Belated Happy Mothers' Day

In my mad scramble to please my soon-to-be-former employer, I foolishly neglected to give a public cyber-hug to Mom, who graced these shores over the weekend of Mothers' Day. A good time was had by all, including a ferry trip to the islands and even a visit to "our" Starbucks down the hill in Bebek. We even took a nice picture during a family trip to a cute little village called Polonezköy:



(left to right: Meltem's mom, Meltem, Barry, Barry's mom)

Thanks to Mom for coming, and sorry to Mom for leaving you off the blog for so long!

We're still here

Hi all, we're still around, it's just been a crazy end-of-semester period for each of us. Gradually, though, things are winding down. I've even found the time to spiff up MelbaBlog, as I'm sure you've noticed. If not, look at the top of the page...

By the way, happy Conquest Day (or whatever you'd call it). Today, May 29, was the 554th anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, by the Ottoman Turks. Buses are flying little Turkish flags off their rear-view mirrors, and so on. There are also billboards around the city saying "Istanbul, City of Peace – Celebrate the Great Conquest!" (The peace/conquest paradox doesn't seem to have sunk in with anyone. Like the Byzantines just handed the city over when the Ottomans asked them politely.)

Paradox or not, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous. Istanbul in the spring and early summer can be just unbearably beautiful. All this sun, though, is making people worry about water shortages. The same thing happened when I was here for the first time in 1994, prompting the Islamist mayor of the city to "officially" pray for rain. He's Prime Minister now.

Low tolerance for oppression

By the way, I decided not to go to Syria. I decided the foul odor of totalitarianism would overwhelm any enjoyment I got out of the Islamic architecture, much as was the case when I went to Iran in 2004. Oh well, the architecture isn't going anywhere, but hopefully the goons running the place are (Deo volente, to the gallows).

Love that rumor mill

Last semester I let slip to a couple of students that I had worked on the Ridley Scott movie Kingdom of Heaven. (For those of you who don't know, I acted as a consultant to the designers to ensure that the Islamic costumes, weapons, banners, etc. looked appropriate. Didn't get my name in the credits, but take my word for it.) Now it seems the word on the Yeditepe street is that I wrote Kingdom of Heaven! Didn't know I had it in me.

In other students-believe-the-darndest-things news, last week, after the class in which I taught the rise of Nazism, a student came up to me and said, "Since the Jews now control the world economy, what do you think of Hitler's ideas?" After picking my jaw up off the floor, I made it abundantly clear what I think of such things. Jeez. He seemed like such a nice boy (the student, not Hitler).

Goings-on in our fair land

For those of you who have been following the ups and downs of Turkish politics of late, here is a very sensible article from the Washington Post which, in my humble opinion, nails it.

Priorities

Last night Meltem and I decided to go to the movies. We wanted to see Spider-Man 3, but held out little hope that there would be any tickets to be had, since it had just opened the previous night. Lo and behold, not only did we get tix, but there were empty seats a-plenty in the theater, and those that were occupied were occupied by little kids and their moms. Where'd the menfolk go? Answer: The couch. There was a very important soccer match last night, pitting the favorite team of Meltem's mom against the favorite team of Meltem's dad. (Dad lost.) And since soccer is better than oxygen, most people were more interested in watching a bunch of guys kicking a ball than in watching Spidey kick butt. (They may have been right, as it happens – I found the movie to be a disappointment.) The cosmic balance was soon restored: When we left the theater, the guys were back, filling the streets, hollering and honking their horns to celebrate "their" victory.

Workers of the world, stay home!

Happy May Day, International Day of the Worker and all that. Never a big deal for me before, but apparently it's a HUGE deal around here. Combine thousands of agitated lefties and thousands more nervous police and you have a recipe for excitement. That's why the cops have clamped down on traffic in order to stem the Red tide, as it were; the bridges across the Bosphorus have been made one-lane only (!!) and the ferries have been cancelled to boot. Highly secure, I'm sure, but this brilliant exercise in preventive surveillance has also completely paralyzed the city. I've even been reading reports about people being poisoned by car/bus exhaust as they sit trapped in tunnels. So I cancelled today's class – in which, ironically enough, I was going to talk about Communism. Vive la révolution!

Weakness of will: A photo essay

One of the menagerie of cats who hang around the front of our building is one I call Snowball. The other day Snowball exhibited admirable gumption by making it all the way up the stairs to our fifth-floor apartment (no matter how much they like my headscratches, the cats usually give up following us by about the third-floor landing). For all our protests that it was a human-only apartment, Snowball managed to finagle an invitation in the door...



... then tested our ability to resist by attempting a jump onto the couch ...



... and finally achieved victory in the form of a perch on Meltem's lap.



We finally had to evict Snowball at dinnertime, but do hope that she'll be back to test our willpower again soon.

Heybeliada

A couple of weekends ago Meltem and I, in desperate need of a break, decided to bust loose and take a trip to Heybeliada, one of the Princes' Islands. The Princes' Islands are a group of islands off the southern coast of the Asian side; they get their name because that's where the Byzantine emperors sent their out-of-favor or "retired" family members (often after gouging their eyes out for good measure, but I digress). It's remarkably easy to get there – from our door to the dock at Heybeliada was about 2 hours total, and that's because we took the slow ferry. Boy, what a difference. You go from trafficky, congested, concrete-laden urban chaos to cool breezes among pine forests with one ferry ride. Herewith a few pix so you can be jealous. (This time I'll put the descriptions before the pictures.)

Below, a nice view of the old city as you pass it on the ferry. On the left is Hagia Sophia and on the right is the Topkapi Palace with its many chimneys. In the center, on the water, is a ferry like the one we took this picture from.



Our ferry attracted lots of seagulls, not least because people (including me) like to throw bits of bread out to them as they tag along. One or two seagulls were intrepid and quick enough to catch their tidbit in midair. This picture is also nice because you can see the many sailboats along the shoreline of the city.



When we disembarked at Heybeliada, we started strolling along the waterfront and one of the first buildings that caught our attention was a pastry shop (pastane) with a familiar name! That knockout in the red jacket is my one and only.



And speaking of familiar names, literally across the street from Meltem Pastanesi was a real estate office. One of the ads in the window had "kelepir" (Turkish for "bargain" and Meltem's maiden name) in red ink! (The ad is selling a ceramic factory in Bartin, which is the town where Meltem's father was born. Heybeliada, island of weird coincidences!)



We quickly found a street which went uphill a ways and promptly turned into a staircase (this is mainly because there are no motor vehicles on the islands except for public services). You got a nice view over the water and the far, faraway city.



And when you get to the top of the stairs, you're at the tippy-top of the island and look down on the other side.



The top of the island is pretty much forest, and there are nice trails to walk on. We went a ways but didn't want to get overcommitted, especially since we hadn't had lunch yet.



On the way back down, we saw a cute scene with a couple of seagulls waddling around right near a group of cats. Oddly, there was no inter-species tension, probably because both knew that a given seagull was big enough to kick some serious kitty butt. There was some wary eyeballing, though.



Finally, here's a picture of me in front of one of the many flower-bedecked houses. Heybeliada is a wonderful place; we semi-seriously talked about moving there when our rent-free situation ends in 3 years.

The well-tested Yard. Doç.: Coda

Remember how the bureaucracy-happy locals insisted I take a foreign language exam to prove myself worthy of the title of Asst. Prof.? Well, last weekend we got my German test results in the mail, and it seems I got a 90 out of 100. Hah! Hopefully this means I will get not only an office, but a gilded name plate on the door. (Hopefully also a cattle prod to wield on my students, but I digress.)

More Pictures!

Hi! I am back to the Blogger now that I have a computer at home again. My old one died a few weeks ago. I would like to add more pictures from our trip to Emirgan, the park with the tulips and the other flowers. Here is my hubby enjoying the serenity:



Here he is being a tulip:







Here is a view of an old, royal mansion now used as a restaurant & cafe:













And here are some more flowers:

Latest activities of the Elvin Fan Club

We went over to visit little Elvin last weekend, and I thought our loyal fans might enjoy a couple of pictures.



Don't let that sweet smile fool you: Elvin is turning into quite a spunky little customer, as you can see here.



Spunky but also very cute – one thing she does is get up on top of something and pretend to be making a speech, saying random syllables and waving her hands around.



Infinitely more charismatic than Hillary Clinton – but I digress...

Break out the cigars!

Word has just come in to MelbaBlog Central HQ that my sister Kim has had her baby, making me an uncle! Little Mitchell Edward Cohen is apparently happy and healthy – and handsome to boot:



Welcome to the world, Mitch.

Tulip time

There are billboards all over the city now that say "Istanbul'da lale zamanı" (Tulip time in Istanbul). So today Meltem and I went to Emirgan again, and whoa, they weren't kidding – the place was ablaze with tulips and other flowers. Herewith we share our enjoyment. Note that comments FOLLOW the pictures they go with.



Like I said – ablaze.



There were lots of different types of flowers this year, unlike last year when (according to Meltem) there were just tulips. Whole beds of hyacinths, some of which you see here at the bottom, gave off a lovely sweet scent.



Lots of flower beds had a number of different flowers together, making for nice color contrasts.



Alert MelbaBlog readers will remember a wooden log-fountain thingy that I mentioned in our last post about Emirgan. Well, here it is again, only now it's barely noticeable among all the flowers that have sprung up around it.



Sometimes shadow, and not just sunlight, brings out the best in flowers.



In addition to the riot of color, we were amused by this very odd tree. It seems to have had a serious change of mind sometime in its development.



And, of course, I've saved the prettiest flower for last!

Bee S

So I'm at the university yesterday, working in the room "reserved" for us Humanities teachers, when two of my colleagues start saying to each other, "Did you read this [in the paper] about the bees?" "Oh, yes, it's very serious." I asked what they were talking about and apparently there was some report about how all the bees have abandoned North America. Yep, picked up their fuzzy little butts and buzzed off to who-knows-where. And, to make matters even more worrisome, it seems, according to this sterling example of journalism, that Albert Einstein himself once predicted that if the bees left, the earth would only have four years left. Well. This has me really worried – not about the bees, but about the kind of person who takes this guff seriously, and the kind of thinking (?) habits they're going to pass on to their students.

(I actually have a soft spot in my heart for bees now, which will probably shock most people who know me and my Bad Experience with bees at age 8 or so. But a few weeks ago I saw a freaky documentary on some nature channel about bees and wasps. The bees were kind of cute, just minding their own beeswax [sorry, couldn't resist], positively Bambi-like innocents compared to the loathsome embodiments of Evil that were the wasps. It was just so one-sided, so unfair... In one scene the bees were swarming around the side of a house and the wasps would swoop in and slash at random bees with their forelegs, resulting in a smorgasbord of wounded and helpless victims on the ground below. Hah, but in a later scene a solitary wasp tried going into a tree where there was a whole bevy of bees who took great umbrage at the intrusion; they ganged up on him and stung him into a twitching wreck. Yeah! Go underdog!)

Perks of the job

Just as I was grousing to myself about traffic, noise, and other disagreeable aspects of living in a big city like Istanbul, I got a nice reminder of why I'm glad to be precisely here and not somewhere else. One of the two students in my history class happens to be president of the Yeditepe History Society, the group I led on a tour of the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum recently. Well, yesterday in class he said that they were planning some more tours on which my company would be welcome – and one is a three-day trip to Syria in June, one day each in Damascus, Aleppo, and Palmyra. Now there's three places I'm dying to see, particularly the first two, since they've got some of the coolest Islamic architecture to be found. And since Syria is conveniently located next door to Turkey, the tour only costs $200. There is, of course, the issue of my being American, but if I'm just going with a university tour group I don't think they'll hassle me. (Unless I wear a big CIA t-shirt or something.)

The well-tested Yard. Doç., part 2

Couple of things I forgot to mention when I posted about yesterday's big German test:

1. It came the morning after the time change ("spring ahead") – which I almost missed! And I might indeed have missed it were it not for soccer. Yep, Saturday night the Turkish national team was playing against (European champions) Greece in Athens, and wiping the floor with them 4–1 I might add. I only had a dim recollection of this fact, but since the game was going so well for Turkey people around the city were setting off fireworks. Hearing the fireworks boom, I remembered that there was this game, so I checked the Internet for the score – and only then saw a headline about the time change. Whew! I can just imagine showing up an hour late for the exam and getting turned away. Wonder if that happened to anybody.

2. More distressingly, I had to sacrifice my mighty beard. Before the exam, Meltem's brother Hasan passed on his strong recommendation that I shave before showing up, since it is a distinct possibility that the person at the door could object that my face didn't match the photo I had submitted for my ID. Sure enough, the exam rulebook also said much the same thing. (And in fact, as far as I'm aware it's technically illegal for a civil servant, such as a teacher, to wear a beard, much as female civil servants can't wear headscarves.) So, with a deep sigh, I got rid the beard. All that hard work, down the drain! Oh well, at least I look 19 again.

The well-tested Yard. Doç.

I think I griped in a previous entry about having to jump through yet another hoop for my Yard. Doç. (Asst. Prof.) rank, namely an official German exam. Well, today was the day. Bright and early, Meltem drove me to the campus of Istanbul University, where I sat in a classroom with about 50 other people for the three-hour ordeal. (Like the SAT all over again!) The exam wasn't too bad, but it did put the fear of Gott in me, especially since with German I tend to coast on my experience as an exchange student in Germany rather than fall back on the solid foundation of any formal training. This can result in scary moments when the question turns on a tricky grammatical point, but there we are. Anyway, I think I did fine, so hopefully NOW I have proved my academic worthiness to my august employer. (A few weeks ago it was announced that people who were hired after a certain date also have to take some high school equivalency-type exam. Glad I got in under that particular wire!)

My legion of fans continues to grow

Yesterday I led a group of students on a tour of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in the historic section of the city. (I may have taken some of our loyal MelbaBlog readers around there back in 2001.) Originally this trip had been intended to just be for the (two) students in my History 412 class, but it turned into a full-fledged activity of the Yeditepe History Society, complete with a shuttle service to take the students from the university to the museum and back. The tour got off to a late start – I had come directly from home, intending to meet the group at the museum entrance, but ended up cooling my heels for an hour while their shuttle sat in traffic – but after that it went pretty well. There were nine of them, and to my considerable surprise they were quite interested in what I had to say, asked good questions, etc. (I say "to my considerable surprise" because I am accustomed to the students in my Humanities classes, who are for the most part total bricks.)

I was particularly tickled by one student who, upon being shown a large Ushak carpet, asked me how the Ottomans would have transported it from Ushak to Istanbul, since (he thought) it was too big for a camel to carry. I hemmed and hawed, since I had never thought of that, and finally he decided they probably lugged it to Izmir and then sailed it up the coast. Turns out he's not in the History Department, but rather the Department of International Logistics and Transportation – and he's from Ushak to boot!

After the tour we had lunch nearby before returning to the campus. It was a nice opportunity to chat more with the students, who seemed to have enjoyed the tour as well as their tour guide. For instance, they asked where my office on campus was, and when I told them I don't have one (grrrr) they acted disappointed, as if they had been hoping to come see me. Also, I mentioned that my main interest is manuscript painting, and that I'll be giving two talks on it in the near future (one at Yeditepe in May and one at a conference being organized by a friend at Sabanci University in June). That made 'em light up. In fact, they had misunderstood, thinking I was giving two classes on manuscript painting, and were apparently excited to be able to learn some art history in addition to boring old regular history. It's nice to feel appreciated. Hopefully they will communicate their appreciation to the powers that be, and maybe I'll get that office after all.

Nice coverage of Turkey

CNN recently did a piece on Turkey, focusing on the Turkish business community and their interest in getting into the European Union. The reporter who did the interviews wrote a little about his Turkish experience on the CNN blog, which you can read here. Nice to read such positive coverage! Me, I say if you want to invest in up-and-coming Turkey, you can always send money to MelbaBlog.