<iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=2814606620462" width="568" height="320" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Walking into Iran, for better or for worse...from the border to Tabriz
After an extra day in Dogubeyazit on which Mehmet the Kurd showed me all those amazing places like the remains of the stranded Noah's ark, and the crater where the meteor fell out of the sky one night in 1923 or so , and having picnic in front of an old, deserted police station for watching the PKK, I decided that it is now time to enter Iran.
As it turned out, there was no other transport from Dogubeyazit other than a taxi that was willing to take me as far as the border and drop me there, near no-man's-land. The last couple of kilometers of Turkey were green, just a lonely road among the meadows and the green, empty planes, with nothing clearly visible ahead of us. Then he stopped, and here I was- at the Iranian border crossing.
I did not speak a word of Farsi. This decision had been made at such short notice that I had had about one week to prepare, with the help of a volume of "Teach yourself Modern Persian" which was just enough to give me time to realise that Persian was related to both Arabic and Turkish which I knew to some extent, and that I could have learned it to some basic, somewhat passaable level, had I started maybe four months earlier. But not now. So all I knew was just "Khoda Hafez" and "Teshekur"which sounded like Turkish, and a few expressions ending in "mikonam", this was all I could master. So, my confidence of being able to cope in Iran was not very high and I felt somewhat faint at heart and braced myself for the experience of braving this country alone.
The trouble started at the border. As it turned out, it was the end of Bayram, and Bayram had given me, the lonely tourist, days of trouble already. No food, no open shops, no restaurants, people disappearing behind doors to celebrate with their invisible relatives, occasionally going for short walks on the few streets of Dogubeyazit, while I was aimlessly roaming around, in search of something to eat, and someone to relate to. Here was the next stage of Bayram: the Iranian relatives returning to their country. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and all at the same time. The busloads came first. Huge stacks of passports were handed to the immigration officers, while the rest of us waited outside. The doors to the immigration hall were kept closed, the gates before that were also kept closed, and they would only allow small groups of people inside, close the doors and make the rest of us wait. And wait we did. It took hours. The kids became cranky, the mothers nervous. This went on to the point where one woman got so angry at her wimpering little son that she kicked his feet and made him cry, because he would not leave her alone. People seemed at the end of their wits, with this border. The second time this mother kicked and screamed at her son, my eyes met with the ones of the Turk standing near me, our foreheads wrinkled in a frown, our eyes sharing concern for the crying child whose fault it was not that we were made to wait for so long.
We moved closer towards each other and started talking. He was a carpet dealer, who lived in both countries, alternating between Istanbul and Teheran, and he spoke Farsi. And Turkish. Thank GOD, I thought, finally someone who will be able to translate for me!
The door opened again and this time we were let in, but only to discover that inside it was just as crowded as outside, people were now waiting in front of two counters. Not in two lines. no, just as a crowd in disarray. Names were being called, passports passed over people's heads until they reached their owners. It took another two hours before it was my turn, and then I was made until the very last because the man did not want to turn on his computer. At one point everybody lost their patience, and all the people in the hall started shouting at the immigration officers. I had never seen anything like it and could hardly believe what I was witnessing. A whole hall of screaming, angry people who were almost ready to storm the booth of the border police if they did not hurry up processing their passports.
At last I got close to the officer's booth, and my Turk took my passport from me and stood on his toes and handed it over the glasswall to the officer. The man rolled his eyes when he saw it and stuffed my passport under his keyboard, saving it for later. And made me wait while he copied everyone's data by hand onto paper, with a fountain pen. When they had finally all been processed, including my Turk, he opened my passport. It turned out, his computer did not work. He angrily called over tp the man in the other booth, my passport passed hands again, was handed over the glass wall, and registered at last. I was almost amazed to see that they actually stamped it after looking at the picture of me wrapped in a black hijab scarf that the embassy has forever glued into my passport next to the entry visa. So here I was at last, with a permission to enter Iran. I walked out of the booth, met up with the Turk, and saw that there were only two taxis for these hundreds of people.
This meant that we had to walk to the first bus terminal inside Iran which was about 3 kilomters away. The Turk carried his bag and I rolled and pushed my suitcase down the street. After about 20 minutes I managed to stop an empty taxi which took us to where the buses were.
We bought tickets and got on the bus to Tabriz which would drop me off along the way and take him to Teheran, his final destination. How I wished, this quiet, gentle , unobtrusive Turk would be my companion for the next few days, accompany me, protect me, translate for me and show me the way- but it was not to be. The best he could do wascall a hotel and make me a reservation. It had taken four hours at the border, and the road to Tabriz was long and winding through the hills, so when I handed him my Lonely planet guide, it was already 10pm. The first hotel where I had planned to stay was full. He finally managed to get me a room, after about 3 calls.
I arrived in Tabriz when it was close to midnight. The hotel was in a dilapidated street, with crumbling walls and construction sites nearby and I felt rather unsettled. But I did manage to check in, and hand over my passport again. Everybody except me seemed to be male. An old man at the reception , a slightly younger man who took my up to my room in a squeaking, groaning old elevator.
I tried to ask questions:"Where are the towels? Is there hot water? Do you have internet? " The man kept talking and talking but he spoke only Farsi, all I could make out was words with lots of "aww" sounds in them, and I did not understand a word he said. He did not really understand me either. My Turkish did not work, even though they claimed to speak some sort of "Turkish" here. It was no good. But he kept talking, and I felt exasperated and was close to despair. How would I survive in this country? Not being able to communicate?
At last he left, and I discovered the white towels in the bathroom, and found out that what he had offered as "internet" for my computer was nothing more than a normal electric socket. Oh , well.
I climbed into bed, rolled myself into a fetal position on the huge, sagging mattress, and slept, my first lonely night in Iran.
The next morning I tackled the next, and just as vital problem of my journey: how to put on a headscarf. I stood in front of the mirror in my hotel room, knowing only too well that I was not allowed outside my room, without a scarf on my head. But what to do? Suddenly the wrapping method did not work anymore, it kept falling off, it could not be too tight or it would be unbearably hot, and it could not be too loose or it would fall. I was wrapping and rewrapping and collecting the fallen scarf and starting all over again, arranging the folds, stuffing strands of hair into it, taking it off, trying again. I started to wonder when I would ever get out of my room, and would there still be any breakfast? After a full 45 minutes, I finally managed to get the scarf pinned into place, in some acceptable form.
Breakfast turned out to be a depressing affair involving stale bread, a small can of carrot jam and a butter knife made of plastic, like inside an airplane. I would soon discover that in all of Iran, tehre were almost no knives available, like in the 9/11 days on international flights, all we ever got was spoons and forks, and the knives came in miniature plastic versions of the real thing. Oh well.
The next thing I had to do was go to a bank and buy rial. The bank manager told me that he was offering me "his own special rate" (much later I found out that he took some unregistered commission this way) and I was handed an enormous wad of banknotes, with many many zeroes on them. Iran is suffering inflation, and they had not had time to redenominate their currency from rial into toman yet,. they juyst converted it inside their heads, which made the sums ever more confusing to the novice. One was expected to mentally remove 3 or 4 zeroes from the sum it said on the note, I do not remember clearly. So it was not 500.000rial but only 50 toman, or some such. I kept getting confused.
then I walked off, crossing from the Imam Khomeini street into the Ferdosi street (every city in Iran seemed to have one each of those) and trying to find a tea shop, but to no avail. As it turned out, all the same shops were gathered in one place. One street for sunglasses, one street for mobiel phones, one street for shoes and so on. I wondered how people shopped. It seemed to involve lots of walking. Someone sold me a pair of sunglasses, for a price fit for a movie star.
Then I was guided to an internet cafe, I had at last run into some people who spoke English. My next discovery was: the itnernet was censored. Instead of facebook, all I got was a message, in black script slinking across the screen, apparently saying that this website was blocked. I asked the manager of the internet cafe about this. All he said:"You want to use facebook? Just a moment!" and with a flourish, he made a few clicks, connected me to a proxy server, and voila, I was in. this was my first encounter with Iranian laws. The laws were there but people did not seem to take them all that seriously, and law enforcement seemed somewhat lax too, if internet cafes could just use vpn and proxy servers and bypass all the blockages in public?
I decided not to stay any longer in Tabriz, after it took me 3km of walking in oder to find the only cafe in the whole area, apparently, and eating my lunch out of transparent plastic baskets in a restaurant, that served food but no plates. And more plastic cutlery.
Good bye Tabriz, Roj bas, Kordestan!
As it turned out, there was no other transport from Dogubeyazit other than a taxi that was willing to take me as far as the border and drop me there, near no-man's-land. The last couple of kilometers of Turkey were green, just a lonely road among the meadows and the green, empty planes, with nothing clearly visible ahead of us. Then he stopped, and here I was- at the Iranian border crossing.
I did not speak a word of Farsi. This decision had been made at such short notice that I had had about one week to prepare, with the help of a volume of "Teach yourself Modern Persian" which was just enough to give me time to realise that Persian was related to both Arabic and Turkish which I knew to some extent, and that I could have learned it to some basic, somewhat passaable level, had I started maybe four months earlier. But not now. So all I knew was just "Khoda Hafez" and "Teshekur"which sounded like Turkish, and a few expressions ending in "mikonam", this was all I could master. So, my confidence of being able to cope in Iran was not very high and I felt somewhat faint at heart and braced myself for the experience of braving this country alone.
The trouble started at the border. As it turned out, it was the end of Bayram, and Bayram had given me, the lonely tourist, days of trouble already. No food, no open shops, no restaurants, people disappearing behind doors to celebrate with their invisible relatives, occasionally going for short walks on the few streets of Dogubeyazit, while I was aimlessly roaming around, in search of something to eat, and someone to relate to. Here was the next stage of Bayram: the Iranian relatives returning to their country. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and all at the same time. The busloads came first. Huge stacks of passports were handed to the immigration officers, while the rest of us waited outside. The doors to the immigration hall were kept closed, the gates before that were also kept closed, and they would only allow small groups of people inside, close the doors and make the rest of us wait. And wait we did. It took hours. The kids became cranky, the mothers nervous. This went on to the point where one woman got so angry at her wimpering little son that she kicked his feet and made him cry, because he would not leave her alone. People seemed at the end of their wits, with this border. The second time this mother kicked and screamed at her son, my eyes met with the ones of the Turk standing near me, our foreheads wrinkled in a frown, our eyes sharing concern for the crying child whose fault it was not that we were made to wait for so long.
We moved closer towards each other and started talking. He was a carpet dealer, who lived in both countries, alternating between Istanbul and Teheran, and he spoke Farsi. And Turkish. Thank GOD, I thought, finally someone who will be able to translate for me!
The door opened again and this time we were let in, but only to discover that inside it was just as crowded as outside, people were now waiting in front of two counters. Not in two lines. no, just as a crowd in disarray. Names were being called, passports passed over people's heads until they reached their owners. It took another two hours before it was my turn, and then I was made until the very last because the man did not want to turn on his computer. At one point everybody lost their patience, and all the people in the hall started shouting at the immigration officers. I had never seen anything like it and could hardly believe what I was witnessing. A whole hall of screaming, angry people who were almost ready to storm the booth of the border police if they did not hurry up processing their passports.
At last I got close to the officer's booth, and my Turk took my passport from me and stood on his toes and handed it over the glasswall to the officer. The man rolled his eyes when he saw it and stuffed my passport under his keyboard, saving it for later. And made me wait while he copied everyone's data by hand onto paper, with a fountain pen. When they had finally all been processed, including my Turk, he opened my passport. It turned out, his computer did not work. He angrily called over tp the man in the other booth, my passport passed hands again, was handed over the glass wall, and registered at last. I was almost amazed to see that they actually stamped it after looking at the picture of me wrapped in a black hijab scarf that the embassy has forever glued into my passport next to the entry visa. So here I was at last, with a permission to enter Iran. I walked out of the booth, met up with the Turk, and saw that there were only two taxis for these hundreds of people.
This meant that we had to walk to the first bus terminal inside Iran which was about 3 kilomters away. The Turk carried his bag and I rolled and pushed my suitcase down the street. After about 20 minutes I managed to stop an empty taxi which took us to where the buses were.
We bought tickets and got on the bus to Tabriz which would drop me off along the way and take him to Teheran, his final destination. How I wished, this quiet, gentle , unobtrusive Turk would be my companion for the next few days, accompany me, protect me, translate for me and show me the way- but it was not to be. The best he could do wascall a hotel and make me a reservation. It had taken four hours at the border, and the road to Tabriz was long and winding through the hills, so when I handed him my Lonely planet guide, it was already 10pm. The first hotel where I had planned to stay was full. He finally managed to get me a room, after about 3 calls.
I arrived in Tabriz when it was close to midnight. The hotel was in a dilapidated street, with crumbling walls and construction sites nearby and I felt rather unsettled. But I did manage to check in, and hand over my passport again. Everybody except me seemed to be male. An old man at the reception , a slightly younger man who took my up to my room in a squeaking, groaning old elevator.
I tried to ask questions:"Where are the towels? Is there hot water? Do you have internet? " The man kept talking and talking but he spoke only Farsi, all I could make out was words with lots of "aww" sounds in them, and I did not understand a word he said. He did not really understand me either. My Turkish did not work, even though they claimed to speak some sort of "Turkish" here. It was no good. But he kept talking, and I felt exasperated and was close to despair. How would I survive in this country? Not being able to communicate?
At last he left, and I discovered the white towels in the bathroom, and found out that what he had offered as "internet" for my computer was nothing more than a normal electric socket. Oh , well.
I climbed into bed, rolled myself into a fetal position on the huge, sagging mattress, and slept, my first lonely night in Iran.
The next morning I tackled the next, and just as vital problem of my journey: how to put on a headscarf. I stood in front of the mirror in my hotel room, knowing only too well that I was not allowed outside my room, without a scarf on my head. But what to do? Suddenly the wrapping method did not work anymore, it kept falling off, it could not be too tight or it would be unbearably hot, and it could not be too loose or it would fall. I was wrapping and rewrapping and collecting the fallen scarf and starting all over again, arranging the folds, stuffing strands of hair into it, taking it off, trying again. I started to wonder when I would ever get out of my room, and would there still be any breakfast? After a full 45 minutes, I finally managed to get the scarf pinned into place, in some acceptable form.
Breakfast turned out to be a depressing affair involving stale bread, a small can of carrot jam and a butter knife made of plastic, like inside an airplane. I would soon discover that in all of Iran, tehre were almost no knives available, like in the 9/11 days on international flights, all we ever got was spoons and forks, and the knives came in miniature plastic versions of the real thing. Oh well.
The next thing I had to do was go to a bank and buy rial. The bank manager told me that he was offering me "his own special rate" (much later I found out that he took some unregistered commission this way) and I was handed an enormous wad of banknotes, with many many zeroes on them. Iran is suffering inflation, and they had not had time to redenominate their currency from rial into toman yet,. they juyst converted it inside their heads, which made the sums ever more confusing to the novice. One was expected to mentally remove 3 or 4 zeroes from the sum it said on the note, I do not remember clearly. So it was not 500.000rial but only 50 toman, or some such. I kept getting confused.
then I walked off, crossing from the Imam Khomeini street into the Ferdosi street (every city in Iran seemed to have one each of those) and trying to find a tea shop, but to no avail. As it turned out, all the same shops were gathered in one place. One street for sunglasses, one street for mobiel phones, one street for shoes and so on. I wondered how people shopped. It seemed to involve lots of walking. Someone sold me a pair of sunglasses, for a price fit for a movie star.
Then I was guided to an internet cafe, I had at last run into some people who spoke English. My next discovery was: the itnernet was censored. Instead of facebook, all I got was a message, in black script slinking across the screen, apparently saying that this website was blocked. I asked the manager of the internet cafe about this. All he said:"You want to use facebook? Just a moment!" and with a flourish, he made a few clicks, connected me to a proxy server, and voila, I was in. this was my first encounter with Iranian laws. The laws were there but people did not seem to take them all that seriously, and law enforcement seemed somewhat lax too, if internet cafes could just use vpn and proxy servers and bypass all the blockages in public?
I decided not to stay any longer in Tabriz, after it took me 3km of walking in oder to find the only cafe in the whole area, apparently, and eating my lunch out of transparent plastic baskets in a restaurant, that served food but no plates. And more plastic cutlery.
Good bye Tabriz, Roj bas, Kordestan!
Thursday, November 1, 2012
In Dogubeyazit, border city in Kurdistan
In Dogubeyazit people were celebrating Bayram, the end of Ramadan, and what this meant I found out soon enough: no food! All the restaurants in town were closed, and there weren't many to begin with as Dogubeyazit is very small. My hotel had no lunch, only breakfast which was far away, it was early afternoon now. I asked where I could go eat and the answer was:"Wait until tomorrow, then some of the shops will open."
In a slightly forlorn mood I wandered outside, found a supermarket and bought some cookies. The streets were empty, deserted, since everybody seemed to be home, celebrating. Finally, after a long walk, I spotted a street stall. Salvation from the churning feeling in my stomach arrived in the form of kofte in a bun. Finally! Some food to eat, other than biscuits. I was saved.
Down at the end of the long street I could see the foot of Mount Ararat. And some way up the mountain slope, the place of my dreams that I had been cherishing for the past 5 years: Ishak Pasha Sarayi, the Kurdish palace.
This was where I headed now. I asked someone and people told me to take the dolmus, the mini bus, up the mountain as it would be a rather long walk otherwise.
I descended from the bus in the palace's parking lot.
There was a gate through which I walked in. The palace seemed built of sandstone, it's truly exotic shape of a dome shaped roof and several little towers perched on the mountain side. There was a corridor in the middle, leading through several large decorated halls behind each other and then there were rooms- the harem, some other rooms for sleeping and sitting- and each room had a window that, like a picture frame, opened to some breathtaking view. One has to be in Kurdistan to comprehend it's incredible landscape- endless spaces stretching over rolling hills, rocky cliffs, harshly beautiful dramatic mountain slopes, and endless space. No wonder the Kurds who live here are a proud people with a love for freedom. This landscape is indominable. It is also nourishing in some places, the Kurds seem to have a special love for vines and climbers trailing around their houses, grape leaves obscuring part of the view from the window with their lovely green shapes, and the rest is partly a rocky desert and in part, green hills. I was in awe. I took lots of photos while I explored the rooms of the palace, and from each window frame I shot the view.
That night I finally discovered what may have been the only open bar in town. It was called Simorgh, like the legendary Persian bird. And the owner was a young man who served me mezze with a smile and made me watch some bits of the movies that he showed in his bar, projected onto a screen.
I asked for a sheesha and he took me upstairs where I could sit on the kilim cushions while I smoked.
And then I walked through the night back to my lavender coloured room at the Tahran. It was not as easy as it would seem, in this small town, as the electricity went out and almost all the streets were pitch dark. I was glad I did not get lost.
In a slightly forlorn mood I wandered outside, found a supermarket and bought some cookies. The streets were empty, deserted, since everybody seemed to be home, celebrating. Finally, after a long walk, I spotted a street stall. Salvation from the churning feeling in my stomach arrived in the form of kofte in a bun. Finally! Some food to eat, other than biscuits. I was saved.
Down at the end of the long street I could see the foot of Mount Ararat. And some way up the mountain slope, the place of my dreams that I had been cherishing for the past 5 years: Ishak Pasha Sarayi, the Kurdish palace.
This was where I headed now. I asked someone and people told me to take the dolmus, the mini bus, up the mountain as it would be a rather long walk otherwise.
I descended from the bus in the palace's parking lot.
That night I finally discovered what may have been the only open bar in town. It was called Simorgh, like the legendary Persian bird. And the owner was a young man who served me mezze with a smile and made me watch some bits of the movies that he showed in his bar, projected onto a screen.
I asked for a sheesha and he took me upstairs where I could sit on the kilim cushions while I smoked.
And then I walked through the night back to my lavender coloured room at the Tahran. It was not as easy as it would seem, in this small town, as the electricity went out and almost all the streets were pitch dark. I was glad I did not get lost.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
From Van to Dogubeyazit- venturing into Eastern Anatolia
At the end of Ramadan 2011 I took a Pegasus flight from Istanbul to Van. Having never been to Eastern Anatolia before, I was suitably apprehensive, not knowing what to expect. Would I have to wear a headscarf to stop people from staring at me and think of me as a Western tourist of uncertain morals who was breaking the Islamic rule that a woman should not travel alone? Would I run into terrorists, be kidnapped by the PKK or die in some dramatic car crash on a bad road? Would people refuse to serve me in a restaurant, possibly, because it was all only for men?
No, none of that. My worries were dispersed the moment when, after I had taken a cab across town to the minibus station for Mt. Ararat, I shyly wandered into the waiting room and uneasily sat down, one of the moustached Kurds got up and asked me in Turkish:"Would you like a glass of tea?"
Ice broken, tension gone. My ice, my tension, not theirs. ; )
Finally our dolmush arrived, we all got in, all of them Kurdish men plus one Iranian and his hijabbed wife and their little son, and me. About 12 people squeezed into a vehicle, headed for Dogubeyazit.
The ride led us into the Kurdish landscape- vast planes with very little vegetation, harsh barren mountains rising up with ragged edges, endless views of vast empty spaces, and not a single human being in sight. We did not see even one car during the 3 hour drive. I was already in love with their landscape, as rugged, hardy, and passionate as they were.
My Lonely planet guide had informed me that in Dogubeyazit there was one hotel that was "suitable for lone women travellers." Ironically, it was called Tahran and run by an Iranian manager. Bilal, who had once been called Ahmet or whatever, but received this name when he joined the Hezbollah in his youth. He told me, he no longer prayed because "I have done so much praying when I was young, it is enough now." We all laughed.
Bilal, thank God, spoke English and had accepted my reservation on the phone.
So now I was in Dogubeyazit, got off the bus, and walked with my big suitcase through town. At the far end of the mainstreet I could see Mt. Ararat rising up in the distance, and up on the mountain slope, the place of my dreams- Ishak Pasha Sarayi, the beautiful Kurdish castle that I had been too scared to visit for years but had dreamed off seeing since autumn 2006, after I had met my first Kurdish friend. I was finally here!
The streets were deserted, it was the end of Ramadan, Bayram, and everybody on holiday, somewhere, in their own home.
I found the Tahran Hotel in a side street, and when I walked in, I saw a Kurd, very much looking like my first friend, with a sharply cut beautiful face, deep set eyes, chiseled eyebrows. These eyes now set on me, opened wide and emitted one bright turquoise flash, like lightening, and then narrowed again and assumed their normal expression. This handsome young receptionist, not Bilal, did not speak a word of English, but he handed me my key, explained that I could use the tea kitchen downstairs and pointed me to my room on the second floor. My room turned out to be simple, spotless, and indeed, "suitable for women"- it had lavender walls and white curtains! I felt safe here.
I settled in, took a shower, went down for some tea and then asked about a restaurant. It turned out that since it was Bayram, every restaurant in town was closed and he said, I should wait "until tomorrow", then they would all be open again.
I had to wander through several streets til I managed to find one street stall that was selling kofte, and that was my lunch. But I was happy to fill my stomach at last, and now, off to Ishak Pasha!
No, none of that. My worries were dispersed the moment when, after I had taken a cab across town to the minibus station for Mt. Ararat, I shyly wandered into the waiting room and uneasily sat down, one of the moustached Kurds got up and asked me in Turkish:"Would you like a glass of tea?"
Ice broken, tension gone. My ice, my tension, not theirs. ; )
Finally our dolmush arrived, we all got in, all of them Kurdish men plus one Iranian and his hijabbed wife and their little son, and me. About 12 people squeezed into a vehicle, headed for Dogubeyazit.
The ride led us into the Kurdish landscape- vast planes with very little vegetation, harsh barren mountains rising up with ragged edges, endless views of vast empty spaces, and not a single human being in sight. We did not see even one car during the 3 hour drive. I was already in love with their landscape, as rugged, hardy, and passionate as they were.
My Lonely planet guide had informed me that in Dogubeyazit there was one hotel that was "suitable for lone women travellers." Ironically, it was called Tahran and run by an Iranian manager. Bilal, who had once been called Ahmet or whatever, but received this name when he joined the Hezbollah in his youth. He told me, he no longer prayed because "I have done so much praying when I was young, it is enough now." We all laughed.
Bilal, thank God, spoke English and had accepted my reservation on the phone.
So now I was in Dogubeyazit, got off the bus, and walked with my big suitcase through town. At the far end of the mainstreet I could see Mt. Ararat rising up in the distance, and up on the mountain slope, the place of my dreams- Ishak Pasha Sarayi, the beautiful Kurdish castle that I had been too scared to visit for years but had dreamed off seeing since autumn 2006, after I had met my first Kurdish friend. I was finally here!
The streets were deserted, it was the end of Ramadan, Bayram, and everybody on holiday, somewhere, in their own home.
I found the Tahran Hotel in a side street, and when I walked in, I saw a Kurd, very much looking like my first friend, with a sharply cut beautiful face, deep set eyes, chiseled eyebrows. These eyes now set on me, opened wide and emitted one bright turquoise flash, like lightening, and then narrowed again and assumed their normal expression. This handsome young receptionist, not Bilal, did not speak a word of English, but he handed me my key, explained that I could use the tea kitchen downstairs and pointed me to my room on the second floor. My room turned out to be simple, spotless, and indeed, "suitable for women"- it had lavender walls and white curtains! I felt safe here.
I settled in, took a shower, went down for some tea and then asked about a restaurant. It turned out that since it was Bayram, every restaurant in town was closed and he said, I should wait "until tomorrow", then they would all be open again.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
travel fever
travel fever
I wrote this in October 2008, describing my dream to go to Dogubeyazit.
Three years later I went, in September 2011! I will tell you about that shortly, for now, please dream along with me reading that old blog post of mine when visiting Ishak Pasha Sarayi was still a far away dream, and a wallpaper photo on my desktop....
And now... here comes the next part of my dream-
I still want to go to Dogubeyazit. That place has never left my mind. Way out in Eastern Anatolia, next to Mount Ararat, on the border to Armenia, it is close to Ishak Pasha Sarayi, an ancient Oriental palace. Apparently, the only other Ottoman palace left over beside Topkapi. But this one is a mix of Ottoman, Selcuk, Georgian, Armenian and Persian architecture. And it is Kurdish. Today I watched a number of youtube videos showing it, and they all had these simple but powerful, passionate but wistful Kurdish songs. Melodies that Aynur has sung and others too, full of longing...
I keep thinking, I saw this palace in the Gurdjieff movie "Meetings with remarkable men", as the site of the Sufi dances. And when I read up on it, yes, Gurdjieff indeed was born in the city of Kars (the home of the exotic, black eyed Kurd I described in my blog on Bodrum) which is quite close to Dogubeyazit. but it says, the movie was made in Afghanistan... which is where the Kurds originally came from, it seems.
It is also the place where supposivley Noah's ark stranded and near Dogubeyazit is "Noah's ark national park".
Anyway, already almost two years ago my computer had a wallpaper of Ishak Pasha palace... and I keep dreaming.
I found a tour leading up to it, with a guide, offered on the internet, and it says, you can get there on a bus from Istanbul, in 22 hours, and cross the landscape of spectacular Turkish mountains... which is just what I would love to do. Rather than miss all this and fly out there by plane. I want the feeling of travelling, of drifting, of being out on an adventure, of satisfying the gypsy urges in my blood...
Now that I speak some Turkish and have lost my fear of traveling alone, maybe all I need to do is learn how to neatly tie a headscarf, just in case. I already got all the vaccinations for Kurdistan two years ago, Hepatitis A and B and tetanus and diphteria and typhoid, and then we only got as far as Antalya and the Turks begged me not to go any further East because "nobody goes to those places". But I still want to...
Wed, October 1, 2008 - 9:48 AM
That moment...
That moment...
Thu, September 25, 2008 - 12:15 PM
The memory that came to me was of that moment on that ship in Turkey when I was looking up into the starry sky, alone and feeling utterly free. I had just let go and felt ready to just go with the flow, uncertain and yet secure, being all alone in an unknown place and yet feeling so at home, looking up into the night sky, so wide, so far, so open, and my being expanded and unfolded, I opened my arms and raised them towards the stars and deeply inhaled the night air. And I felt happy.
This feeling has stayed with me, like a sense of inner warmth, like a newfound key.
Thu, September 25, 2008
Bodrum nights
Bodrum nights
Mon, September 15, 2008 - 11:01 AM
Now, as I did not do anything really "bad" in Bodrum, I did go out and have fun. In day time, I would walk down to the sunny yacht harbour in the morning after breakfast and buy a ticket for a boat tour, and then spend all my day driving around on the Aegeis in dazzling sunshine, lying on the deck until I was deeply tanned, and when the boat stopped in yet another bay with blue and turquoise water, I would climb down that little ladder on the side of the boat and throw myself into the sea.
One time we stopped at "Cleopatra's mud bath". "Where is the mud??" I exclaimed, after downing a cocktail of vodka and pomegranate juice in the pier bar, and people pointed at the entrance of a cave in the rocks next to the wooden platform I was on. I lowered myself into the water, swam and crawled into the semi darkness of the grotto with some other swimmers, and there we scooped the mud and sand off the rocks and smeared each other with it laughing, until our skin was all smooth and glowing and it did do some job on your beauty, just like they said on the sign board: "Cleopatra's legendary beauty may have been due to her visiting this mud bath..."
The guys who had handed me the mud and rubbed my back with it then invited me to join them in their corner of the deck and we spent the rest of the tour lined up next to each other on the sun mats and sharing the ear phones of my i-pod. I was invited to go out together later by my ear phone-partner but declined as something else happened...
That night I went to a nice restaurant I had received directions to by my hotel manager as he was friends with the owner. I had dinner on a terrace over the sea, looking out into the dusk by candlelight. After a while I noticed an extraordinarily handsome waiter, very black hair, very black eyes, sharply curved eye brows, chiselled nose, long legs, a lean tall body, the exotic almost Arabic features of a Kurd...I kept watching him surreptitiously as I found him stunningly handsome. He must have noticed the way I looked at him, as after a while, after entertaining me like everyone else with bits of small talk, he came over again and asked me to come back in two hours when he would be finishing work. I answered his invitation with "Inshallah", which made him start with surprise, turn his head and shoot me an inquisitive look. Inshallah (Arabic for "With Allah's will") is a sure fire way of saying "maybe", a way of declining or dodging an invitation that no Moslem will argue with, and which is never answered with more questions and attempts at persuasion like any other answer might be.
However, less than two hours later I was walking down bar street again, this time to check out what else was going on there, I had not made up my mind about that invitation, and there he was, standing in the door of his restaurant to beckon people to come in. He spotted me and immediately talked me into coming inside for another drink. "Over there is a table especially reserved for you" he said, and pointed into the direction of a corner right by the sea. I was pretty sure that this is where he puts all his prospective dates and that all the other waiters knew that, too. Then he sat down and asked me whether I was alone or attached. "That is good because I am alone too", he said, and I thought to myself, that must he must be lying through his teeth, there is no way a man like that can go unattached for more than a few days... Well, I had not been completely honest myself, but thus, the game was on...
When all the guests had left, he came over, offered me another drink and started to flirt with me, in a kind of speeded up way. "Don't look at me like that", he said after a while, "You make me hot." I wondered whether this was due to me wearing my Arabic style black eyeliner belly dancer make up that he, as a Kurd, was reacting to? I stared back into his eyes and said slowly:"Your eyes are soo black..." He answered that I was embarrassing him, turned his head to the side and looked like he was almost going to blush. Haha, I still manage to make a man blush sometimes, even this wild looking exotic Kurd, I thought...Maybe he was not used to women flirting back in that way? Or felt caught in this whole staged scenario? Whatever, when he asked me to go out with him, I told him, that the owner of my hotel knew the owner of his restaurant, that the staff in my hotel had been carefully observing me all these days and I did not want people to start talking about me as I knew what they were thinking and did not like it. So, when we were ready to go, he said:"If you are worried about what people think, just follow me..." He instructed me to leave the restaurant before him, walk down the street for a while and wait there... I did, stopped at some store 200m down the street to buy cigarettes , and 5 minutes later, suddenly there he was. He told me to follow him quietly, and walked ahead, with me trailing about 3-5 meters behind, and thus, we walked off into the darkness to where noone could find us...; )
When I told this story to Özlem, the painter in Galatasaray on my way back in Istanbul, she laughed and said:"You were acting just like a Turkish girl!" "Why, is that how they do it?" "Yes", she said, "that is exactly the way they do it." ; )
Mon, September 15, 2008 - 11:01 AM
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)