Why you should go to Istanbul

Sultanahmet Camii, aka The Blue Mosque, near where I was walking

“Hello! You walk like an American” said the smiling stranger in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square. How was I walking? Having been to the city a few times, I knew where I was going but felt no hurry in the constant beauty of that incredible city. Did this relaxed confidence mark me as an American? What a terribly lovely idea.

It wasn’t the sort of association I would have expected on my first visit, when I arrived rank with trepidation as to how the locals might view my American nationality. But now it wasn’t that surprising, after those nerves had been immediately dispelled by the undeniable hospitality and irresistible kindness of the Turkish people.

It didn’t take long. I remember the students who jumped to help me on my first train ride in from Ataturk Airport, when I didn’t know to transfer at Zeytinburnu. Their eager words and laughter made me feel I was among friends already.

Baklava and cai with my
brother on a later visit

And at the hotel I remember the staff’s good humor and patience as I puzzled through “teşekkür ederim” to say thank you. It’s a phrase I needed a lot, for those who helped me navigate the sections of that incomparable city, the vendors and waiters who brought me Turkey’s delicious cuisine, and for the advice from friends I made on the ferry from Kadiköy to Beşiktaş, crossing back to Europe after a day in Asia.

The phrase was easy by the time I left Selçuk and automatic before I reached Fethiye. Then I learned its Kurdish counterpart in Diyarbakir and used it often as I wandered the beautiful present and past of Mardin and Hasankeyf, then was humbled by the help of a man in Batman. So much more than a superhero chuckle!

People love to ask a traveler where their favorite place is, and I never quite know how to answer. Though Holland and Nepal come to mind quickly, the most common answer I give is Turkey. In its ancient cities and modern comforts, natural beauty and human kindness, Turkey has something wonderful for every visitor. And none of it should be forgotten in the face of the human vileness of these terrorist attacks.

Why is Turkey the target of so much violence? Several answer for this, from modern politics to ethnic history, but one particular reason stands out, essential to remember when it comes to Turkey.

Inside the Hagia Sophia, a church that became a mosque and
is now a museum. Peace and welcome for all.

Turkey represents hope. Established by Ataturk in 1923, Turkey was born a secular nation whose political, religious, social, and economic changes modernized the country and made it a bastion of stability and freedom in a Middle East wracked by war and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

To focus: Turkey was founded as a secular nation in an Muslim region, and with balance and freedom it has thrived. That’s why it’s under attack by Daesh. Because Turkey, with its concrete demonstration of harmony between modern western culture and Islam, is a threat to those small minds who want us to think Islam is somehow at war with Christianity. It shows the lie of those sad souls who want us to think the Middle East is an opponent of the West. It laughs at those who suggest that we brothers and sisters are somehow enemies.

That’s why they’re attacking Turkey.

And that’s why we should keep visiting.

Terrorists want us to stay home and fear. Instead, I choose the many sites and pleasures of visiting Istanbul, from the markets of its Asian shore to the Golden Horn, including Sultanahmet Square where that man, after saying I walked like an American, invited me to çai with him in his carpet shop.

I know, what a cliche, the Turk inviting you to the carpet shop. It is. And it happens. And yes it’s probably a sales pitch. But it’s so much more. He knew I wasn’t going to buy anything, and invited me anyway. We sat and drank tea from tulip glasses and he beamed when I told him I’d visited and loved his hometown to the east. And when his coworker insisted on showing me some samples, including one that was $420, my newest Turkish friend found it hilarious when I told him that 420 is synonymous with marijuana in America.

We were not enemies, that man and I. Nor are America and Turkey. And we should never be enemies, the West and the Middle East. In Turkey you can visit that. You can sit at the table and watch the unity of the human spirit, as currents flow between continents on the historic streets of an incomparable city.

You can even walk like an American and make a man chuckle at pot.

I want to go back to Istanbul.

Yeni Cami, aka The New Mosque, in Istanbul. (More photos on the vagabondurges.com version)

Big beauty, little biter

So small a creature, it was kind of laughable. But damn, that bite did sting. Or was it that sting that bit? With this particular little bullet of an angry bee, I wasn’t sure.

The hill tombs of Myra

My brother and I, far-from-fresh after a few days on the Lycian Way, had hitch-hiked across Turkey, headed to Demre to see the ancient hill-tombs of Myra. Our third ride heard our destination and paused, dubiously.

“Is Demre not nice?” I asked him.

“No no, Demre is nice. Demre is okay. But nearby is something better. You should go Kekova. My wife and I, this is where we go for our vacation.” He was considering something. Looked at his watch. “I am already a little late, but it is not too far, I can drive you there.”

Cevrelians!

This is the hospitality of the Turks. To pick up a pair of sun-singed hitch-hikers, carry them across a chunk of his country, and then make himself even later to get them quickly to a place with no timetable. I deeply love Turkey. I wish I could sort the Islamophobic masses of America into people who just haven’t gotten to see the truth, and the genuine jackasses. The latter are on their own, but the former should all wander around Turkey for a week or a year.

We eventually convinced our friend that we could flag down another ride, if he would show us which road. He pulled over across from it and flagged down a van to make sure we got there. We waved goodbye to another in the chain of wonderful Turkish people we’d met, and squished in with a family of even more.

What we were looking at when the attack began

They dropped us off in Çevreli, a town too adorable for quotidian orthography. We walked past greenhouses of tomatoes for tomorrow’s kahvalti, stone houses built by inhabitants’ ancestors, and these two giggling lads. Up the hill we paused, shocked by the beauty of this planet we were serendipitously born on, and enjoyed the breath of the wind.

Mean little bastard, he was

Until the wind attacked. A piece of the airy realm, curiosity congealed into belligerence, wedged itself in my brother’s hair. Finally flung free, it rested a mere moment on my finger, long enough to sting or bite or maul. Slapped down again, he wouldn’t give up until crushed beneath a well-hiked heel.

“You should probably rinse your finger, in case it put some of that threat-marking scent on you.” My brother remembered farmland lessons of bee’s ability to induce the aggression of their peers with pheromone markers. I rinsed my hand, rubbing well, careful on the spot that was already beginning to swell.

Not enough. The next bee attacked about five steps later. And so began an awkward, incredulous, this-is-ridiculous-but-kinda-freaky-anyway intermittent run/trot across the Turkish landscape. We reckoned we’d escaped them, then came around the corner to see the next batch of fields. Rows and rows of bee hives.

The apian menace

Do you believe him? Do you believe them all?

Antalya harbor

“Where are you from? Ah.. California. I was in Oregon. Eugene. Yes, yes, the University of Oregon. Go Ducks!” Turkish air, Antalya street, tourist restaurant, but Oregon’s mascot. My brother said how he’d gone to U of O as well, and we all shared smiling nods and those lightweight laughs that come out through your nose. Not real laughter, but showing a complicit entertainment. How funny, that this guy had been to the same place! Or had he?

They weren’t quite pushy, but handed us the menu and promised that theirs was the best food in Antalya. It was the same menu as everywhere else, even the same photos, and the customary kabob carnage on its spit, yet we found ourselves considering going back there for dinner. After all, the guy had been to one of the same towns as us!

Tourist restaurant street in Antalya

The question of why that might matter is abstract and psychological enough that I’m going to leave it for another time, probably another species. What I’m wondering is: do you trust him?

Restaurateurs and hoteliers often know a phrase or two in a dozen or more languages, so why not more? It would be really easy to learn a popular city and school, plus some dominant detail. (Ever known anyone who went to U of O? “Go Ducks” is pretty darn dominant.) After all, Yankee hats speckle the globe, people remember Michael Jordan, and I met a man in Malaysia who cried “Go Broncos!”

But it’s also not complicated to buy a ticket, visit friends and family, and look for work in a healthy town. Is it arrogance to assume he hasn’t done the reverse of what I have?

So? Would you go back there to eat?

The problem with puppies

The problem with puppies is that they love too much. The small puppy ball, barely a foot tall, cute as can be, eyes teeth paws and all, found us again as we left Cirali. The three of us had met the day before in a dirt street chewed up by its impending evolution to pavement, and brightened each others’ days in the dust with scratches behind ears, tiny teeth grins, and irrepressible laughter. We’d parted as friends, and were reunited as the same.

But there was a problem. Schooled by our first episode on the Lycian Way, apprehensive in our minds and penitent in the soles, we were eager to begin the day’s estimated eight hours of walking, so could offer no more than a quick greeting.

The problem with puppies, is that they love too much. Quick greetings are not in their manuals. We asked him to stay, but he followed us across the bridge. We gestured him back, but he pattered along after us toward the trail. We earnestly entreated him to return, but his oversized paws paced us on the path that took us around the riverbend.

Trekking town to town with Max was one thing. He was a grown canine, clearly competent in the alleyways of the world. Letting a puppy trick itself into the wilderness was a whole different story. We apologized, explained, and made ourselves gruff. Tough love. The end of Harry and the Hendersons made an impression on both our childhoods, and here we were. And remember that time Marty Stouffer had to drive away his cub? That broke my heart in a way that has never been fixed.

All around the world, the language of humans and dogs includes the vocabulary of stooping to pick up a rock. Do that, almost anywhere, and the dog will back away, familiar with thrown stones. Not this time. Thank god this puppy hasn’t learned that lesson. But it sure would have been handy.

My brother thought he'd talked some sense into
the little guy, but no. Here he comes again.

We were at a loss as to how to leave our four legs of friendship...until we got to the ladder. Paws don’t work well on those. I don’t know how Stouffer did it, because a day after meeting this sweet-eyed lad, it was already agony to walk away from where those eyes watched us without comprehension, and hear the mournful whines that carried for a surprisingly long time. Go home, puppy! The problem with puppies, is that they’re lovable too much.

Twas the eyes, the gut, and the ancient dead people that made me stay.

My biggest blister was filled taut with juicy intimations of sharp fluids bursting and leaking, gushing through skin torn away from exposed nerves. But we would have gone on.

Knees like battered bocce balls (strung together, tenuous and tight, with rubber bands from the faded newspaper that lay in the garden all weekend), were creaky enough to ask for a day off hiking the Lycian Way. But we would have gone on.

My shoulder, curled forward in Quasimodo consequence of my messenger bag, kindly requested a respite...but we would have gone on. Physical complaints were insufficient to stop our striding soles, but there is more to a man than his component parts.

Okay, it was basically the component parts. But chief among them: the eyes, stomach...and perhaps one other part, too tender to mention yet. (And forgive me any inadvertent implications of genderism; we all know women are more hardcore than men anyway, I just happen to be of the XY cast.)

One of the realizations that enlightened us to being lost, up in the mountains, without much food, no water, no supplies, not even warm clothes as the cold came on and the sun went down (read that story here), was the epiphany that the epic peak that had been observing us all day was indeed Mount Olympos. We imagined the gods chuckling at our plight, perhaps betting on our odds of survival. Ares thought we wouldn’t realize our predicament until it was too late, the cynical bastard.

The Prenses Svetlana, forgotten but not gone

But with Olympus the mountain comes Olympos the ruined city, a purported 30 minute walk from where we slept. It was actually more like 10. So we self-gifted a day for the expanses of meat and bread which Turkey provides on its plates, and poking lenses at the flaking paint on semi-forgotten Russian barques. (I know, a barque is actually a grand vessel with at least three masts, but it’s such a fun word I’d rather misuse it here than never get to play with it at all. Again, forgive me.) (And I can only infer its Russianity from the name, so if it’s an unfair assumption, you’ll have to forgive that too.)

The necropolis in Olympos

As the day checked its 401(k) to see if it was ready to retire, I explored what’s left of one of the six great cities that formed the core of the Lycian League. Olympos controlled the sea routes between Syria and Rome, got rich, and ditched the League to join a bunch of pirates under chief Zenicetes. The life of a pirate is always one of comfort and ease, and they all lived happily ever after. Until the Romans showed up, razed the city to the ground, and Zenicetes had to go light himself on fire. Harsh butt.

After that, the locals played a spirited game of “Who’s going to sack us next?” for a few centuries, until the river silted up and they got tired of being stabbed. But they left behind some nifty things. Ancient baths, a necropolis city of tombs spanning centuries and civilizations, and a 26 foot temple doorway which stands over a fallen pedestal that once bore a statue of Marcus Aurelius, in a wall that encloses only memory and grasshoppers.

Something tells me I have more to
say about this fellow...

All those stone memories brought a smile to my brain, but it was the puppy that made me laugh. What is it with Turkey and dogs? The floppy footed lad found us in a dusty street where workmen carried pipes and flagstones. You’d think no one had ever loved on him before.

But we had nothing better to do that day than pet a puddle of puppy in the Turkish sunshine. But then again, who does?

Lycian Way Day One, the part where we almost died

The beach was so beautiful, so open and warm, I had no idea that within a few hours I’d be calculating the risk of death by exposure, freezing to death in the mountains versus self-immolation by cuddling open flames.

(Read the first part of Day One on the Lycian Way, here)

Our impromptu guide dog, Max, had led us across five hours of pine forested mountain slopes to reach this stretch of sand, and the world seemed perfect. Soaked in calm, we found the path off the beach, straight ahead and clearly marked with the red and white waymarkers of the Lycian Way.

A sunbaked moonscape of loose rocks added to the day’s toll on our aching feet with its hard edges and rolling ankles, but it was a soft and satisfied late afternoon without space for complaint. We passed a waymarker or two and continued up the trail. Up, up, and up the trail. Climbing without surcease. We put our heads down and stepped, past purple stone mined for chrome, over washouts and rockslides, steps slowing. Don’t think, because thoughts will contain complaints. Luckily my brother wasn’t quite as committed to this.

(Read the rest on the vagabondurges.com post, here.)

Turkeylurky goodness, and the Lycian Way

Falling behind on my links here, but there are two new Turkey posts on vagabondurges.com, including part one of our beginning of the Lycian Way... Unless you hate dogs. Then nevermind.

I am defeated

Not enough time, battery, or internet access to tell you about it here, but pity me on my snippet on vagabondurges.com here.

Would you go to Europe with me?

My previous experience with tour guides was to turn and run the other way, snug and smug in my snobbish superiority as a solo traveler. No spoon feeding for moi! No comfy tour buses to take me from place to place without suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous chicanery from touts and hucksters, salesmen and dope dealers.

Or in those cases when I couldn't escape them, like at Ephesus,
I could just slap a neutral density filter on,
and blur them into ghosts.

But after a while, the sinking selfishness of doing things only for and with myself dragged me down. What was the point? I took the normal countermeasures, visiting orphanages, co-operatives, and chasing social justice the way I’d sought bargain dorm rooms and all-you-can-eat buffets. That path is a good one, and I'm sure I'll return to it, but it's still a solitary string, holding together pearls of connection and purpose, and if I keep moving, I’m going to keep leaving. I want continuity, to go with my novelty.

So I went back to the classroom. Teaching English to refugees would save me from the privileged malaise of my birth circumstances and demographic lottery win. And every time I see someone learn a new word, laugh in the midst of their incomprehensibly difficult transition, or even just show up with a smile, I do feel a popcorn pop of satisfaction at perhaps paying back a tiny piece of my debt.

It's a bit ironic that my first attempt at
on-tour training will be in Turkey.

I love to teach. I love to travel. I love to meet new people, share something of myself and welcome a piece of them. Is there a job for this? Indeed there is. So no longer will I turn and run from tour guides, because now, a tour guide am I.

Somehow I conned the good people at Rick Steves Europe into thinking I could be of service, so this June and July I'll be roaming Europe as an assistant guide, frantically scribbling notes in a cheap notebook rapidly becoming invaluable, hoping to learn the skills to lead my own tours. In that top notch company I found a philosophy that mirrors my own, where guides are not salesmen but teachers, travel not a means for profit but an avenue for growth and progress, both individual and pan-social. And they're damn friendly too. I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity.

So in a bid to escape the tyranny of my incomprehensible blessings...I’ve found another one. But hopefully, if I can learn the skills, I can start to pay it forward, one contagious case of travel-lust at a time.

Brothers gone Turkish

Apparently my brother and I used to fight like cats and dogs, squids and whales, birds and bullet trains, though I barely remember any of that. But we’re in a good patch lately, a streak of getting along that’s lasted about, oh, a quarter of a century or so. But through the demands of modern American life, where geography and occupation insert themselves like bossy uncles into the affairs of our days (or like bed bugs into a traveler’s sheets?), we haven’t actually spent much time together since Clinton left office.

Turkey's past, further past, and present

All of that’s about to change. On Monday morning I’ll head towards Turkey, and on Thursday my older brother will arrive in Istanbul. We’ll pitter patter around that most layered of cities, clicking cameras at ancient angles and trying to espy the currents of culture and history that flow through the streets, with their Byzantine memories and Alexandrian heritage. Or maybe we’ll just eat a (metric) shit ton of good Turkish food. That sounds alright too.

What will we do in Turkey, a land that hosts such a surplus of stupendous sites? That encompasses a mass of contradictions and a horde of cultural candy, with relics of ancient ages and promises of future delight? The plan is to do something that spans all of that. It has the potential to be amazing, the obligation to be beautiful, and the capacity to be excruciatingly uncomfortable. Will we roast and burn, freeze and blister, starve and devolve into animals prowling for sustenance and warmth, seeking survival on the fringes of communities we cannot touch? It’s possible.

Turkish countryside from last time, I'll see you soon

But in my present haze of excitement, trying futilely to leave expectations behind, I am going to leave things mysterious. So for right now, I’m focussing on the Family FeelGood current, which will flood out in diluvian splendor to a FeelGood April (unless we do that whole freezing and starving thing). Because travel to foreign shores is a well established love of mine, but to do it in the company of family? That’s a new version. A new perspective, and chance at clashes and harmony, growth and remembrance.

Looking across the Bosporus to Istanbul's Golden Horn

So I’ll be incommunicado for the rest of April. I hope you can connect and share this spring with your family and loved ones, and I look forward to hearing about it in May.

Wishing you lavish travels and familial fortune!

Top Ten posts from a year I love anyway

Did you ever have a particularly brutal teacher? Who grilled you harder, left you doubting your fundamental competency, and didn't seem to notice when you turned in tear-stained homework? I didn't. Until 2013. When itstarted I thought the rug had been pulled out from under me, but the worst part was over.

Cute.

I'd like to say I understand the year and learned all its lessons, but the mere notion of summarizing 2013 just led to my wasting the better part of the afternoon watching the Daily Show, Colbert, and crocheting the start of a new blanket. Clearly I haven't processed it all.

But what I can do is fulfill the tacit contractual obligation to post my Top Ten Blogs of the Year. Wordpress has informed me which ones got the most clicks, but forget statistical accuracy, I'm going to list the ten that stand out to me.

10. AnUnexpected Chance to get Killed in Mandalay  Just a fun day in Mandalay, where circumstances reminded me of how much I love to travel, even if it occasionally increases the chances of severe injury.

9. IfI'd had a clue I wouldn't have met the Wigi  The places are incredible, but sometimes it's the people you meet that maintain the strongest hold on you.

8. WhatHappens to Men like Rudi? Same theme as #9, another trip, another country, another human person. I wish I had the answer.

7. BlueDragon It's so easy to get pessimistic, but hearing about people doing incredible work, helping each other and making a difference gives me so much joy. I hope I can spread some of it to you.

6. ItSeemed like Spring for a Moment Why is it so hard to be grateful and not greedy?

5. Mardin. This city is one of my all time favorites. Poignantly beautiful in its own right, I always feel a rush of vagabond adrenalin when I remember looking out over the Syrian Plain below, tantalized and tortured by the proximity to so much heritage, so much sheer human intensity, and so much suffering. In my mind I still sometimes watch the children of Mardin flying kites on their rooftops, held aloft by the exhalation of ages.

4. Twotravelgasms and a tragedy, Hasankeyf Part 2. I was already in love with Turkey, both halves of it, but that day cemented the region in my heart. Standing in ancient dwellings carved into the very stone, then walking alone through stunning mountain meadows of crimson poppies before descending to find myself in the company of a half dozen new friends? Now that's a good day. Did you sign the petition yet?

3. Is that a good start or a bad one? Jungle Birthday Part 2. It wasn't much fun at the time, aware that I was alone and stupidly helpless in the jungle, where sound does not travel and help is hard to find, but I can't think of a more appropriate way to start the birthyear: lost, angry, in pain from a dozen stupid little cuts, but on my way to what will hopefully be a good story. 

2. TheSystem's Broken, and the Fire Hasn't Even Started Yet. This post was just a set up for the Glow fire festival in Santa Cruz, but to my surprise, was chosen to be Freshly Pressed, and I am grateful for the increased readership that generated. So grateful in fact, that I can almost entirely overcome the pique that the tag which brought me there was not #Travel. #Transportation? Close enough.

1. Falling apart inAnuradhapura. This took no thought at all. The post itself is nearly irrelevant, but that was the pivotal moment of the year. At times I've felt a stunned confusion too guilty to smile about, that I had somehow minced through the minefield of romantic love without detonation, pain yes of course, but never the soul crushing agony. In Anuradhapura...

How to say this without reeking of self pity? The floor was dirty, long black hairs from tenants past, while ants and cockroaches commuted up and down the walls, but still I lay there most of the night and past the dawn, unable to uncurl from around a core of pain like nothing I'd ever felt before. It doesn't surprise me that the non-emotional account of the town was more popular. 

Well shit, I didn't mean to end on a downer. And I'm not.

Because seconds keep clicking, and months slip past while you're waiting on a minute, so here I am, unexpectedly stationary on the other side of the world from where I expected to be. And I like it.

Many things are not as I would have written them, but we don't write our lives. I guess they write us. And right now, I like where the story is headed.

Congratulations to all of you, for surviving the insanity of 2013. All my best wishes for understanding it, and all my earnest hope for a brilliant 2014.

How many ways do I love thee, Turkish breakfast? Let me count the ways...

My breakfast and sleeping place in Fethiye. Not too shabby.

I'm pretty sick of this heartbreak crap right now, and you can be honest, you are too. Unfortunately it still colors nearly everything I see and do, so I'm going to take the easy way out. No, not drugs, nothing so prosaic as that. I have this addiction under control. Usually.

I'm talking about food.

(That's the original version of the old Salt n Pepa song. “Let's talk about food baby, let's talk about bread and meat, let's talk about all the spices and the delightses that fill me...” But they just couldn't stomach the word “delightses”. You're welcome for the pun.)

I have to start with one of the new loves in my life...one I miss dearly. I miss you yemek!

Good morning, Diyarkabir!

Yemek is Turkish for “food” (looking up the Turkish word for breakfast feels like cheating) and the breakfasts in that land are second only to Portland, Oregon in my mind right now.

Turkey put me on the road of eating twice daily that I am (usually) still on here in Sri Lanka, with 12-hour portions of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, slippery armies of black and green olives, and enough feta to build a house (or at least an igloo), usually served with about 12 slices of bread.

12.5 if you count the heel.

In Fethiye the olives came from Grandma's farm. In Istanbul there was thick yogurt with optional ladles of peanut sauce, fruit jam, or molasses. Molasses! I had only ever been slow as, never eating. I took to it as quickly as...molasses (it's much faster than I was led to believe).

There were more cheeses in Mardin than I led you to believe.

In addition to the feta, they often had braids of a very firm white cheese, like a salty mozzarella, chopped into pieces. In Antalya they had börek, the cheese-filled fried pastry that is a cousin of the meaty version in Bosnia that gave me food poisoning. (Predictably, I liked the Turkish one better.)

In the Kurdish areas they switched the French bread for pita-like flatbread, which was fine with me. In Diyarbakir they added a slowly colonial pond of honey with hunks of the comb riding around like warships. Alongside the honey was a slice of cheese that was crazy-smooth, and whose taste was sweet and silky beyond my imagination. It took me a minute to realize it was homemade butter.

Everything seems more exotic when you have a mouthful of deliciousness.

Father and son bakers, I like knowing they're out there.

In Hasankeyf I agreed to a tour by the hotel owner's awkward friend, and before we started we waited, chatting in Arabic, while the baker and his son cooked a round of bread for us in a wood-fired oven. Then we went to what looked like a hardware store, chatted in Kurdish, and bought cheese so fresh it was still warm. I didn't even know cheese was made warm. Finally we got olives from a little old man, chatting in Turkish, and took them to eat in a spare cafe where flies buzzed in front of windows looking over the ruins of a Roman bridge across the upper Tigris River.

I can't remember the hike, but I remember the breakfast. Shukran, spas, and teşekur ederim for the breakfast, Hasankeyf.

Well shucks, I was going to tell you about Sri Lankan curry, but that will just have to wait.

Mardin, children among the decay of civilization(s)

I need a little more time to know for sure how I feel about Jerusalem, so I'm going to catch up on a place that definitely deserves more attention than I've given it. Mardin.

Mardin felt like the sentinel of civilization, sliding slowly off its hill on the edge of Mesopotamia. The few small crags between it and the Syrian Plain show sharp stones to remind the works of man of the geometry of time, which has been destroying the aspirations of civilizations for millenia here. And always that ancestral plain, forming the background to every picture, conversation, life.

Mardin itself is significantly destroyed, even as it is maintained and even grows. Rough-hewn stones make up the bottom strata of most buildings, with modern cinder blocks perched on top; my money is on the stones to outlast this age as well. It was easy to imagine a future where something buys tickets to walk where I did...

The streets are a labyrinth that twists and climbs the hillside, often passing under ancient structures in dank tunnels of broken rock and empty cigarette packs. If there are stairs, the center is likely a washout of rubble, presumably from the water that occasionally falls on this dusty city. I stepped over garbage, ancient paving stones, and more garbage.

The peak of the hill is capped with an ancient citadel, ghostly and mostly ruined from what I can see, with never a hint of motion. I was assured that to approach it was a sure death sentence, for the military still occupies the haunted height.

I wandered the slopes of Mardin each day, passing mustachioed men on colorfully-dressed mules who yelled at me not to take a picture, and clusters of women in colorful swaths of cloth who similarly refused my gestured requests for photos, though with smiles and giggles. I would have no proof of human habitation if it wasn't for the kids.

I never had to walk far before high-pitched voices would cry out “Hello!” I would answer back “Hello! How are you?”

Answers ranged from giggling, to staring, “What is your name?” or “Thank you!”

My second day I found myself swarmed with a particularly interested pack, answering and asking the name question over and over, to the point where I started to wonder if I would ever escape. But they also knew “Goodbye!” And after yelling it to each other a few dozen times, I was walking alone again...

For about 9 seconds. Then the three most persistent girls appeared again. “Hello! What is your name?”

They had been asking me something in Kurdish, getting gradually louder in frustration at my continued inability to speak that language. They must have found someone who knew the word, because the three started asking “Money, money!”

The persistent three who got tomatoes

I bought them each a tomato instead. They ran away giggling, and the shop keeper gave me a thumbs up. I love Kurdish people.