A fine trip across the water

Meltem and I just returned from a nice day out. Thursday is my day off from teaching, so I have the luxury of going places in the afternoon with her, after her class gets out. So what did we do, you ask? Well, I'll tell you.

It all starts with my Turkish driver's license – i.e., the one I don't have and need to get. Much to my annoyance, I can't just convert my U.S. license to a Turkish one, since my Massachusetts license expired well over a year ago. So I need to go through the whole process of getting a Turkish one. To this end, Meltem signed me up for a driving course across the Bosphorus, in a neighborhood called Üsküdar. Now before you snicker too much, rest assured that I'm not actually sitting in a class with a bunch of Turkish teenagers every week; rather, I have to be registered with such a course in order to be eligible to take the official test. I probably should have sat in for the lessons, though, because the test you have to take is hard! You not only have to know the rules of the road – which virtually all Turkish drivers treat as a contemptible fiction, but whatever – you have to know how an engine works, as well as the principles and practices of first aid! I tried one of the online practice tests and failed the last two sections pretty convincingly. I do have a lesson book, so I'm boning up in my spare time.

(Truth be told, not all the questions are THAT hard. E.g. one question I remember from the motor section is "If such-and-such [corroded spark plug or whatever] is wrong with your engine, what color smoke will come out with your car's exhaust? (a) Blue (b) Red (c) Yellow (d) Black." I'd like the see the car that belches red smoke when it's got engine trouble. Maybe this one.)

So back to our day out. As part of the bureaucratic rigamarole which anything in Turkey requires, the driving school needed to see my university diploma. A photocopy wouldn't do; they had to see the sheepskin itself. So we hauled my Johns Hopkins B.A. (don't want to intimidate them with my Harvard Ph.D., snark snark) over there for them. Today we went over to get it back. The weather has suddenly turned freezing cold, which I didn't realize when I set out in jeans and Docksides, but there we are. "Across the Bosphorus" sounds far away, but actually we just take a bus down to the shore and there's a little ferry which zips across in about five minutes. We picked up my diploma and got chatted up by the school's owner, then had a nice little walk around Üsküdar, a cute neighborhood dominated by two Ottoman mosques. We even found a cool antiques-sellers' market, where we marveled at stuff like old radios with Moscow, Belgrade and Radio Free Europe pre-painted on the dial.

Going home was no picnic, especially since we had to go through a busy area at rush hour. Which reminds me that as we crossed the Bosphorus, we saw the rig where they are working, finally, on an underground metro link between the European and Asian sides. The city is on a civil-engineering binge to try and clear up the hellish traffic situation. By 2012, they tell us, you'll be able to travel on the metro all the way from the airport to far up the Asian shore. Let's hope!

Now Meltem has exited the premises for Girls' Night Out with two of her friends, and I am left to do stuff like update our worldwide legion of fans on stuff like going out to pick up my diploma. More entertaining stuff as it happens!

P.S. Meltem informs me that not only is Ozan an inveterate kicker, he seems now to have begun trying somersaults in there. I asked her whether we should direct him to the Turkish or American Olympic gymnastics team...