


Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. Last stop before the night train to Istanbul.

Sarajevo Grays

We arrive to Bascarsija to its center to sit for a cup of coffee waiting for our room to be ready. The pigeons swirl in the square as an old lady tosses seed to them. Every place seems to have a square like this with an old lady scattering seed soon after daybreak. Breathing in the chill morning air and drinking delicious strong macchiatos is just what we need after the horrific busride to get here.

But let's not dwell on the night trip, because arriving to Sarajevo rocked. It's such a beautiful city, surrounded by green mountains with pleasant people sweeping the cobblestone walkways. It was a gray day when we arrived and the clouds stuck with us the whole time, but only really tipped once. The blending of religions is apparent in the skyline. It's mostly Muslim, also apparent from the skyline, as we could count (without standing up) 20 minarets just from the balcony of our hostel. Within an eyeshot, crosses, domes and minarets all cut at the gloomy sky.

Traveling through southeastern Europe after staying a while in Turkey, you definitely see the Ottoman influences everywhere: in the foods and the words and the Turkish Quarters, which seem to be every town center's highlight. In the morning we explore the narrow cobbled streets of the Turkish Quarter where no cars can go. Copper coffee pots garland the windows of every other shop. Silk scarves and pretty knit goods fill the stores in between. The rest are cafes bars, restaurants and more kebab and burek fast food joints than you care to sample. It's definitely not a good place for vegetarians, so I end up eating a lot of burek. Burek is also Turkish, but Sarajevo has the and the best damned burek on the planet. (Burek is a flaky meat-filled pastry, but veggie versions can contain cheese, spinach, potato, or more creative versions with pumpkin, etc.) Also we become instant friends with a young Dutch couple caravannig through Europe. The four of us spend a couple nights of merrymaking with beers, "alternative cuisine" (not kebab) in To Be or Not To Be, ice cream, margaritas and mojitos, scant dancing and a long morning after relaxing.

Next stop: Albania. Or not.

Poor Albania. It's supposedly beautiful: you know, mountains, beach. But the infrastructure is only inching along. Concrete bunkers abound and roads that require a snail's pace to navigate. Tirana, the capital, seems our most feasible stop in Albania, but the chore of getting there from Ohrid, Macedonia, is a bit ridiculous. A bus to the Albanian border. Walk across the border where taxis (hopefully) wait on the other side to take you to the first town in Albania, where (hopefully) there'll be a bus to Tirana. Once in Tirana, we'd have to find a place and then figure out how to leave, another feat since it's apparently complicated, even for locals. Add Cyrillic into the mix and you can see the attractiveness of an overnight bus that would bypass all of it.

Ohrid to the Montenegrin coast, direct, more or less. Nobody was allowed off the bus to pee even inhale Albanian air. It's pretty impossible to sleep on the bus, because the unpaved roads are so potholed the bus brakes and goes so abruptly for hours on end. From the window: nothing. Some may even call it a wasteland, though during the day I'm sure there must be some sort of view. At night, the only view is of gas stations. Gas stations lit up in all their glory, every two minutes at least. Astounding in their bounty. How could this many gas stations be on one road, where not even a single light glows in the distance.

We get to the bus station in Ulcinj, Montenegro, at 5 am, earlier than we'd hoped. I started to doze off at table while we waited for it to be a decent hour to find our place to stay or grab some coffee. Serkan found a bouncy bench seat, something that probably used to furnish the back of an old van, in the middle of an outdoor storage area. He led me there, covered me with a towel, and that was all she wrote.

Ohrid by night

From Sofia we head to Skopje, Macedonia, but we're already tired of the capital beat, so we stick around the Skopje bus station and wait for the next bus out to Ohrid instead. Ohrid is a lakeside resort town, a weekend escape place for locals. When we arrive, our big backpacks and other telltale signs reveal our traveler status, and the ladies offering rooms to stay and men offering taxi rides tug and prod at us relentlessly. Mind, we had planned to find a room with somebody selling space in their home. A cheap place to stay in a small town, so nothing could be too far away from the action. But they were so aggressive, all I wanted to do was hightail it away from them. We grabbed a taxi to the center and just found something from there.

Since it was Friday, Ohrid turned out to be a pretty hoppin' little town, where we danced in Aquarius. (Hemingway and Aquarius top the list of bar names in eastern Euorpe.) When the sardine pack of people started to get a little too snug, we wiggled our way to the back of the cafe nightclub. A patio dock stilted above the water with cushy sofas and low tables for chillin'. The full moon shone black glitter onto the lake, and underwater spotlights like moons brightened the schools of fish swimming in the teal below. This may very well be the coolest spot in Ohrid, but you have to be there at night.

Rila Monastery: Sleeping with monks

This morning we left Sofia for the Rila Mountains to slumber an evening in the old monks' cells of the eponymous monastery. As the sign at the entrance says, God chose the Rila Mountains for their beauty and peace as a good place to develop one's spirituality. If it's good enough for god, it's good enough for us. Rila Monastery sits in a pined valley; granite mountains hallelujah around it, crescendoing to a too-blue sky with candy-like dollops of clouds. A river sounds out further down the gorge, constantly refreshing and cleansing the energy.

The monastery itself is freshly painted. Broad wooden stairs and walkways creak, but the colors pop. I admit I was a little shocked when our bus arrived. I thought it would be cool to stay a night in a monastery hailing from the 10th century, but I didn't expect its vibrancy. The white and blue and green and gray of cloud and sky and forest and rock deepen the brightly painted colors of the building, even before you enter its massive gates.

Inside the marble and stone cobbled courtyard is a flurry of tourists snapping photos and buying souvenir rosaries, Virgin Mary plates and Bulgarian wool socks. Bearded monks robed in black walk the grounds and gather to sing a few times a day. By 6 p.m. most of the tour buses have snaked back down the hill, so the monastery belongs to the few of us who have decided to stay here for the night, and to the monks of course. A week and three countries later, this will still be, by far, the highlight of our trip.

Wedding pictures

Like I've mentioned, the wedding was extremely tiny. Me and Serkan, our witnesses (Sevgi and Murat, Serkan's sis and brother-in-law), Duru (their daughter) and Murat's mom. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and weekend days, couples marry each other in rapid-fire fashion every 10 minutes, from the hours of 2-4 p.m., depending on the district where you marry.

The couples waiting to get married, can sit in the hall and watch the other lovers' commit to one another. This turns out to be great for me, because I was a bit nervous about not being able to understand what was being said. I'd read what the vows should sound like online, but, still, my hands are a little clammy. I don't want to have to do any American-style repeating vows after the judge in Turkish. It's nice to be able to see the process live once before actually doing it myself.

Then it's our turn to go up to the podium-like table. The kindly judge dressed in a red cloak with gold embroidery sits at the short side of the table and Serkan and I sit on the long side of the table facing the transient audience, who shuffle in and out of the wedding hall. We lay down a tremendous bouquet of roses and Easter lilies, which my family sent me and which arrived just as we were all squeezing into the car to zoom to the wedding hall. Much to the joyful surprise of Murat, who kept marveling that the flowers came all the way from America!

(In fact, my aunt and uncle were even scurrying to find ways to come all the way to Turkey for the wedding, with only a couple days' notice. Yep, I was feeling loved, alright. It didn't pan out, of course, because it takes at least a day to make the travel, and they had barely double that amount of time to make the arrangements. Plus, I can only imagine the cost would be, as the star-lovers say, astronomical. In any case, all our loved one were with us in spirit and energy.)

They place microphones in front of us and make us test them out. Bir iki üç. One two three. And we begin. The vows are QUICK. And go something like this, in Turkish, of course: Heather, daughter of Mark Poyhonen, you met Serkan Yalın and you liked him, you two fell in love and now you wish to spend the rest of your lives together. Do you, of your own accord and free will without any outside pressure, take Serkan as your husband? At this point, because the judge has been so nice to us, and didn't make us hire and pay for a pricy official interpreter, he queues Serkan to translate to me in English. Serkan translates, we smile, I say evet. The judge says to say it louder and into the mic. Serkan translates. I lean forward and say EVET, and everybody claps.

Then he asks Serkan the same thing. He says evet and again EVET. Then Sevgi and Murat also respond affirmatively, though we don't remember what question they were responding to. The judge wishes us well. More applause. He hands me the wedding certificate, because, you know as a woman I'm boss, at least inside the home. Then we head outside into the sunshine, and we are married. Good times.

There are a handful of pictures on Flickr, though we don't have many. We hope to get a few more pictures from the professional photographer shooting throughout the tiny 'ceremony' when we return to Istanbul.

Wedding mini-collection of pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/florasol/sets/72157622250599566/

Entering the green fields and toilet paper of Bulgaria

In the morning, from the train the land is green and misty. We've escaped the city for the village, just by waking up. Old cars, old buildings, old people. It reminds me strangely of Nebraska: corn rows, level land, the intermittent silhouette of a lone oak. Then the small shops come into view and the signs in Cyrillic--which, for the record, was created in Bulgaria and borrowed by the Russians.

We're definitely not headed for Nebraska. One shopowner is setting out her wares for the day. A store entirely devoted to the selling of toilet paper. Yellows and pinks and blues and small mountains of what turns out to be typically Bulgarian TP: a thin, singly-ply natural beige, not soft or scratchy. How much she sells is anyone's guess. Seeing that much toilet paper in one spot does fill one with a sense of urgency. Is TP hard to come by? Should I stock up now... you know, just in case?

Honeymooning in Bulgaria

I start reading about eastern European trains and worry that actually taking them might be a bad idea. Many of the Eastern Europe trains I've read about are referred to metal hunks of dilapidated crap. But I've never crossed a border on a train before and it sounds fun. In the train station, Serkan and I hop on one of the trains stationed there. See, he says, this is so much more comfortable than a bus. This is how our train will be? Awesome, I say, we're definitely doing the choo choo. We even purchase the sleeping cabin tix, because they're not much more expensive. I imagine clinking wine glasses in the dining car, playing cards and watching the scenery change.

Ours is the Bosphorus Express. Serkan reads about it online, after we buy our tickets. Everyone complains and details how horrible and old the cars are. No dining car, only a bunch of unhappy customers. But we have our own room, I just can't imagine it would that bad. I mean, with all the rank and toiletless overnight South American buses, with kids and chickens sitting on your feet... The Bosphorus Express can't be that bad. And it isn't. All the cars are ancient, sure, but the room is pretty clean. There's a window we can open. It's not fancy, but there are beds with fresh sheets. We watch the moon and the backwater houses of Istanbul fade into the distance. Then we watch The Station Agent on the computer. It's all very romantic.

At the border crossing, if I am asked, I will tell them we're on our honeymoon, finding it mildly hilarious, because not many people would choose to start their honeymoon in Bulgaria. But the only thing the Turkish side asks me is if I live in California. I say yes, because any other answer is complicated and excessive, plus it's 3 a.m.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, he says in a deeper, gruffer, man voice.
Yeah, I laugh.
How is Arnold? (He's on a first name basis with Arnold, they go way back.)
I don't know.
Why not? (I'm starting to wonder if I should have said I live somewhere else...)
Um, I don't know Arnold personally.

Exit. Thump thump goes the stamp from ink pad to passport.

Three's pushing it...

It's finally our last day of Istanbul traffic horns, raised voices at exaggerated octaves, the general city chaos. All day we take care of last-minute errands, paying bills and visiting the beauracracies to see how I can get me a Turkish ID.

What would be the benefits of a Turkish ID, you ask? The answer is simple: Muze Kart, baby! No more paying oodles of liras at every museum, 20 lira once and I can visit everywhere for free! Not really much of a help, since we're leaving, but it might also waive my Turkey entrance Visa fees (which are only $20 a pop, but still).

We still don't know the answers for any of this, though we did learn from an old lady at the bus stop that we will have three children. Actually, today I wonder if we are giving off newlywed vibes, because all kinds of strangers seem to mention something about our marriage, asking Serkan where his wife is from. Trippy.

Luna de miel con Fenerbahçe

The wind ruffs up the treetops from the fourth floor window. The sky is a matte periwinkle, smog seaside twilight. Babies yowl and the seagulls cry, intermittent conversations, somewhere between complaints of love. The evening mosque call has relieved Ramadan fasting for the day, and the masses have commenced eating. You can hear the hungry clink of forks on plates from the rooftop terrace where I balance the computer on my lap. We'll head out to eat too soon, before the fasters have scattered, so we can grab a bite before the Fenerbahçe home game on their home turf.

We got married two days ago, free from pomp, only some white daisies in my hair and a huge bouquet from my auntie and fam, which smelled beautiful and lovingly for days. It arrived just as we were piling in the car en route to the marriage hall. Receiving the flowers right then and there nearly put me to tears, but I recovered. I wore a simple white sundress, which Sevgi, Serkan's sister, MADE. She gave me some shoes of hers, since we wear the same size, and she even did my makeup (complete with trial runs the day before).

Serkan and I had scurried the huge distances of Istanbul to get all the marriage papers together for one week exactly. On Friday afternoon we finally submitted all the documents and set our wedding date. It was a long process while we were doing it, but looking back, one week is nuthin'.

There were so many characters in the process. The hospital visit to obtain our blood tests may have been one of the most miserable places on earth. One old man at an information desk couldn't donned a sourer scowl or gruff voice. Serkan tried to ask him where we go to for blood tests. He avoided Serkan's eyes and gave me the ole up and down evil eye staredown. He mentioned something about the pointlessness of marriage, and then he told us to ask someone else. We found where we needed to be, luckily. After the sterile carnage everywhere else in the hospital, the nurse taking blood in the salmon pink-themed office was jolly with a hearty laugh and a broad smile. Though, she drew blood brutally, blessing us both with bruises for days, despite my transparent skin and She-Ra inner elbow veins.

But each step grew lighter. The doctor, who told me to bite down on my flower necklace while he shoved my ribs against the X-ray machine to photograph my lungs, proved efficient and radiated good energy. The woman who signed our medical report babbled on endlessly with a huge grin. She said not to worry about the bolded and starred part of my (anemic) blood report. Serkan should just marry me for having a pretty smile. In our three-minute visit, she also talked about marriage in general, her dislike for the American health system, and possibly what she planned to eat for lunch. A few kilometers a minute, pure monologue, but enthusiastic. We found the happiest people at the marriage office. I figure it has something to do with their work focusing on the beginnings of couplehood. They're not dealing with sickness or annoyed people. A cool breeze circulates through the office and natural daylight, at least, accompanies those horrid florescent energy saver bulbs. The marriage bureau people treat each other familiarly, and they deal with hopeful couples starting the next chapter of life, together.

Information for any American citizen who wants to get married in Turkey

American citizen getting married in Turkey: Step-by-step instructions

This is a totally random post, but the process to get married in Turkey was pretty extensive. I was already making lists of what I needed to do, so I figured I would share the data here. Who knows? Maybe it'll help somebody.

Probably the most difficult part of this whole process is the fact that we were getting married in Istanbul. You need to go to a lot of different places and they are all pretty spread out. If you are getting married in a smaller town, the process should be a bit easier. However, the American citizen will likely have to get the Affidavit of eligibility to marry form from Istanbul or Ankara. Each step requires some cash and some patience, so be armed with both.

For more detailed information (with addresses and approximate costs), check out the American consulate web site in Istanbul and the American embassy web site in Ankara. Also, here are the "Getting married in Turkey" info pages for Ankara and for Istanbul.

Step One: American Embassy

NOTE: In Ankara, you will need to make an appointment first, which you can do online. In Istanbul, no appointment is required.

1a. The American party will first need to visit the American embassy or consulate in Turkey. Fill out the Affidavit for Eligibility to Marry form, which you can get at the American embassy. If you have been previously married, you will need your divorce decree or death certificate of your spouse (The document needs to be the original or a certified copy. They will not keep this document, they just need to see it.)

1b. Pay $30 USD, by cash, check or credit card. No other currency will be accepted.

1c. After you pay, the official will make you swear that everything you have written on the affidavit is true, and your affidavit will be notarized.


Step Two: Turkish government office (Valiliği)

2. The Turkish authorities will then need to certify, stamp and sign your notarized affidavit. I read in several places that you needed to make copies of the affidavit before you head to get it certified. However, they just stamped the original notarized document and did not want the copy, so making photocopies at this point is probably not necessary.


Step Three: Document copying, translations, notarizations and photos

3a. Translations...

• Translate the American citizen's passport by a certified translator. Then take the translation to get notarized. This step is pretty pricey.

3b. Photocopies...

• 1 copy of the American citizen's passport photo and information pages (all pages containing Visa stamps)
• 1 copy of the Turkish citizen's id card, front and back
• Three copies of the notarized and certified eligibility to marry document
• 1 copy of the translated and notarized American passport

3c. ID photos...

• Get at least 10 of the passport-type photos taken. Each person will need at least six for the marriage report and two for the health report, so it's better to have more photos than not enough.

Step Four: Medical Report (Sağlik Ocaği)

4a. Go to any government health clinic (Sağlik Ocaği), pick up the marriage health report paperwork, which will require two passport-type photos of each party as well as blood tests (AIDS, syphillus, the normal drill) and lung X-rays.

4b. Most likely, you will have to get your blood tests taken somewhere other than the health clinic (because they don't have labs). At this point, you'll hope there is a hospital nearby and you'll navigate getting your blood drawn at the hospital. You'll have to pick up the blood test results the following day.

4c. Lung X-ray... Um, who knows why. Anyway, this is another location altogether, and you'll just have to ask around to find out where to go. Normally the lung X-ray results are ready within a few hours, so if you arrive before lunchtime, you can pick them up the same day. The results come in the form of a signature on the medical report form, which you leave with the front desk.

4d. After you have the blood test lab results and the lung X-ray results, head back to the health clinic to get the forms stamped.

Step Five: Marriage Bureau & setting the date!

5a. Document requirements change, so you may actually want to visit the marriage bureau before you do all your document gathering, just to know exactly what the most up-to-date requirements are. Either go to the marriage bureau where your Turkish spouse-to-be is registered to live or see if the municipality web site has posted the information.

5b. Make sure you go to the correct marriage bureau: the one that serves the registered residence of your future spouse. Every town has its own marriage bureau and couples are only allowed to marry at the marriage bureau that serves the Turkish citizen's registered address. If you choose to marry someplace other than where your spouse-to-be is registered, you will both have to travel to that locale and get permission to marry elsewhere. This can obviously be a problem if you are far away from where your spouse is registered.

5c. What's needed by the Turkish citizen

• Photocopy of Turkish ID & the ID itself
• Proof of where s/he is registered to live, stamped by the village alderman
• Six passport-type photos
• Completed health report

5d. What's needed by the American citizen

• Affidavit of Eligibility to Marry, notarized by USA and certified by the Turkish governor's office + copies
• Photocopy of the passport photo and information pages (all pages containing Visa stamps) & the passport itself
• Translation of the passport primary info page, notarized and stamped a million times
• Six passport-type photos
• Completed health report

5e. If you have all the papers you need, the office will fill everything out for you in their system. You'll check the info and sign a couple of times. Then all you have to do is choose the wedding date. Hooray! If the American citizen doesn't speak Turkish, you may need to hire a certified translator for the ceremony.

5f. If the woman wants to keep her last name, this should be mentioned when you sign the papers at the marriage bureau.

More info at http://turkey.usembassy.gov/getting_married.html & http://istanbul.usconsulate.gov/getting_married.html

Good luck!

Yoga Farm, Oleiros, Portugal

One donkey, one rooster, one dog, two goats, two teachers, three cats, three hens, apples, peaches, pears, figs, yoga, sun, forest, a whole lotta brown rice and even more love. That's been my home for about the last two weeks.

The Ashtang-Vinyasa Yoga retreat I found rests in central Portugal, in a sleepy village about 15 km from Oleiros. The setting is peaceful and the ambient hippy. The property overlooks a deep valley of farmlands and cork oak, pine and eucalyptus forests. Organically grown fruit trees and garden veggies dot the grounds. The retreat just opened this year, and they seem to be doing really well, as people from all over Europe end up there just by virtue of their web site: www.ashtanga-vinyasa-yoga.co.uk.

I tend to think of the last couple weeks as my stay on the yoga farm, as the setting is definitely farmlike, with animals and fruits and veggies growing everywhere. Willow, the gentle pranayama honking donkey, whoops out the most hilarious noises I have ever heard. Donkeys apparently are one of the few animals that make noise on inhalation and exhalation. I still can't stop myself from laughing every time he busts out into his tonkey song. Trying to stay focused and unsmiling during savasana when he starts up, is a feat in itself. The two brother and sister goats love to gnaw chairs and eat napkins. The male goat has nads as big as his head and the testosterone they produce reeks cheesily. He actually smells like goat cheese. The rooster and hens peck around the compost daily and the adult cats keep pretty much to themselves. The kitten with a deviated tail, Annie, climbs anything she can stick her claws into. Queenie, the dog, was rescued from the nearby village people who were about to kill her. Supposedly she'd been in a rage with fits of biting. She still limps due to a broken hip, which healed out of socket (and which happened before she was adopted). You wouldn't believe she ever had a mean streak by the way she coos for love and rolls over on her back to give you better access to rubbing her belly.

Days start at 8 a.m. with Sue's dynamic yoga practice. She teaches in the form of workshops, delving more into the spiritual side of yoga. Each day focuses on a different element of the practice: earth, wind, fire and water. These sessions also give more time in certain postures (along with suggestions on how to correct them) to ensure the body is properly grounded and aligned, allowing us to come into our postures with more integrity. Breakfast and tea follow around 10 a.m. and we have free time to sleep, sunbathe, sway in a hammock or read from their cool library until lunch at about 2 p.m.

After lunch, it's back to the hammock or for a walk on one of the several fireroad trails that stem off the property. Sometimes we go to Rio Zezere, about a 10-minute's drive away, to swim and watch the local fisherman watching us. Evening yoga at 6 p.m. is the full Ashtanga practice with Peter. I'd never done Ashtanga before, so it's interesting to practice a different kind of yoga. It's quite a strong class, but he constantly reminds us to listen to our bodies, be patient and ease off. Build good associations in the body and not bad ones: Don't over-force your poses or let pain or tension creep into the practice; breathe. A yummy (macrobiotic) dinner follows shortly after our night practice. We sit around the table and chat. Since I am here mostly on trade, I do a whole lotta dishes during the day as well. It's kind of like cleaning up after a small Thanksgiving, every day, twice a day.

After meeting lots of other people who have been practicing yoga all over the world, it makes me feel more even thankful for my yoga beginnings than I already felt. Luckily, I have a great yoga prof, Susana, in Puerto Natales, who has always focused on the spiritual side of yoga, and not just taught it as some exercise you do at the gym. She has always encouraged us to be present and tried to make sure we do what we can while maintaining proper form, that we don't compare ourselves with our peers (or even with ourselves on previous days). Apparently it is not the norm to teach yoga holistically, as a way of life. And it is a whole lot more common to egofy the practice, turning it into an exercise or flexibility competition. Which it is not. Anyway, my yoga farm days rekindled my yoga, energized and relaxed me just in time to meet up with Serkan again in Istanbul.

Information for any American citizen who wants to get married in Turkey

American citizen getting married in Turkey: Step-by-step instructions

This is a totally random post, but the process to get married in Turkey was pretty extensive. I was already making lists of what I needed to do, so I figured I would share the data here. Who knows? Maybe it'll help somebody.

Probably the most difficult part of this whole process is the fact that we were getting married in Istanbul. You need to go to a lot of different places and they are all pretty spread out. If you are getting married in a smaller town, the process should be a bit easier. However, the American citizen will likely have to get the Affidavit of eligibility to marry form from Istanbul or Ankara. Each step requires some cash and some patience, so be armed with both.

For more detailed information (with addresses and approximate costs), check out the American consulate web site in Istanbul and the American embassy web site in Ankara. Also, here are the "Getting married in Turkey" info pages for Ankara and for Istanbul.

Step One: American Embassy

NOTE: In Ankara, you will need to make an appointment first, which you can do online. In Istanbul, no appointment is required.

1a. The American party will first need to visit the American embassy or consulate in Turkey. Fill out the Affidavit for Eligibility to Marry form, which you can get at the American embassy. If you have been previously married, you will need your divorce decree or death certificate of your spouse (The document needs to be the original or a certified copy. They will not keep this document, they just need to see it.)

1b. Pay $30 USD, by cash, check or credit card. No other currency will be accepted.

1c. After you pay, the official will make you swear that everything you have written on the affidavit is true, and your affidavit will be notarized.


Step Two: Turkish government office (Valiliği)

2. The Turkish authorities will then need to certify, stamp and sign your notarized affidavit. I read in several places that you needed to make copies of the affidavit before you head to get it certified. However, they just stamped the original notarized document and did not want the copy, so making photocopies at this point is probably not necessary.


Step Three: Document copying, translations, notarizations and photos

3a. Translations...

• Translate the American citizen's passport by a certified translator. Then take the translation to get notarized. This step is pretty pricey.

3b. Photocopies...

• 1 copy of the American citizen's passport photo and information pages (all pages containing Visa stamps)
• 1 copy of the Turkish citizen's id card, front and back
• Three copies of the notarized and certified eligibility to marry document
• 1 copy of the translated and notarized American passport

3c. ID photos...

• Get at least 10 of the passport-type photos taken. Each person will need at least six for the marriage report and two for the health report, so it's better to have more photos than not enough.

Step Four: Medical Report (Sağlik Ocaği)

4a. Go to any government health clinic (Sağlik Ocaği), pick up the marriage health report paperwork, which will require two passport-type photos of each party as well as blood tests (AIDS, syphillus, the normal drill) and lung X-rays.

4b. Most likely, you will have to get your blood tests taken somewhere other than the health clinic (because they don't have labs). At this point, you'll hope there is a hospital nearby and you'll navigate getting your blood drawn at the hospital. You'll have to pick up the blood test results the following day.

4c. Lung X-ray... Um, who knows why. Anyway, this is another location altogether, and you'll just have to ask around to find out where to go. Normally the lung X-ray results are ready within a few hours, so if you arrive before lunchtime, you can pick them up the same day. The results come in the form of a signature on the medical report form, which you leave with the front desk.

4d. After you have the blood test lab results and the lung X-ray results, head back to the health clinic to get the forms stamped.

Step Five: Marriage Bureau & setting the date!

5a. Document requirements change, so you may actually want to visit the marriage bureau before you do all your document gathering, just to know exactly what the most up-to-date requirements are. Either go to the marriage bureau where your Turkish spouse-to-be is registered to live or see if the municipality web site has posted the information.

5b. Make sure you go to the correct marriage bureau: the one that serves the registered residence of your future spouse. Every town has its own marriage bureau and couples are only allowed to marry at the marriage bureau that serves the Turkish citizen's registered address. If you choose to marry someplace other than where your spouse-to-be is registered, you will both have to travel to that locale and get permission to marry elsewhere. This can obviously be a problem if you are far away from where your spouse is registered.

5c. What's needed by the Turkish citizen

• Photocopy of Turkish ID & the ID itself
• Proof of where s/he is registered to live, stamped by the village alderman
• Six passport-type photos
• Completed health report

5d. What's needed by the American citizen

• Affidavit of Eligibility to Marry, notarized by USA and certified by the Turkish governor's office + copies
• Photocopy of the passport photo and information pages (all pages containing Visa stamps) & the passport itself
• Translation of the passport primary info page, notarized and stamped a million times
• Six passport-type photos
• Completed health report

5e. If you have all the papers you need, the office will fill everything out for you in their system. You'll check the info and sign a couple of times. Then all you have to do is choose the wedding date. Hooray! If the American citizen doesn't speak Turkish, you may need to hire a certified translator for the ceremony.

5f. If the woman wants to keep her last name, this should be mentioned when you sign the papers at the marriage bureau.

More info at http://turkey.usembassy.gov/getting_married.html & http://istanbul.usconsulate.gov/getting_married.html

Good luck!

The last couple of years...

I'm back to thinking about the last couple of years. The idea of being ready to put down roots. But where? I'm back to thinking about the past couple years and their what-fors? I like having strange conversations with people who ask me eversosweetly WTF are you doing? I have pocketfuls of sweet replies. I don't tend toward the generic, but often sincerity'll just get you into trouble. However, I do sometimes think about real answers to whys after the fact.

I'm thinking about the past couple years... I've met wonderful people; climbed mountains; reached 6,000 meters with soroche; licked icebergs and walked on glaciers; swam with pink Amazonian dolphins and milky Black Sea jellyfish; huddled in overflowing overnight toiletless buses alongside chickens, sacks of potatoes and huge Andean families; viewed other galaxies from a telescope in the clearest desert nights and thought we are so small; froze to my bones, tent-trapped in a blizzard for four days, without wishing I was elsewhere; been stuck in undesirable places waiting out national protests; been knocked on my ass by the Patagonia wind, over and over; landed a many-hatted job editing a travel mag at the end of the world; learned a new language and new softwares; let go emo-baggage; sat in meditative silence for 10 days (yet still somehow manage to overreact to trivialities); realized that being is a lifelong practice; experienced too many firsts to list; found love, someone to share all the many firsts to come; found yoga and the red chair swing that hangs from a scrub oak in Portugal where I sit right now.

On the road again... not aimlessly

Tonight I feel trapped in the same cycle lots of people feel trapped in. Doing the same thing day in day out, somewhat aimlessly. I have the same questions as everybody else. What the hell am I doing? And what for? (Are you looking for adventure? Why are you here? Alone?) The only difference is my days in days out seem more edgy than, say, an office job. So what in tarnations am I complaining about?

Even while I am thinking that I am ready to be done, I know these have not been aimless years on the move; they have been for their own purpose. I needed to hop off the teeter-totter and ride the merry-go-round for a while. Itchy feet. Wanderlust. Whatever centripetally propelled search. My favorite playground activity has always been swinging, though. I suppose that means I need a little of both sides and to find balance. It's also (interestingly) one of the few recess pastimes you can do by your lonesome.

But I really wasn't looking forward to traveling by my lonesome again. It's not that one way is better than another way (accompanied or alone). They are completely different creatures. Once you are familiar and OK with both, you probably don't mind doing either one, but it's normal to have a preference--and even normal for this preference to change depending on circumstances and the time/space you occupy in your life. It's kind of like pets. Some people prefer dogs; some people'd rather have cats. Just because you think you like cats more, doesn't mean you won't someday have a dog, which you love like a child.

In some ways I started to get excited to travel on my own. The freedom! The easiness. But traveling with Serkan hasn't been difficult. On my own I might do more girly groomy things like do something with my damaged mane, or skip it all and go to farm-like yoga retreats. But the other repetitive travel crap is tiring. Men. I am not single. I'm not in the mood for flirtations. It's annoying not to be to be left alone when solo. When I am with Serkan, guys don't follow me around like the stray dogs of Puerto Natales, and the gross noises from their spittle spotted mouths are fewer. I miss that peace I have with Serkan and that sense of ...well... I guess it's security.

Lisbon and lost luggage

I arrived to Lisbon today. The day started at 3.30am with a short, expensive ride to Schipol Airport. Just me and my great big many-galloned backpack. Archteryx, blue, some black, patches on the lid. Each detail has its own special sku number at the airport. If I had it right now, I would take out a stick of incense and light it. But it still hasn't arrived. I should have known it was no good when I was told to lug it to the odd-sized baggage area before 5 a.m. Nobody was there, so I waited. A Dutch family also had some odd-sized baggage to drop, we walked around and found a manned drop.

It will get on the flight, right?
Yes, of course, no problem.

After waiting two hours at belt #9 for odd-sized items in the Lisbon airport, I describe my pack to the overly busy lost luggage office. I fill out an official lost luggage report, and I am on my way to the city center. I have no load, so I figure instead of queueing up for the taxi and paying some outrageous fare, I would just bus and metro it. I get directions and make it fine. I have even planned ahead this time, and not only do I have a place to go, I have the address and phone number of the hostel handy.

I walk up and down Avenida Altamirante Reis. It's hot, I am still in heavy travel jeans, and I lumber through the sketchy hood shouldering the most uncomfortable laptop bag I have ever met. I cannot for the life of me find the place. I pass by where it is supposed to be a couple of times and find a public phone. (Thank goodness there are public phones here.) I call. They say yeah, that is the number, you have to walk down the street more, closer to where the avenue turns into a smaller street. OK. Another hour. I am starting to feel whiney and desperate. Nobody knows the hostel, though everyone wants to help, tries to help. Normally I wouldn't be so attached to a hostel I couldn't find, I would just let it go and look for another one. But I gave the airport this invisible hostel's address, and it's where they are going to deliver my pack, if my pack ever arrives.

Eventually I hail a cab and ask if he knows where the place is. He doesn't really, but I get in anyway, because I figure we can cover more ground by auto and maybe he can call them on his cell to get better directions, in Portuguese. It turns out to be exactly where I thought it was the first time, you know, an hour or so ago when I called and they said I should keep walking downhill. The driver is horrified and says how muito perigoso this neighborhood is. I already know it's pretty dangerous, because I had been walking around the same area for hours already. You don't have any friends here? You are here all by yourself? Why? Are you looking for adventure? This is no place for you to stay. You could stay at my house. I am just driving the taxi all day anyway, and it's only seven km from the airport.

So that's where I am now. Haha, just kidding.

Really, I ended up in Portugal for reasons of yoga, rural farmlands, and dishwashing galore. I'm not looking for adventure, rather for peace, solitude. In having someplace quiet to go, I am, in fact, trying to escape travel for a bit. Traveling's hard. So often nothing works out the way it's supposed to, the way you plan it to. Just. Like. Life. This is starting to sound like a Black Sheep article. It's just that when you're out there on the road, it's only natural that you and life come within grimace distance of each other more often. How we divide ourselves from our lives is a whole other story altogether.

In Amsterdam

My friends greeted me at the Amsterdam airport in true Holland style, bikes and all. We first took a train to where the bikes were parked and then cycled home, weaving through the green parks in the breezy evening. Nico shouldered my pack and I sat on the rack behind Marjan.

First I must say that the fact of being picked up at the airport was a trip in itself. I can't remember the last time someone was inside the airport waiting for me. Normally I walk coolly past all the hugging or tearful reunions, sometimes with balloons or flowers and often with kids; and the anxious people waiting for loved ones--the faces that light up with the sight of their beloved behind me, or that slight let-down look every time another body comes into view, and it's not the anticipated body. I normally like this part of arriving and of airports in general. People giving each other the ol' once over, arms out and a step back and the upanddown looking. At this moment everybody looks good, refreshing even. The waiting's over and you get to drink each other in, tall glasses of cool water. These reunions make me smile and, admittedly often choke me up a little. So it was cool to be hugging this time and not just watching everybody else hug.

Rain scented that first evening, but it didn't start to tip until the next morning. And tip it did. I kept thinking, July? I am sissying out to the cold again after being so long in Turkey. But even though it rains, just a little every day, the days are also lovely. Green and flowery. Songbirds and rustling leaves of ubiquitous trees, which sound like rain even when the sun's drying everything off.

We've been having a lot of fun, cooking, catching up, museuming and eating delicious meals. Marjan and I kayaked through the canals for a few hours on Sunday up north a little in Waterland. We parked the kayaks at a tea garden for some tea and cake about halfway. The whole time I was amazed at how "perfect" everything is. I don't think I have ever been to a place so manicured. The houses are all different, so it's not like the wacky manicured look of our new age of cookie-cutter, tract housing. Here it feels simultaneously cute yet strange. What makes perfect perfect, and when is perfect too perfect? All super picturesque in any case.

For dinner we met up with Nico to eat Thai food, which I haven't had since I was last in California. Red coconut curry, mmmm. We took a detour on the way home to stroll through the red-light district, where apparently there are guided tours. I suppose that is obvious, but it is a pretty funny sight: one tour leader showing off a window full of spiffy condoms or elaborate dildos to 10 some odd pot-bellied tourists donning cameras and hats and, yes, even Hawaiian T-shirts.

Museums here are amazing, though overfull. I think the only way to enjoy them is to take the audio tours. The stories they give, for example, of Van Gogh's life and the history surrounding certain works whisk you up out of the crowd. Informative and moving, the audio slows you down so you can enjoy each piece a little more, with less sensitivity to the big heads that inevitably and frequently block your view.

Learning to swim

It's summer and it's Monday. Today was my last day running on the Black Sea shore, Samsun-side. It was my most quiet run since I've been here (at least three weeks?). The water, like glass. Not even the tiniest beginning of a wave. The high tide pushed me further up onto the sand, which was stained with seaweed and milky blobs of jellyfish.

The kids are out of school and many people are out of work, so enjoying the beach before the high sun at noon seems to be the best plan. Blond girls sunbathe. Grandparents watch their grandkids play in the sand. Dads teach their sons how to swim. Hardly anybody is in the water, because it's Monday and the beach isn't near as packed as it is on the weekends. In the sea are some young boys playing with beach toys, toddlers with neon-colored arm floaties, old men with hair backs, and a little futher out, the dads teaching their sons swim. No matter what part of the beach I run on, there is a dad out there with his crying child. Trying to get that kid to swim. The kids yell for their mothers and say they don't like it. Every scene is the same: the dad laughing slightly, saying come on, come on, just try it one more time.

A side note on languages. When I was thinking about the absurdly waveless see, I thought, "Nothing to wave hola to." And then I thought how in English the word for the ocean's waves and the act of waving hello or goodbye is the same. In Spanish, ocean waves are olas. And hello is hola. Our languages seem to point to wanting some sort of interaction with our environment. An ebb and flow kinda thing. End side note.

Afghans in Turkey

I have plotted my next adventure. In a couple of days, I leave for Istanbul and then off to Holland to visit a friend, Marjan, who I first met in Patagonia. I hope to see another couple of scattered-about Dutch friends while I am there as well, if it works out. The ticket there was an amazing 4 Euros + minimal taxes. Super.

It will be good to be on the move again. I enjoyed settling down for a bit at Serkan's parents' house, but I've also found it difficult to develop my routine. Some element of weirdness is to be expected, since we can't really communicate with each other. (It's been good for my Turkish. I still can't really speak, but I do understand more than when I started.) Plus I have officially spent more consecutive days in Samsun than Serkan has since he first left when he was 18. I've just spent a beautiful day with his mom and his brother's family. I still have the kids voices ringing in my ears. It's funny, but I can tell already that I will miss them.

This set up where I live with my sweetheart's family with whom I can hardly communicate while he is away has been quite the experiment. There's been a psychologically interesting part, mainly what's triggered when I start tiptoeing inside someone else's world. (The bastard question marks dangle their feet: "someone else's world?" "tiptoeing?" Though I am a master tiptoer, it's still kind of uncomfortable. My discomfort has only to do with me--nothing to do with anybody else (of course). Everyone has been crazy welcoming. In fact, I've received so many gifts, there's no way we can bring everything back with us to Patagonia. Some gifts are too precious, like the handstitched body scrubber from Serkan's mom. She crochets these amazing, exfoliating, super sudsy foaming wash cloths for the whole family. Her son-in-law loves his so much: To make sure nobody else uses it, after he bathes he stores the washrag in the pocket of his robe, you know, for safe keeping. Each rag could be one square in an afghan. Someday I think we should unite all the cloths into a hodgepodge family heirloom. Would that be gross?

Anyway, yeah, the discomfort is a mini psychic trigger for me. It has to do with revisiting childhood roles. We all have them, and they are, for the most part, bad habits meant to be tamed or flat out broken. Otherwise we end up playing out our Oedipal disasters in our adult relationships, and who wants that?

My role was that of the anemic tiptoer. Invisible bullet dodger. Mostly nobody even knew that I was anemic or that there were bullets to dodge. I have, I hope, sloughed off that kid identity. But it crops up again sometimes, especially in uncomfortable situations where I feel trapped in "somebody else's" world. Part of me refuses to enter that world and part of my is utterly incapacitated by it. Stuck inside, forever outside. There's something so familiar about this kind of discomfort, which dusts off the little girl in me. She says: Time to blow this popstand.

My zen side says, "You are not your past. You are not your identity. You are not a you or an I. You are light and love and one... just like everybody else. In which case there are no human separations. Your ego mind is creating these separations to keep itself in power, in control and in tact. Om. [white space] My literature side is intrigued by the idea of identity and identities and could write essays on the subject, has written essays on the subject. My therapy side says to turn the rock over in my hand until it becomes glossy from the grip. Crack open the stone, come to terms with it, understand its guts and its voices, listen to each and reunite them. [Time-is-up-buzz of the 50-minute alarm] My writer side says, "Ummm. OK. I am just going to Amsterdam and it's really not that big of a deal." My crafty side says to make a hodgepodge afghan outta this.

Understanding noises

I sit on a balcony about seven stories above the noisy street. Birdsong and saws, car alarms and hammering, motorcycles, diesel vehicles, horn honking and dropped metal tools. Occasional hollaring and calls to prayer over the loudspeakers.

Beside me is a 1930s radio, which Serkan's father found and repaired a decade or so ago. The station dial has numbered frequencies, but it also lists locations all over Europe, a bit of the Middle East and northern Africa. I keep it ever on the station closest to Moskva/Moscow. The music is crazily varied, but mostly it plays jazz, big band, some blues and classical. Old music melodying out of the old speakers puts the radio to best use, at least it seems more authentic to me.

The music splashes out of its borders sometimes. Earlier this morning: Shakira, Turkish pop songs, Like a Virgin and Pet Shop Boys. Then some Sunday morning music for the kids, some choir songs and now a little opera. Friday and Saturday nights are my favorite, mostly blues and big band tunes, which remind me of one of my favorite radio shows back home. Crazy 'Bout the Blues hosted that sexy-voiced diva, Kathleen Lawton.

Now a circumcision party is parading by below. 'Tis the season for circumcision. The young boys (usually between 6-9 years old) dress up royally in white sultan-like suits with gold embroidery, crowned by fancy white hats. People here seem to hire the same red classic Mustang convertible for the parade. The boy stands up in the convertible and waves at passersby, while a line of balloon-adorned cars trails him, honking. The caboose always seems to be a pickup with three old men drumming in its bed. I wonder if they are hired too. The procession and happy boy waving is, I imagine, pre-circumcision.

I am still in Samsun. Serkan found work a few hours away, damn dam construction, dangling down a canyon on a thin cord in sweltering heat and knocking out the loose rock. There's really no way for us to be together for the next month or so. We had spent pretty much every minute together since April, which is just insane if you think about it. It's good to have a break, I tell myself, but mostly it is strange to be separated.

The idea was for me to set up shop at his parents' house, catch some solitude, run, write and so on. I've been wanting to settle down for a while and enjoy some semblance of a routine. His folks were planning to leave to "the village" for a month or so to tend the hazelnut fields. But plans change, as plans do. His dad never left and his mom is returning in a few days. So, with solitude not so solo, I am also mapping out a temporary escape. I have to hop the border anyway to renew my tourist visa.

In the meantime, I am enjoying theatrical conversations with Baba (papa). We seem to understand each other. He has the most creative ways of explaining things, using utensils or maps or pictures, and a whole lotta gestures. I can't say much, though I'm speaking more and more... as usual, my shyness decreasing over time. Mostly my end of the conversations consists of evet evet, çok güzel, iyi and other non-word sounds. (Yes yes, very pretty/nice/beautiful/etc., good.) All very positive as you can see.

Travel or Did you find what you were looking for?

Travel is a funny concept. The whys behind it. Some people travel to check continents and countries off their list, some to increase the percentage of the world they've visited for Facebook applications. Others skip off to sunny resort spots for week-long beach vacations spent mostly by the hotel pool. For some travel is a bug, an addiction. I can't say what the addiction is exactly. It's exciting, it's constant learning, expansion and the chance to test yourself a bit, in total immersion. That little thrill you get when you fly up and away, watching the city shrink below. Your mundane problems shrinking with the city. Or when you hop on a bus, leaving town A and headed to town B; those moments between places tend to grace us with extreme aliveness. That odd joy I experience on buses is reason enough for me to travel. It feels like sticking your head out the window of a car at high speed. For a moment there's too much air to take in so that you can hardly breathe, and then you do breathe, deep, full, exhilarating breaths.

This morning I was wondering, as I occasionally do, what my family and close friends must think of me sometimes. There's Heather off to another country, trying to learn another language... For what? Even if nobody else wonders, I guess I do. In Puerto Natales, there's a pretty hefty community of expats, and we are all a little nutty. Maybe everyone who lands somewhere else is either running away from something or searching for something. Before I left the States, over two years ago now, many friends said: I hope you find what you are looking for. Someone even asked me recently if I had found what I was looking for. I can't say that I've been searching for something in particular, and even if I was, I still haven't the foggiest idea of what that thing might be.

What I have found is that everything we need, we already have. There's nothing magical to discover. Maybe just a slight flip in perspective. Instead of outside, look inside. That's the stuff of enlightened beings at least. Since I am not one of those, I have to settle for vacillating. When I notice I'm looking in the wrong direction, I try to refocus. Focusing on the 'right' thing is a constant struggle of course. (Meditation helps a lot, but first you have to meditate regularly, which is also aided by a settling down of sorts.) I certainly didn't have to travel at all to come to these probably obvious realizations.

While abroad I found some things outside myself, as well, like the love of my life. So, I feel pretty darn lucky, since it was highly unlikely we would have met if I stayed in California. Who believes in destiny? :) Of course it's pretty unlikely that we met in the deep dark south of South America, too, since I'm from North America and he's from Turkey. I certainly wasn't looking for love, especially not in Puerto Natales. Now here I am in Turkey, on the road again, not settling down as planned. Travel is a funny concept and life a green live thing, as a frog or a blade of grass.

Samsun, Turkey

I'm where the mosque is loud and the new apartment construction relentless. Mornings--since I'm up anyway with the morning call to prayer or the early hammering--I 've begun to run warm and barefoot on the beach by the Black Sea between two large rivers (one named Red River, one named Green River). The rivers empty their underpinnings into the Black Sea, mixing eventually and coloring this part of the sea a kelpy brown. Yesterday the jellyfish swarmed in, looking not mystical at all, but more like spent condoms tossed to sea, and throbbing. Today, Saturday, only plastic bags and winged black ants bobbed near shore on the nods of waves.

On the shore the men yell hoarsely shouldering their hot simits for sale. "Çok sicak! Çok sicak!" (Very hot! Very hot!). The refrain echoes the small waves curling in from the sea. His voice ebbs and flows as he distances himself and boomerangs back again, back and forth on the beach for hours walking the damp, cool part of the sand. Simits are thinly rolled out rings of bread, covered in sesame seeds and baked. Whether the bearer of simits is hotly yelling about the weather or about his pretzel-like snacks is unclear. By midday the hottest part of the beach is the sand underfoot. Although the sun-warmed simits may be mildly calid.

I am becoming a fan of sesame seeds, slightly roasted. And of hazelnuts, also slightly roasted. And feta cheese, known simply as "white cheese." White cheese comes in all kinds of flavors, with varying levels of salination, underground aging and fat content. And olives, delicious black olives, slightly wrinkled. I've been bracing myself against the moment where I tire of eating olives, where I OD, so to speak, but it hasn't happened yet, and I don't think I've gone a day without munching on at least five drops of black gold.

National Geographic Accident

When I was a Freshman or Sophomore in high school, some time around 1993, I had to write a project concerning something anthropological, I reckon, although I don't remember for what class. History? English? "Social Studies"? Was Social Studies a class in high school? I can't remember any of this. In fact I don't remember much of high school at all, even though I was the most sober straight-A kid ever... for the most part. What I do remember is a mix of greasy gross cheese bread with a burp of ketchup at the midmorning break for breakfast, women's chorus at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. before school started, rabid note passing, foggy bits of the GHS LitMag meetings, and somehow--repeatedly--losing my key to the house.

But this isn't about any of that. It's about west African cultures, yellow magazines and serendipity. When I was a Freshman or Sophomore in high school, I wrote a report on the Dogon peoples of Mali. Most--if not all--of my research came at the last minute from an article I found in National Geographic, October 1990 edition. The little I'd remembered about the Dogon from this article had to do with their treatment of women: a "crazy" young girl living with her ankles shackled; and menstruating women cast away during their periods to a house adorned with vile depictions of females with huge genitals. This took up only sentences in the hefty article, and maybe didn't even make it into my school report. But it makes sense that I remember the woman parts, because of the tenuous space in womanhood that I was pubescing into, first with a deteriorating mother and then motherless among men. If I did write about the tribe's women in my report it marks the beginning of the slew of women-issue essays that I would write well into my university years.

More than the article, however, I remember my dad and brother teasing me about doing a report on a wacky culture. It was gentle teasing, the kind that might actually make you laugh, in retrospect at least. (I probably cracked only half a smile at the time.) It was the kind of teasing that occurs when there is nothing else to say. The same way that little boys and girls may flirt by hitting or making fun of each other to feel close for a moment in each others' presence. Teasing as an alternative to uncomfortable silence, which sometimes pervades whole households.

But this isn't about that either. It's about serendipity. Defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident." Horace Walpole first coined the term serendipity in a letter of January 28, 1754, where he discusses a discovery, which '"is of that kind which [he] call[s] Serendipity, a very expressive word." Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of "a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...."' (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/serendipity)

I can't say that I remembered that report was on the Dogon culture or that the info came out of a NatGeo mag. And I certainly wouldn't have known which year the article appeared. Memory is a fickle flimsy thing after all.

A week ago, the forgotten facts resurfaced. I was sitting in an office, waiting for Serkan while he filled out some work forms. A waiting room of sorts with a view to the Ankara skyline, the noisy streets below and Turkish conversations out of my reach on the couch across from me. I started browsing the collection of National Geographics, scanning their spines from new to old, from Turkish to English. The discomfort of waiting, not understanding my surroundings, trying to look cool and absorbed, brought me easily to Elizabeth Bishop's poem In the Waiting Room--though her little girl was 8 and I am 31. (Someday when I retell this 'story' I'll have been less than 10 years old too.)

Only about 10 NGs were in English. I wondered, in the quiet space of the thoughts beneath thoughts: What was happening in the the world while Mom was dying? And wouldn't it be crazy if I found the article I used for that report? I wouldn't be able to wait to tell Dad. He'll remember this article too and we'll share a moment. I picked out one with rainbow fishes under the sea on the cover and put it back. I skipped over the one with a Cappadocia article in it, even though we had just visited there. Then I took the collection's oldest National Geographic off the shelf and sat down with it. The feature articles were about global warming ("Under the Sun--Is Our World Warming?") and an amazing civilization of climbers with an impressive funeral culture ("Mali's Dogon People").

I read the Dogon article straight through in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion, jumping ahead at the beginning of each new paragraph to see if something in it seemed familiar. Had I read this before? Is this the fodder of that decade-old report? What are the chances of that? This article here in Turkey? I'm so close, I could go there! To Mali. To the Bandigara Cliffs. Back in time.

Ercan, Serkan's friend, asks me what I am reading so intently; is it in English? I tell him the story, maybe my voice even cracks. So much bundled inside these 27 pages, more than the article itself or its rediscovery. Briefly a parallel universe unfolded itself, unpacking distance and space and time. But what makes a discovery serendipitous anyway? Can my second encounter with the Dogon still be considered a happy accident if at some very hidden level I thought I might actually reunite with the article? Before last week, the story had meant nothing to me, not even a blip on the old radar. Now I'm not sure what the connections and reconnections mean, if anything, but I write about them anyway.

A soon to be relevant poem about falling...

...about stumbling suddenly into personhood, specifically into womanhood.
By Elizabeth Bishop, one of my favorites.

In the Waiting Room
by Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

ref: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15211

Ankara to Samsun from the air conditioned bus...

A bull mounts a heifer while the shepherds in yellow slickers drive them slick toward the storm, and bolts touch the ground green pasture from granite sky. Lightning flashes at quickening intervals. Maybe there is thunder, which I don’t hear behind my ears corked by earphones and the chorus of sax, piano and percussion akin to big band; behind the Turkish news blaring on the drop down TVs—thick white all-cap captions on red rectangular backdrops like skinny Turkish flags censoring the suit of the newscaster right where his nipples would be; and behind the hum of the bus on the wet asphalt.

Sometimes the lightening pinks or blues the dusk, stayed stuck behind the storm or else it breaks through and zigs horizontal, aligned with the horizon. The bus totters toward Samsun, where Serkan's parents live. I'd been nervous up to this point, but now I'm calm and sleepy, able at least to offer some chocolate-covered cotton candy truffles, bought from the 30-minute, 75-kurus bathroom break at the gas station-slash-tea garden in the middle of nowhere.

By the time the bus reaches the next town, it's night and rain. Rivers flood the streets and the downpour paints the bus windows, sheets of water distorting everything wavy outside. Thunder roars out the maw of sky, ending in a sound like tin trash bins dropping clunk clack clack to the cement.

Aladağlar Red Mountains

We escaped to the Red Mountains (Aladağlar) for a few days of backpacking from Ankara, the capital, busy yet efficient city. It's the first time I've been trekking since Chile, and it was so nice to be back to it! The mountains are exposed and not forested at all, so the morning sun would already start to bake us in the tent by 7 a.m. Even so, the nights were cool enough for me to wear a wool hat and hiking during the day still proved much cooler than in the city.

Our first night out, we watched the stars deepen and wondered which planets those brightest stars were. When suddenly: A faraway flash in the sky. No clouds.

Serkan: Lightning?
Me: but there's no thunder.
S: It might rain on us.
Me: Maybe somebody is taking pictures. There's a tent down in the valley.
S: Yeah, it's god. As a witness to our love because the moon's not out to see us. God says, What a beautiful couple, Let me snap some photos of them.
Me laughs herself into a ball.

No rain or thunder that night, just distant gray lightning.

Capadoccia Roundup

Everywhere we go Serkan seems to hook us up somehow. Everyone is so talkative, not to me so much, because I don't understand anything. Though, that is becoming less and less true. Every once in a while, I bust out with a moment of utter understanding. I'm just unable to respond in Turkish. It's nice, however, to have those moments of clarity, to feel like a little kid again, extremely proud of oneself for accomplishing a new feat.

Our first day in Cappadocia, we went out for a walk to photograph some of the manmade structures in the rock around Ürgüp. One place was so elaborate, it even had a built in dining area complete with a table and benches. All of these houses and rooms are vacant now, which leaves them open to mountains of litter, urinating men and nighttime beer guzzling, which evidently ends, ceremonially, by breaking the brown bottles.

In the evening we walked toward a UNESCO world heritage site to check it out and said hello to the night guard there. It was already dusk, and it didn't look like we'd be allowed to loiter, but Serkan asked if it would be alright if we went in. Not only were we able to pass. The night guard proceeded to give us a tour of everything, even the buildings that were closed up for restoration. He took us into the old church (eventually converted into a mosque), the hamam (bath house), stables, wine cellars, all over. Serkan did his best to translate all the details for me, but the night guide went into about a 30-minute story on the Greek dude/martyr who used to sleep in the stable to be closer to the animals. If it was good enough for the animals, it was good enough for him. I did not get the 30-minute version of that story.

The next day we took a bus to Uçisar, known as Pigeon Valley, because most of the rock formations in this area are replete with nesting nooks for the pigeons (aka doves, famous hippie symbols of peace and love). We can only take the bus so far and then have to walk a few kilometers into town. We'd walked less than five minutes before an old man in an old blue pick-up picked us up. We weren't even hitchhiking. He just asked if we wanted a ride. We hopped in, and he told us how he is one of the area's most prominent carpenters, an expert in stone masonry. Then he pointed out the houses, which he had built, many of them more than a decade older than me.

The following day, the same thing happened on our way back from visiting the gigantic, multi-level underground city in Kaymakli. As we walked toward the main road to wait for the bus, a man in a fancy van asked us if we were going to Nevşehir--which we were to catch the next bus back to our temporary home in Ürgüp. He took us to the bus stop in Nevşehir, and before he dropped us off, he gifted us a handful of Napolean cherries and the most delicious apricot I have ever tasted.

We also visited the Göreme Open Air Museum, where we must have ducked into about 20 cave churches with Byzantine frescoes. Lovely, cool respites from the heat outside. On the way down the hill, back into the town of Göreme, we passed by a sign that said Fairy Chimney Valley or something like that. It was hot out and neither one of us was really feeling the whole walk-in-the-heat thing, but we figured we should check it out, just for a few minutes. As in life, one path led to another, until we were mini-trekking through the valley on the way to a different town altogether. A couple hours later, on our approach to the tiny village of Çavuşin, we were actually outrunning dark clouds, violent dusty winds and miniature twisters. The next bus wouldn't arrive for another hour, but we were able to hire a driver for only 15 lira back to Ürgüp. The downpour started once we jumped in the car. Whew.

Fairyland

We arrived to Ürgüp around 6 a.m. on the overnight bus. The sun rose during our approach to town, splashing pink hues over the stone alleys, while the morning’s blue hot air balloons ascended. When we stepped off the bus to find a place to stay, the sky was already lighting up the apparent ghost town in the yellow phase of early morning. We walked up the street and up the stairs toward a mini plaza raised above the streets around it. All the tables and chairs were out, left to sit alone throughout the night, though none of the cafes or shops were open. Nobody in the streets. We sat down at one of the tables wishing for tea and joked how in Chile we would never see so many tables and chairs, even fridges cooling iced teas and water left out in plain sight overnight. In most places the furniture would be stolen or vandalized. Of course there’s a lot of vandalism in Turkey as well, mostly of national treasures, like the landscape and buildings carved into the rock in Cappadocia. It’s the same lack of respect for natural and/or ancient wonders we see everywhere. There’s really no escaping it, an education lack, but it’s another story.

Cappadocia may very well be one of my favorite places. After writing that though, it’s impossible to make such sweeping statements. In any case, Cappadocia is magic, it is lunar. It’s bizarre. The landscape created by volcano eruptions around 30 million years ago, covering the area with ash that eventually hardened. The rock, known as tuff is extremely malleable by weather and by people. Over time the rock has disintegrated creating spiky valleys known as fairy chimneys. They say the early inhabitants of Cappadocia called myriad towers “fairy chimneys” because they believed them to be the chimneys of fairies, who lived underground. What’s more amazing than the shape of the land, though, is the fact that people carved homes into the rock. Not just homes, there are entire underground cities that go down seven or so levels. Old homes were connected to escape routes and tunnels below the Earth. Today you can stay in renovated cave hostels, with rooms etched out from the rock or chill out in underground bars. There is a definite Flinstone feel; even a few eponymous businesses to boot.

Dreams

I keep having the same dream: Everyone around me is speaking Turkish, and I don't understand. The feeling is distinct and has its own evolution, depending on the time of day, who we are with, etc. Sometimes I try really hard to follow the conversation, and I can, relying mostly on gestures or place names or other familiar sounding words I hear: kayak, Patagonia, California. Other times I check out completely, submarining into my own world, which can be small or colorful or huge or sleepy, depending on the time of day, who we are with, etc.

But the real question is: If I can't speak Turkish in real life, what language are they speaking in my dream? Does my subconscious know Turkish? Or is it just some nonsense filler to help me feel that slight disunderstanding discomfort while I sleep? Maybe all I have to do is relax and start speaking in tongues. More likely I need to study more.