The problem seems to be that they had automatic ticket-taking machines like the ones that work well in Japan. These don’t work quite so well since they required a human to show people how to feed the ticket in and then remind the user to pick up the stub.

Our plane that was supposed to take off at 1am was still loading at that time. About 1:15 we had a Lufthansa innovation, the safety talk was done with computer animation to make it look like a puppet show. That way it is not surprising that the figure is smiling when he puts on an oxygen mask. A puppet cannot do anything else. It always looked unrealistic when a human put on one of those masks. It always looked unrealistic to have a happy smiling human slip on an oxygen mask to narrowly avoid death. Of course I am joking. We all know nothing can go wrong on one of these planes. But I would have felt better if they had not lost the picture on their safety tape.

The tape concluded we are now ready to take off. But 30 minutes later the plane still had not. I slept. I did feel the takeoff, but my eyes were closed. The plane was taking off about 45 minutes late. I slept another half hour but woke up when they started handing out beverages and “a snack” if you can call a half ounce of mini-pretzels a snack. I had an orange juice, no ice.

The dinner seemed slow in coming, but it was certainly better than what is usually considered airplane food. There was a salad with a nice piece of smoked salmon; the bread had sweet butter; then there was chicken on macaroni in tomato sauce, but it was longer spirals of macaroni. For desert there was a piece of cherry cake and some cheese and crackers. Everything was made fairly well.

Well, after dinner I got maybe a couple of hours of sleep. I woke up in time to see the last ten minutes of the in flight movie, The Rainmaker. I had seen it once already, but it has a fairly rousing conclusion from the moment that Roy Scheider is on the stand. The one problem with the story is that is awfully similar to Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict. It basically is the same defense of lawyers. I don’t necessarily like a lot of what goes on in the legal profession, but there are some good films that defend lawyers, starting with Inherit the Wind.

We are now over Cork in Southern Ireland according to the map they put up. Another hour and we land in Frankfurt. I am looking forward to Istanbul with a mixture of three parts excitement to one part dread. It will be a challenge. We have to do things like find a hotel in a country where we do not know the language. I take that back. It will become three parts excitement to one part dread. Right now it is three parts dread to one part excitement. But that will change. Most people don’t travel because there is too much dread and not enough excitement. But as I tell Evelyn, any place you don’s see by the time you die, you never get another chance. I have some idea of the variation of thought patterns that Americans are capable of, but not that humans are capable of.

Evelyn is sleeping on my shoulder and I try to type in the half-light without disturbing her.

They come around with breakfast. It is choice of a Danish or what sounds like a cappicola sandwich. More for health than for cowardice I take the Danish. We have passed over London and are now crossing from Dover to Calais.

I am also wondering if we are going to be able to travel like this in two years. I usually do not believe in Doomsday prophecies. I am betting that the Year 2000 computer problem will be bigger than most people think. There is only a relatively small part of the population guessing how serious it will be. I am just not hearing experts looking at the situation and coming away skeptical. There are lots of technical people concerned, there are a few trying to tell the general public, and the public is ignoring the threat. Well people were frightened of atomic war and it has not happened. People feel safe. The difference is that we did not have an atomic war scheduled for a specific date and time.

We landed in Frankfurt at 8:39. Evelyn and I both found we were nodding off toward the end of the flight. It is actually a fairly short walk to our outgoing gate with no security checks. Another nice touch is a selection of international newspapers you enter each plane. I got a copy of the Herald Tribune. It seems to be a collection of the international news from the New York Times and the Washington Post. I look at the price. For the US Military in Europe it casts $1.20. It cost 300,000 Turkish Lira. Yup, that confirms what I had heard. A quarter million Turkish Lira to the dollar. Turks get used to large numbers early in life, I think.

Well, there is the call for our plane. We are to go downstairs and board a bus. I wonder where the plane is. I didn’t choose airfare to ride a bus, of course. Had I wanted to ride a bus, I would have taken the bus from Newark to Istanbul. The German voices are so pleasant, even in German. I wonder why they are played so nasty in those old war films. “Ladies and gentlemen, please proceed around to the front of the machine guns.” I wonder what it must be like that in all the good adventure films, like The Guns of Navarone, your countrymen are the bad guys.

On the plane we met a nice couple who were going to Turkey on an Elderhostel tour. We talked to them about places they were going this trip and places we had been.

It is funny. I can remember when I was in elementary school I knew I was going in for science and especially math. The teacher would show us slides of her trip to France and I would be bored. I wasn’t the traveler type. There was more fascination in what life was like in a drop of water than in France. I little suspected I would grow up with this hobby of travel and telling others about what I saw. I would probably go to far more countries than my teacher would. But not France so far. When we are old and tired we will go the easy places like France. First it has to be places like the Amazon and Turkey and India. Travel writing came as a complete shock to me. What happened there was when I worked for Burroughs and got a job offer from Bell Labs, Burroughs sent me to see if there was work I would have liked to do in Pennsylvania where Burroughs had some labs. My supervisor wanted me to report certain things from the meetings. Evelyn wanted to know other things. In order not to have to explain three different accounts of my trip, I wrote just one comprehensive account for myself and gave copies to other people telling them to pull out what was relevant to them. It struck me that account was a nice souvenir of the trip so I did it for other trips. But it was mostly for me. A friend was going to Britain, where I had been, and wanted to know what I had enjoyed seeing there. I gave her this illegible trip log and told her it would not all be of interest, but if she skimmed it she would find the parts that answered her question. She read it cover to cover and gave it to her husband to read cover to cover. It never had occurred to me that for anyone who had not traveled with me there would be much interest at all. But I started circulating my logs to friends and family. Big steps forward were the addition of an HP 200LX that allowed me to type the log as I went and Usenet and the Internet to make the logs available. The 200LX do a lot more for me than that. It keeps track of the sites we will be seeing; it tracks time past. I have programs for the phase of the moon and when sunset is. It is an amazingly useful tool.

Evelyn is sleeping and I just took the first picture of the trip, the ground from the plane.

I am a little afraid of what I put in this log since the Turkish government strikes me as being sensitive to criticism. And I am a guest in their country.

Lunch, which was at about 10:50am was a salad of ham slices, cottage cheese, and a cherry tomato; an omelet with mushrooms and a little potato pancake, German yogurt with an American flag decoration. It said “Fruit guaranteed to be from the US;” and something called “raspberry extra jam” on a croissant. Not quite as high a quality as dinner last night. The yogurt was some unidentified fruit and seemed to have nuts.

I slept more after lunch and we landed about 12:35. Now I had been expecting that anything to do with the Turkish government would be officious and very suspicious of strangers. I had considered not bringing my vitamin C because I could end in a drug hassle if I could not prove it was just vitamins. I went to the trouble of encrypting files in my palmtop about Turkish politics so that if they were examined nobody would see that I was carrying opinions against the Turks. So here it came. First there was buying a visa. The piece had gone up to $45, but otherwise no hassle. The man in line stamped my passport. Then to the area where we pick up luggage, except of course we carry all of our luggage. Here it comes, the inspection. A few people had to open suitcases but nobody bothered with us. Perhaps we have honest faces, but I would have thought the backpacks would have made us look suspicious. For whatever reason, Turkish security was hassle-free. We got out and changed some money and got a taxi for the hotel. We asked to be taken to the Berk Guesthouse. The driver said that he knew where it was but called it the Berak Guesthouse. The driver tried to tell us that if we did not have a reservation we were not going to find a room unless we let him find a place. “Every place you go. Full! Full! Full!” We were unconvinced, and it turned out rightly so. There is a season like that in summer, but not the spring. My mother didn’t raise no children who were foolish enough to believe taxi drivers.

Driving we passed a lot of remnants of old Hippodrome wall preserved, with a fence around them to protect them. The Hippodrome was an old Roman racetrack and if you saw Ben Hur you know those old Romans took horse racing seriously. Turkey is a place aware of its past. You see also minarets all over, but they all look pretty much the same. Minarets have a uniform design in Istanbul. They look like pencils with balconies that all look much alike.

Evelyn mentioned to me that I should not call this an Islamic country. Yet as we drove it is clear that there must be something along those lines that should be said. There are two kinds of country you can visit. There are religious countries where the government is brought to you by the same fine folks who bring you the religion. There are secular counties where the government has nothing whatever to do with religion. Of the religious countries there are two types. The religious leaders can be the same as the government leaders, but so what? England is that way. Supposedly the queen is the head of the Church of England. Iran is the other type: “Our political leaders are all of our religion and by the way, Mr. Visitor, you are really supposed to be that religion also.” Secular countries also have two types. One says something like he US says: “We are all kinds of different religions and none control the government, even if we do shut down on December 25.” Then there is the one that says “We are all pretty much the same religion, but we try not to let that affect our government.” That last is Turkey. The vast majority of the country is Islamic. In that sense it is an Islamic country. But the government does not check the Koran to find out how to govern. The Turkish police do not enforce the Koran. Catch me if I say this is an Islamic country. I mean that by majority demographics.

The taxi driver played on his radio American rock. I don’t know if he liked it or if he thought we would. Most of the music you here on the radio here has an Arabic sound.

We got to the Berak Guesthouse and discovered it was almost the same name, but definitely the wrong place. We had to hassle and show him the name on paper. He had never heard of it. But we discovered it was just about a block or two away. We had pronounced it like burr with a “k” at the end. He pronounced it like bear with a “k” at the end. The reason for the coincidence that they were so close is that if you stay near the major tourist attractions you stay in a relatively small area called Sultanamaht after the Sultan who built the Blue Mosque.

So after the little confusion about the name we got to the Berk. I went up to see the room. I never really know what to look for in a room, particularly in a new country. It is never easy for the traveler to know if his hotel room is a good deal or not. In Tokyo we got a really good deal on a room that was about $90 a night and was about big enough that we could spread two pads on the floor for us to sleep on and no private plumbing. On our Southeast trip $55 was really overpriced for a room with two beds and cable TV with remote, a radio, and really good plumbing with free shampoo. By US standards the room here is pretty Spartan for $50 a night. One bed, a chair, a sink, a private bathroom, but with plumbing so primitive that you throw out rather than flush toilet paper. (I knew some places had the toilet paper deal, but this is the first I visited and it is hard to get used to.) I think travel is definitely worth the expense and with the exception of airfare can be done cheaply even to places like Japan. But it also reminds me again and again that in the late 20th century life in America for most people is incredibly comfortable. Our slums are incredibly luxurious compared to how most people in the world lived 100 years ago. I guess it is a matter of what you get used to.

We left our luggage in the room and went out to scout the area. One reason the hotels are so expensive and all together in one group is we are right near the Blue Mosque and Saint Sophia. We stopped at a corner shop for a cool drink. There is easily available Coke and Doritos. We got a local drink at 150,000TL (sixty cents). It turned out to be cherry drink. The brand name is Cappy (but it is really Coca-Cola) and it tastes really good, like liquid cherry pie filling. Prices, incidentally, are quoted in thousands. The woman in the shop said the price was “150″ and that was what the can was what was written under the can in the cooler.

Near the mosques there are a lot of touts hanging around, who are medium aggressive. They come up to you and try to get you to come to their shop or try to sell you postcards, but they do take no for an answer. There are not as many as there were in India and they are mostly just near the really touristy areas. Also if you appear to be lost locals passing will without being asked stop and try to help you.

A lot of things you see are in a blue and green color scheme. Those were the colors of two political parties and they are sort of the unofficial colors of the country, though the flag is red and white.

What can I say about the city? This is the city of the “once-beautiful.” Buildings are of nice design but are not well maintained. Buildings that in many different eras were new and nice-looking are giving way to the ravages of time. Houses are much the same. We walked around and could have gone in the mosques, but I preferred to get caught up on my log before we did too much. So we headed back to the room, stopping at the corner store to get bottled water for the room. We got a big 1.5 liter bottle and a half liter bottle. It cost 200,000TL, (I will use “TL” as “Turkish Lira”) well under a dollar. Evelyn had just had her small bills present but had stuffed them in a pocket and could not find them. The woman behind the counter suggested we just pay her tomorrow. We almost took her up on her credit offer, but we found the small change. The woman probably figures that if American came this far, they are honest. She also generated good will. I will probably pick that store first for buying snacks.

I told myself I wanted to read up first. I did not actually do that, though I did make up some flashcards to get some of the language down.

Evelyn fell asleep and I worked on my log. I wrote a program on my palmtop to act like flashcards, but it was not as good as the real thing. I also scouted the bands on my short-wave but found little of interest though I did find the BBC.

About 7:15 we went out and found a restaurant. For about 2 million we each had a dish and a yogurt drink call Ayran. My dish was kiremit shish. It was called claypot chicken and cheese. It really was chicken pizza without the crust. Evelyn had yogurtlu kebap. That is lamb over yogurt drenched bread.

There are really three parts to Istanbul: Stamboul, Bayoglu, and Uskudar. Take a postcard sized piece of paper and draw in the two diagonals. You have four triangles coming together at the center. The lowest triangle is the Sea of Marmara. Continuing clockwise you have Stamboul, Bayoglu, and Uskudar. Separating Stamboul from Bayoglu is the Golden Horn, a long narrow bay and a port. Between Bayoglu and Uskudar is the Bosphorus. The palace and the great mosques are in Sultanahmet, the region toward the point of Stamboul. It is there we are staying and that is really the tourist section of Istanbul.

Going back to the room we crashed. Slept through most of the evening. At midnight I woke up and worked on my log, but then went to sleep officially. This is a noisy neighborhood.

Breakfast was not ready when we arrived so we talked a little bit to Nico. First about the Camel ad. It apparently was used in a German film. The discussion turned to his battles with the Turkish government to preserve this area. He seems to have a set of abstract complaints and desires and I have not gotten a good idea of exactly what he does want. First he is saying that they want to buy the cone he restored and they should have been asking him six years earlier. Then he is complaining that they may not want to buy it. He wants the bus station and the stalls outside the open-air museum torn down because they were not designed by an architect. He complains they are “Door. Window. Door. Window. Door. Window.” He wants the government to come in and spend a lot on the town. I don’t know what exactly he wants things to be like.

We were worried the Olsons would miss their tour. They came into breakfast at 9, which seemed a bit late.

After breakfast we went back to the room to rest up from going back to the room. Evelyn asked me what I wanted to do today. Well, like yesterday it was already kind of a lazy day. I looked in the Lonely Planet and they had maybe two places worth going to. I dozed off a little, I guess and woke at 10am. Evelyn said the places I picked were really a bit far to go today. Okay, so now what? I suggested what if we were to check out and head for the less lazy area of Ankara. We would be going a day earlier than planned, but there would be more to do there. Evelyn said there was probably no convenient bus. Then she looked and discovered there was one about 12:30. So that was decided upon. The hotel never asked us how long we were staying. At least in this season things are a little loose. So we are off to Ankara. It took us about 15 minutes to me out the door. I cracked my head on the top of the door one last time on my way out. We had just flushed the toilet and we could not get it to stop so we just told one of the employees. Nico saw us and asked us a couple of times, “You’re leaving?” He was also sort of mumbling to himself.

We got to the bottom of the hill at 10:35 and it turns out one of the bus companies had a 10:45 bus to Ankara. The bus pulled up early and at 10:38 we on both the bus and our way to Ankara. It is hard to imagine timing getting better than that. We seem to be on the bus with a somber group. It is just a small bus, larger than a mini-bus but maybe two-thirds or less than a full-size.

The bus takes us to Nevsehir. Here we will wait for a half-hour for the Ankara bus. The time comes and we board. This is video-bus, our first. It was built by Mercedes-Benz. They start a film and I tell Evelyn it is safety instructions (like on a plane). The joke turns out to be quite true.

But then they do have a movie. The movie is Gunah. The plot must be more complex than this, but since it is in Turkish I may be missing some of the subtlety. An inter-city bus driver is a good guy whom everybody likes. A mysterious woman running away from her village rides his bus, and she fascinates him. He keeps seeing her in the city at the other end of his route. He finds out that she has become a sexy belly dancer. He wants to save her from this life. Eventually he kidnaps her at gunpoint, drags her onto his bus and takes her to the ocean where he washes the makeup off of her. She melts into his arms. She tells him what she was fleeing in her village but it is lost in the Turkish. Presumably they are very repressive. They hug again. Flash forward: they are engaged and deliriously happy. Even the groom’s mother agrees. They have a wedding ceremony. Everybody is happy. Then at the height of the ceremony the bride is shot dead by her family. In agony the bus driver grabs the dying body of the woman he loved.

Some of the things I learn from this film:

Some Turks eat like Indians, using the bread to pick up the food.

The life of a bus driver may be considered to be romantic in this culture like being an airline pilot in the US or being an engineer on the trains in Canada or India.

It is not unusual to see men holding hands and kissing each other on cheek. I have also seen this on the street.

Almost like Indian films ,they may often have songs for no reason in the middle of some Turkish films.

The approval of the groom’s mother is very important in deciding if a wedding can take place.

Brides in Turkey wear very Western-looking gowns.

Pretty much a whole village will celebrate a marriage. The men may have a dancing ceremony that has a mock fight with sticks.

There is still a great deal of tension between the fundamentalists and the more Westernized Turks.

I think you learn the fastest about a country the first couple hours you are on the street and when you watch your first movie from that culture.

We stopped for lunch break. I did not know how long we had. I went to the steward and pointed at my watch asking “On? Yirmi?” (“Ten? Twenty?”) He said, “Okay. Okay.” Well that was not much help. We bought a couple of chocolate bars and talked to an Australian couple about travel, etc.

At this writing we are approaching Ankara. This is a city known for taking that which is tangled and making it straight and that which is straight and making it tangled. In the first case it is the hair from Angora goats. The city was once called Angora, in fact and is the center of the Angora wool trade. And making the straight tangled is obviously the chief function of government and Ankara is center of Turkish government.

The town was a center of trade going back to the Hittites at 1200 BC. It changed hands to the Phrygians, Alexander, the Seleucids, the Galatians, and in 25 BC the Romans. The Byzantine held the town, but it was captured by the Seljuk Turks. Tamerlane captured it and its Sultan. But when his state collapsed it became a sleepy goat-raising town again.

Ataturk made it his government in 1920. After his War for Independence it became the capital of his new Turkey.

Well, we arrived in Ankara and the first thing we needed to do was find the bus to Ulus. Evelyn tried to ask in broken Turkish how to find bus 198 to Ulus. I told her to never underestimate the power of the written word. I wrote on a piece of paper “Otobus 198 -> Ulus”. I showed that to people and got conflicting answers but at least they understood the question. One man could not tell us where to go so walked us to the place to buy tickets for the bus and waited there with us until the ticket-seller arrived. We told him he could go, but he insisted on waiting with us. The Turks are a very hospitable people. We really should have taken a taxi, probably. We are saving ourselves a few small dollars, but people here are willing to humor us.

The bus comes and it is a double bus. It is really two cars with a sort of turntable arrangement between so people inside don’t risk the floor turning under them and gaps forming.

We get off at Ulus. This is really a business street with banks, more up-scale stores, and crossing Cankiri Caddesi anywhere but at the light is taking your life in your hands. When you cross at the light it seems that all of Ankara is crossing one way or the other and perhaps both. We fight our way across. On the other side one street over we look for the hotel, the Yildez. Behind the counter there is a rather strange looking clerk with a falsetto laugh. Something has pushed his eye teeth forward of his other teeth giving him the appearance of an underfed and slightly swishy vampire. We ask to see the room, first he wants to see our passports. This does not sound good to me, but I insist on seeing the room before paying. The bellboy takes our stuff up to the room. Well, if he insists. The room does not look too bad. I test the toilet and it works. It is a reasonable room; it even has a TV. Okay, we pay for three nights on the room. I go back upstairs and start to settle in.

I tried flushing the toilet again. This time nothing happened. Terrific, we have now paid for the room and the toilet is broken. There was water in the tank the first time, but the tank did not fill. I memorized Turkish for “the toilet is broken.” Down to the desk.

“Tuvalet yanmiyor.” The desk clerk smiled at me. “Yes.” That’s it? Yes? “Tuvalet yanmiyor.” “Yes.” But this time he was searching for the right words in English. “Seven.” “It will work at 7:00?” “Yes.” He bent his arm and made a muscle as if to say, “Be strong.”

We go looking for dinner and go to the Lahmacun Office, a pizza joint. It is decorated with a poster of Georgia O’Keefe and other flower pictures. We each get a different kind of pizza. I order Lahmacun, called Turkish Pizza. This is on a cracker-like piece of crisp bread, a circle about eight inches in diameter. On it is a think layer of ground lamb and tomato sauce. Then it is baked. Much more like pizza at home is Kiymali Pide. This starts with a crust a little thicker. It is covered with tomato sauce, cheese, and ground lamb. A rim is folded on the pizza from the top and bottom so it is no longer a circle but an eye shape. It is baked and then cut with parallel cuts the short way across. You get strips of pizza with rolled crust at each end. At this restaurant with each you get a little parsley salad, no utensils, but a salad. A slice of lemon is there as the dressing.

After dinner we walk around the shopping area. There are lots of more prosperous-seeming stores. Perhaps they are just more the style we see in the US and less like open and less formal mom and pop stores. You do have people selling battery-driven toys on the street. There is the car that drives to a wall, tries to climb it, falls on its back, and then rights itself. And runs in the opposite direction. There is also an electric dog that barks. There are sweet shops with open fronts.

We walk out into the square and there is a very large statue of Ataturk on a horse. Ankara, of course, idolizes Ataturk, at least officially. Here it is a punishable crime to show disrespect for Kemal Ataturk.

At the base of the statue there are kids playing soccer or hockey with an aerosol can cap.

We look in a bookstore window. I was surprised to see a Turkish edition of George Polya’s mathematics classic How To Solve It? There were novels by Dean R. Koontz, Stephen King, and especially Wilbur Smith. But we saw no science fiction. That was something of a surprise. There seems to be no market that I can see for science fiction in Turkey.

This is really the least touristy section of Turkey we have seen. We haven’t even seen a tourist since the Otogar. I also have not seen one carpet shop. There are no touts chasing tourists either. The closest you see is beggars who pick out foreigners.

Well, enough walking. We get back and the same clerk is behind the desk. I point out it is 7pm. I say “Yedi.” He responds only by giggling. We get upstairs and there is still to toilet. We can use the toilet only by filling the tank from the showerhead.

There is not much on the television of interest. I work on my log. I think I will treat myself to my last on-hand can of Cappy Cherry.

I have to be a little negative on Turkey for more than just the tout problem. Just about wherever we go the level of service is a bit dishonest. Now the hotel knows they the toilets don’t work and they basically lie about it rather than fix the problem. The desk clerk knew darn well there was no fix to the toilet coming. He just did not care.

I must have hit the sack about 10pm. I really don’t remember for sure. What I remember is that I got caught up in the log and decided to play one hand of solitaire. I have Klondyke on my palmtop. It worked out for me and I decided nothing better could happen to me today. From the next room I hear the monotonous of a computer video game. They have it turned up too loud. But it does indicate these things are available here.