I’d like to introduce you to an old friend of mine, Salmonella typhi. S and I first became acquainted when I was traveling in eastern Turkey in 2003, and we quickly became fast friends or even closer yet. I still don’t remember exactly how we met, but it seemed like it had barely been a week or so before S. typhi’s toothbrush was in my bathroom and a few million of her agamogenetic clone friends were in my gut. (more…)
Europe-Asia Trip
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I know that every joke about the Turkish lira has been made already, but it deserves mention. The exchange rate is currently about 1,450,000 to the US dollar; a loaf of bread costs about 250,000 and a bottle of beer, 2,000,000. It brings a smile to my face to pay a million of _anything_ for a half kilo of nectarines.
Inflation is, obviously, mad. Turks don’t take out loans to buy houses - or if they do, they get five year mortgages. I sagaciously take money out every few days instead of getting a wad of cash. I was very proud of myself until I mentioned this to a Turkish man I met and he pointed out that, actually, the dollar was slipping against the lira and I was better served by having my money in lira. “I had all my money in American banks. If I had kept it in Turkey, I would have made billions.”
My one small step–closer to about twenty meters from the ferry to the door of the customs building–took an hour and cost US$100 (I say once again, Damn George Bush and his foreign policy). But I think I know how Neil felt. On the 1000m walk from the ferry to my pension (a welcome island of european sensibility run by a German expat) I was accosted by men selling car speakers, nearly flattened between a BMW and a donkey, swarmed over by a live band playing Turkish folk music chasing a flock of brightly-colored children (one dressed as a sultan, atop a bejewelled horse–I later learned this was a circumcision party), and endured the dizzying _ezan_, the Turkish Muslim call to prayer, echoing down innumerable narrow alleys from the three mosques within a few hundred meters. Turkey is truly an alien place.
There are a disproportionate number of short-haired, braless women in Skala Eresos, on the west coast of Lesvos.
Gold star if you can tell me why.
Your image of a rug merchant is probably from 1001 Arabian Nights, where every third night Scherezade told of some scheming rug merchant cheating his brothers out of an inheritance, tricking a beggar, or trying to cheat the sultan who was dressed as a pauper and inspecting his realm. The caricature has been modernized as the greasy mobster whose rug store exists solely to give the Family something in which to wrap inconvenient bodies. I can state that these are entirely reasonable examples of the character of the rug merchant. (more…)
The Cyclades (keek-la-dees) fill up the Aegean sea south and east of Greece. This is where all the famous islands are located: sun-worshipper’s heaven Mykonos, nonstop-party Ios, the caldera of Santorini. It’s where the images you have of Greece come from: white buildings, blue doors, magenta bougainvillea and always the blue blue Aegean.
It’s all true. (more…)
In Olympia I visited the ruins of the original Olympic games. I arrived by 8am to avoid the heat and tourists, but by the time I had walked through the remains of the temple where atheletes were ritually greeted by priests and into the pillared gymnasium where they grappled the sun was doing its Mediterranean duty. The incessant whine of thousands of cicadas in the olive trees were the living voice of the sun fused into a single hypnotic note. I sweated and slipped from one thin Doric shadow to the next.
The hippodrome where chariot races was held was washed away a thousand years ago when the river Alph changed its course slightly (That same sacred river, though I must say Greece is disappointingly short on pleasure domes and the river empties into the gulf entirely unaware of its literary duty; I saw no mapless caverns or sunless seas.) so I could not see where Nero’s ten horses made their laps, vainly trying to carry the mad emperor to victory over his opponents–who by his Imperial decree could have only four horses each. (more…)
I’ve never seen a chain-link fence as amusing at the one that surrounds Homer’s “wall-girt Tiryns”. I don’t think the Myceneans would find it as funny–their 3500 year old temple to paranoia and xenophobia, a fortress on the eastern side of the Pelopennese, with its 10 meter thick walls thoughtfully protected by a delicate necklace of 1.5m chain-link.
The stones at Tiryns are so big (some at 14 tons) that Herodotus believed they must have been set in place by Cronos, the father of the giants deposed by the Greek gods. The chain link seems disingenuous.
The visitor today gets to walk up the uninspiring back side (entirely devoid of explanation or history) to the top of the fortress, where crumbling knee-high piles of stone that appear at least twenty years old sketch out crude homes. There’s a better view of the 25m tall walls from the bus that goes by between Nafplio and Argos. ‘Hypotenuse’, ‘erotic’, ‘isoceles’, ‘democracy’–all Greek words. So is ‘anticlimax’.
The 5km walk back to Nafplio took about forty minutes and three liters of water.
A few images from Greece — Athens and Nafplio. Visit the gallery for more.
