So I’ve been showering with a lemon lately.  Or, more accurately, a lemon-shaped piece of soap.  This is yet another new experience that I have been lucky to have as a result of being in Turkey.

It is not an unpleasant thing, showering with my lemon-shaped soap, but it is, in my opinion, the secondmost tricky thing that I have had to do (the first being learning how to use a squat toilet without getting wet…eww).  The initial problem with showering with lemon-like soap is that it is yellow, like a lemon.  Now, one cannot forget that I am in Turkey, and I am not particularly convinced that Turkey has any sort of agency that completes work similar to that of the Food and Drug Administration in the US.  I’m not saying that I put a lot of faith in the FDA, but I do trust it enough to give me an idea of whether the yellow layering on my soap that seems to give my hands a neon-like shean is going to keep me from having children later in life or not.  Since I don’t have any assurances that the former will not happen, unlikely though it may seem, the first action that I must take before washing myself with the lemon soap is to wash the soap itself until the strange yellow leaves its surface.  Once this is done, the real problem begins.  The difficult part about showering with a piece of soap that is shaped like a lemon is that it doesn’t have many grooves.  Therefore, keeping a grasp on the lemon and moving it enough to bring about a lather is quite difficult.

The soap doesn’t smell like lemon.  That should be mentioned.

Anyway, the reason why I brought up the soap to begin with is that it is from a city called Edirne, which is located near Istanbul.  Edirne is famous for one of its mosques, which is okay–big, decorative, holy.  But it is the second thing that Edirne is known for that makes it a tourist hot-spot, and that is its fruit-shaped soaps.

No matter your preference–apple, orange…banana…you can find soap that will fool even the cleverest of the clever into taking a big bite out of one if you happen to leave it in a nice basket (which is often included) on the kitchen table.

So, basically, my recommendation is this: go to Turkey.  Find your way to out-of-the-way Edirne, and buy yourself some lira-and-a-half soap.  Then bring it home and fool your friends.  Just don’t be surprised if, later, there’s a lemon in the shower.

Okay, so Syria is dirty.  The streets are dusty, the beds have bugs, there was a mysterious booger in my shower.  That’s fine.  I can understand that.  Dirt is a part of life, bugs need beds, too, and sometimes you just can’t find a tissue…in the bathroom.  Whatever.  I can deal with that.  It is on the outside.  I, on the inside, am clean and at peace with the outside grossness.  The problem comes when the badness without becomes the wretchedness within.

I, along with many of my professors and fellow students, became infected with some sort (or variety of) bacteria while in Aleppo and Damascus.  When I saw the first girl throwing up, I felt very bad for her, but I also thanked my lucky stars that it wasn’t me.  Well, I guess those burning balls of gas in the sky didn’t get my thanks fast enough, because soon afterwards I came down with something similar.  It made trecking through Syria interesting, but the real fun came when I got back to Alanya.

I don’t know what made me think that after I got back to my apartment, I would magically feel better.  I think that just NOT BEING IN SYRIA was considered by all of us to be the first step towards recovery, but we were oh-so-wrong.  Some of our systems worsened, and after a particularly rough Sunday night, I decided to go with some of my peers to the hospital to be tested to see if I was the most recent victim of some mild form of biological warfare.  (You’ve got to admit, it would be sneeky.–Don’t infect people with something that kills them, infect them with something that causes mass vomiting, so that not only are they incapacitated, but also hospitals are flooded with smelly, stomach bile-dripping patients.  The clean-up alone could take hundreds, if not thousands, of man-hours if enough people are infected.)

When I was at the hospital, one of the first things that I noticed was the fly that was buzzing around.  This wasn’t just a normal fly.  It was like the fly from Hell.  A hell where the ground, the walls, and the ceilings are made of poo, and only poo.  It was absolutely disgusting.  And I swear that its red eyes were plotting and demonic.  Its sole purpose in life must have been to spread the diseases of the patients to one another, so that no one who ever set foot in that hospital could ever be well again.  I hate that fly.

Anyway, after some testing and unprofessional information sharing on the part of the doctor and the staff, we were all informed that Dr. IHaveAnUndergraduateDegreeInMedicine told us that he didn’t know what was wrong with us, so he was prescribing us all antibiotics and some other medication to share, and we should feel better soon.  Thanks, Doc.

None of us are better yet, but we’ll see how it goes.  I have one more pill of my prescription left, then it’s back to square one.  Maybe I can become the Typhoid Mary of Asia Minor.  That wasn’t on the Life Experience List, but I could add it in somewhere between sky diving and seeing the next Twilight movie.

Our next city of destination was Damascus.  On the way there, we stopped at a Christian village called Maayoula.  It is really rare to find a lot of Christians together in one place in Syria, but this village was one of the places.  There is a church there that supposedly has the oldest alter in the world and the only relic that has a depiction of the last supper and the Crucifixion on the same painting.  The town is also one of the last that still speaks a form of Aramaic, which was really unique.

I came down with a Syrian stomach virus my last day in Aleppo, so it’s a little bit harder to report on Damascus, but it was a cool city.  I went to the National Archaeological Museum and the main mosque there, which is where the remains of Saint John the Baptist, Sallah Aldin, and one of the Prophet’s grandsons are kept…supposedly.  I also went to the bazaar there, but it was a little too much for me.  It was a lot like an indoor shopping mall, only dirtier and louder and hotter. Of course, that didn’t stop me from spending way too much money.

It was fun being sick in my hotel room in Damascus (one that wasn’t quite clean).  It would be one thing if I could tell myself that that is just how Damascus is…run-down and dirty.  But it’s not, and my biggest reminder was the view of the Four Seasons across the street from my hotel.  Nice.  I think that that is where my missing the West started in earnest.  The special on living in DC on the BBC didn’t help much, either, but oh, well!  I’ll get over it.  And I still love Syria!

On the way back to the border we went to a crusader castle called the Crac des Chevaliers, which was really, really neat.  You could go exploring anywhere that you liked, and it was very exciting to be able to walk around where the crusaders had hundreds of years ago.   The views over the Syrian landscape were wonderful, as it was not only tall but also on a hill-like mountain.

We got back into Antakya later that night, where we stayed the night in the hotel that we had stayed in during the first couple of nights of our excursion.  We then set out the next morning for another twelve hours of travelling through beautiful yet scary-as-hell Rough Cilicia.  We finally got back, ordered pizza, and commiserated over the fact that we were all sick from dread Syrian diseases, and our damned Internet was out of commission.  Oh, what a trip!

Seriously, though, Syria was amazing and I loved it and I recommend going to anyone and everyone…unless you are a small child, the elderly, pregnant, or have a heart condition, that is.  Just in case!

During our first six weeks in Turkey, our professors would constantly ask us questions like, “You think it’s hot now?…Just wait until Syria!” or “You think you have to dress concervatively now?…Just wait until Syria!” or “You think that silver was cheap here?…Just wait until Syria!” or “You think the food is inedible here?…Just wait until Syria!” or “You think that the squat toilets are bad here?…Just wait until Syria!” or “You think that getting groped on the bus was unpleasant here?…Just wait until Syria!”  So needless to say, we were all a little nervous and a little excited about going to Syria.  Some of us (the smart ones) packed an extra bag full of individually wrapped food and hand wipes to keep them safe.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough.

Crossing the border into Syria was fun, and by fun I mean really crappy.  I have to keep the last seven pages of my passport blank for my South African visa, so border crossings are a little worrisome.  Throw in the Syrian soldiers with guns and you’ve got a somewhat uncomfortable situation.  We had a long wait, and our thumb-prints taken, but we eventually got into the country.  I didn’t expect it, but the landscape changed suddenly.  At first I thought that it was just psychological—that I just felt that since Turkey is Asia-Minor and Syria is the Middle-East, Syria would be more arid and less green than Turkey.  But it really is.  I guess that helped in defining the border.  I paid particular attention when I came back, so I’m sure it wasn’t just in my head.  I LOVE Syria.  There are these little houses made of the rock that makes up basically the entire country (handy), and the doors are spectacular.  They are all made of iron or some kind of sheet metal, depending on the style.  The sheet metal is painted in bright colors and usually has a design stamped in the middle of them.  The iron doors are made of bent metal bars that form sometimes pretty intricate patterns.  It is particularly interesting, because these doors are sometimes the only part of a house or wall that is decorative.

Getting into Aleppo was fantastic, because I could feel right away that I really liked the city  I can’t really explain why.  It was dirty and crowded and hot and the women there veil completely for the most part, which makes me look pretty loose in comparison despite my conservative clothing choices, but it is wonderful.  The architecture is beautiful, especially in the old Christian Quarter and the Old City.  The whole city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it has a large castle built on a man-made mound in the middle of it.  The castle is pretty well preserved, and we went scrambling on it.

The market in Aleppo is very busy and less touristy than the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, which I appreciated.  There were a lot of people selling meat from stalls which seemed to lack refrigeration (not really a good idea in Syria, even in October—it was still freaking hot there).  Liver is a big seller there, and you could see the veiny sacs hanging at most of the stalls.  I didn’t opt for the meat, but I did do my fair share of shopping.

While we were in Aleppo we made a day trip to some of the Dead Cities, abandoned ruins of ancient cities.  They were really interesting, and no one pays much attention to them.  One of them was located next to a farmhouse.  The family that lived there had two children who were adorable.  We also stopped at a Roman Road that was still usable, at least by the locals without cars, which I find impressive.  That day we also went to the place where Saint Simeon lived on a column for almost forty years.   That’s basically his story.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the guy was nuts, but he MIGHT have been a messanger of God.  You never really can know for SURE, can you?  That location was originally built using money from the state, so it was super-impressive and had great views of the landscape to boot!

I left for Antakya early last Friday morning.  We drove through Rough Cilicia, which is a mountainous region in the central/eastern part of Turkey.  The main road going through this region to our destination runs along the Mediterranean, so we spent the majority of the time on a winding road that went along cliffs and mountains dropping into the sea.  It was absolutely stunning, but also REALLY scary, because a lot of the roads didn’t even have guard rails, and our bus was big. About half-way through Rough Cilicia we stopped at the southern-most point in Turkey at an ancient city called Anemur.  It had some amazing ruins, including tombs that were more like houses, with a room for the dead, a room for visiting the dead, and sometimes a courtyard for visiting with living relatives.  People would pack picnics and hang out at the tombs of their loved ones.  There are paintings and mosaics on the walls of these tombs, and we saw a beautiful floor mosaic that is usually covered with dirt, as is the practice at ruins in Turkey, to preserve it.  Being the southern-most point in Turkey, Anemur is on the sea, and we walked down to see the ruins on the water.  The beach was amazing.  Sand isn’t that prevalent in Turkey.  Here, the ground was made up of large rocks in a lot of really pretty colors, including purple and green, along with pieces of ancient brick and a little bit of sea glass.  It was fantastic.

After Rough Cilicia came Smooth Cilicia, which is, as the name would suggest, relatively flat.  We eventually left the Mediterranean behind and got to Antakya.  Technically the Southeast isn’t the safest place to be, because the Kurdish resistance is located there.  I don’t know how familiar you are with the Kurdish issue in Turkey, but the Kurds are an ethnic and cultural group that has been and is oppressed by the Turkish government.  The government has done things like adopting an alphabet that doesn’t have some letters, including the letter “W,” while many Kurds have names that include that letter.  There are other bigger examples of the oppression, but basically Turkey doesn’t want the Kurdish culture to survive, and this makes some Kurds angry.  Some of them have joined a resistance movement fighting for their own nation.  It is tricky, because some of these people live on the Iranian border or in Iran itself.  They used to attack civilians a lot, but now it is mostly the military..  It is a touch issue.  Anyway, nearer to Antakya we saw some political graffiti, but that was all.  I wasn’t really concerned—it is worse in the villages than anywhere—but it was interesting to see the physical evidence of the movement.

Antakya is a really interesting city.  It is primarily Muslim, but it is also the location of an Orthodox patriarchate and some Christian and Catholic churches.  I went to an Orthodox mass conducted in Arabic.  It was really interesting.  Have you ever been to an Orthodox church?  Everything is really ornate and the masses are very ritualized.  I really like the smell of the incense—not so much for the smell itself, but because it pulls you into the mass using one of the senses that doesn’t usually get that much attention.  I also visited Saint Peter’s Church, which is located in a cave in one of the mountains overlooking the city).  I also hiked to a citadel overlooking the city.  It required some bush-whacking, but it was worth it.  There are a lot of big ruins in this part of the world.  It’s nice, because that means that most of them don’t get much attention, leaving them uncommercialized and fairly deserted.  We were the only ones on the citadel that afternoon.

The food in Antakya was really good compared to some Turkish food.  There was even humus, something that we had been waiting for for a while.  Who knew that humus wasn’t actually found in every restaurant within a ten-mile radius of the Mediterranean?  The only thing that didn’t sound incredibly appealing was the local fast food restaurant, Liver Burger.

I feel like now is an opportune time to comment on the wonder that is being in a severely different time zone than the majority of the people that I know and care about.  At four in the morning this morning, I was awoken by a repetitive, loud, foghorn-like bleep coming out of my computer.  Once I regained about 65 percent of my consciousness, it occurred to me that I was receiving a Skype call.  ’In the States’ (Yes, I said it.  I live in the land of drunken Russians and obnoxious Germans.  I can call home whatever the hell I want!), when I would get a call at three in the morning, chances are I would hear one of my friends, a little worse for wear, on the other line, hoping to tell me something of particular importance…or what seems like it, anyway.  (Secretly I love these phone calls.)  However, in Turkey, when someone calls me at 3 am, it is, of course, my mother.  A while into our conversation, I hear her tabulating what time it is for me when it is 9 pm for her (there’s a seven-hour time difference)…after asking me if I had been alseep.  No, never.

However, I was thankful, in more ways than that I got to talk with my mother before my long bus trek (I am going to think of it like the space journeys of Captain Kirk, since mine will be just as difficult and take me to places just as foreign as the starship Enterprise did for him) to Syria.  My friends also have a radio show that airs from 8-10 pm on Wednesdays.  They’re pretty talented people, I have to say, so it’s certainly worth listening to Auditory Penetration at radio.georgetown.edu (not that anyone will ever see this, but why not?).  It’s a nice time slot…if you aren’t over five thousand miles away.  8-10 pm there is 3-5 am my time, which hinders my listening a bit, what with my need to sleep.  But being woken up by my Skype alarm clock let me fit in a little Mambo No. 5 before hitting the hay for a couple more hours, so all’s well that ends well!

One day, when I get a call at four in the morning, it will be my drunken friends again, and everything will be right with the world.

When you are out of your regular environment, you use your senses more. The colors are more vivid, you are more aware of the sound of a passing truck…or the nightclub at the base of the mountain (more on this later), you notice the taste of the eggplant in your food more than you usually would (possibly because you never had eggplant in your food before), and the smell of the flowers growing in the garden is more noticeable, the mint in the market perfumes the air, your entire existence is tainted with the pungent aroma of days-old poo.

One thing that they don’t tell you before coming to Turkey is that you cannot, under any normal or special circumstances, flush toilet paper in Republic. Instead, you throw it away in a little trash can located near the toilet. The plumbing just can’t handle any sort of paper product. Sure, you could try. It might even work for a couple of days. But eventually, assuredly, it will catch up with you, and you will not only be unable to flush the paper, but the poo as well.

I guess that it would be a good example of Prisoner’s Dilemma, this poodicament. There are three or four of us in every apartement, and every apartment has a bathroom with a toilet. If just one person flushes their toilet paper, then things might be alright for a long time…maybe even long enough for us to finish out the program and leave our temporary home before the shit hits the fan. But if more than one person does it, then the shit is going to pile up pretty quickly, and there are going to be problems. Problems that, previously, left American students without running water for five days a while back. The best situation, presumably, would be for no one to flush their toilet paper. (I would just like to point out how bad a situation has to be for the BEST path to be keeping large quantities of paper loaded with various human secretions OUTSIDE of the toilet.) However, that still leaves the problem of the smell that is a permanent part of life in Turkey.

So how does one deal with it? I’ve thought of various solutions: breath through your mouth (BAD call–don’t forget that smell and taste are VERY closely linked), pretend like you are starting a collection of the used paper (collecting things is always fun, and when you live with others, it is a great bonding experience), cry…. Eventually, however, you just have to embrace it. I am in Turkey, and I am going to become aquainted with the smell and even a little bit of the appearance of everyone’s poo. This is just the way it is going to have to be. When I arrived in Turkey, I told the people in my program that we were going to learn EVERYTHING about each other. Well, now we’re all one ore step closer. Thank you, sub-par Turkish plumbing, for helping to bring us all closer together!

Witty.  Funny.  Clever.  These are the words that I would use to describe good blogs.  Stupid.  Boring.  Self-gratifying.  These are the words that I would use to describe bad blogs.  I’m hoping to hit somewhere in the middle.  This is my way of keeping track of not only my time in Turkey, South Africa, and the places that I’ll go along the way, but also my sanity.  It’s my way to cope with the culture shock by putting my experiences out to the not-too-interested universe.

The plan is that I’m in Turkey from late August until late December, traveling in Europe for a bit, and then heading to South Africa from January until the middle of June.  Since I’ve already been in Turkey for a month, I’ll throw in some of the more interesting stuff when I have time and I think that I have something worth sharing.

So, I guess the only thing left to say is:

What do you call a one-legged dog?

 

It doesn’t matter–he won’t come!