Well, our trip is rapidly coming to an end. My spreadsheet that tracks such things says we are now 7/8 the way into the trip, or will be in about 8 minutes, which is close enough for me. This program gives me a nice pie chart showing what percent of the trip is gone. It also tells me where I should be on my film. In the early parts of the trip I was using up film too fast, but now I am even just a bit behind. I may end up with a roll to spare.
More fighting with the plumbing, but in an hour or so it is someone else’s problem. We went down to what might well be our final Turkish style breakfast. Frankly it is pretty much the same thing day after day and while I did warm up to it eventually, I won’t be sorry to get some variety. The knife at breakfast was cheaply made. The handle was only a little sharper than the blade.
We go out looking for some of the local artifacts of ancient Rome. The first stop is the Column of Julian. It was erected for the Emperor Julian. It is not all that impressive any more. A stork has built a nest on the top.
We got ourselves a bit lost looking for the Haci Bayram Cami, the most beloved mosque. How impressive is a glass shop with a cracked picture window? We found the mosque and the small ruins of the Temple of Augustus. A man was feeding pigeons and had roughly an acre of them swarming around. I wonder how many of the pigeons six yards away really thought they were going to get anything at all considering how much competition there was. I guess you take your chances and hope to be lucky sometime. You take your chances going with the flock. Not a lot of pigeons are creative thinkers.
A little girl and what I assume was her younger brother were selling what I would call charms or Islamic Mezuzahs. It was something in a sealed leather pouch. She was so persistent and it was only 20 cents, so Evelyn and I each bought one. She kissed us each on both cheeks, but there was too much language barrier for us to understand even what we bought.
We took some pictures of the mosque, but did not go inside. We walked around. There is a sort of religious bazaar with most shops selling religious goods. We bought a book, the first apparent piece of science fiction we found in Turkey, but found out it was really a tract about Islam and Doomsday. We talked to a soft-spoken gentleman who asked us to see his bookshop and have some tea. We politely declined. He gave us a sort or religious talk assuming us to be Christians. He told us about how powerful God was, identifying God with Nature. He said that God was the greatest computer maker since He had invented the human mind. He said that a fly is far more complex than a fighter-jet. The sun is a much more powerful atom bomb than anything man has made is. If he were a Jehovah’s Witness on my doorstep I might have pointed out the flaws in his argument. He believed things were going to come to a battle between believers and atheists. I really should have pinned him down as to why he thought that people with differing viewpoints have to battle. I respect both believers and atheists, though deep down I think both use flawed arguments for their viewpoints. The universe just does not provide the evidence for us to decide if there is a God. Deciding to be one or another is an emotional decision, not a logical one. But I really now wish I had tried to persuade him that atheists are not his enemies. At least they are not just by being atheists.
We walked from the bazaar through the streets until we saw the Ataturk Monument and that told us where we were. On to the War of Salvation Museum.
The War of Salvation Museum is in the building that housed the National Assembly and from which Mustafa Kemal commanded during the war of Independence. Essentially, as I understand it, you had a three-sided war. You had Greeks invading Turkey. You had the forces of the Sultan, and you had Mustafa Kemal. On May 19, 1919, Kemal took command of the Ninth Army ostensibly to fight the Greeks but instead taking on two enemies. Kemal was forced to resign but resistance to the Sultan was now official and a national issue. The resistance continued and gained support and by January of 1920 Kemal claimed his Nationalists were now the rightful government of Turkey. In March of 1920 Kemal set up this building as the National Assembly of Turkey. The National Assembly was slow to act but in August they counterattacked the Greeks and routed them, burning Smyrna.
If you know a little of the history the museum has more meaning. There is not really a lot to see. It is just a bunch of rooms where the assembly met and where Mustafa Kemal had his office. Perhaps because this was the Friday before May 19 there were hordes of school children whose classes had come to visit the museum. Many of them found us more interesting than the exhibits. We tried to discourage them, but we got lots of hellos and kids trying out their English on real live tourists. There were long lines of them waiting to get in and we could not even walk down the street without being treated like celebrities.
The Republic Museum is just down the street from the last museum. When the Grand National Assembly got too big for the first building they moved to this second building. However, when we got there it was closed to the public. A film crew was setting up to film a shot there and was preparing several cars out front to look like antiques. We watched for a while, then decided to go back to the hotel, just a few blocks away. There was a man on the sidewalk selling washcloths. At least I think that is what they were. I shook my head no, but he gave me a big smile anyway. The Turks are great people.
Back we go to the room. One last use of the ludicrous plumbing facilities. Then we pack our luggage on our backs and we are off. As we leave the hotel I tell Evelyn to take a last look. There is actually a fairly good chance she will never see it again. We catch a bus. I suspect that with this amount of luggage we should have taken a taxi.
A bus station is an otogar; a train station is simply a gar. We leave our luggage at left luggage. The man tells us they close at 11pm. No problem. The Ankara Express leaves for Istanbul at 10:30pm. If our luggage is still there at 11pm we are in serious trouble. From there we get a bus to downtown. This is the modern downtown from the new part of town. Ulus is really the old part of the city. Evelyn sat next to a woman studying to be a mathematics teacher. I had to grab a different seat.
Getting off the bus Evelyn got a Coca-Cola and I got a Cappy Cherry and we went to sit in a nearby park. Two shoeshine boys came by walking with a third boy. The third boy stopped to look at us with an over-exaggerated pained and pitiful look. When we would not give him money he pulled a smoking cigarette from behind his back and nonchalantly walked away. I commented to Evelyn that he needed a better pitiful look and the cigarette definitely did not help the act. A few seconds later he had picked a fight with one of the shoeshine boys.
The downtown section is called Kizilay for a square in the area. What I had called up-scale shops before should be taken down a peg. This is really a fancier downtown than most American cities have.
You see a lot of clothing and toys that use Mickey Mouse or Tweety-Pie. The two are very popular characters. I never see a copyright symbol. I suspect that the use is illegal.
We look in a bookstore window as we walk. One of the books for sale is The Diary of Anne Frank. Now how many mostly Moslem countries would you see that in?
There is an area opened only to a very minimum of car traffic. We walk around going to stores, mostly bookstores. I get some pictures of fish stalls. The fish are all laid out in parallel even rows. Each one has a bright red wound the size of a nickel at the base of the neck. It may be some sort of freshness proof, but I am not sure how it works. Maybe it changes color when the fish is not fresh. There are also some beautiful fruit stalls.
As yet we had seen several bookstores without ever seeing a science fiction section. You do see horror and some fantasy, but science fiction seems not to have made much of a mark in Turkey. In one bookstore I find some books that get about as close as I have seen. There is a Turkish edition of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. I get a much abridged version of The Phantom of the Opera also, just as a souvenir. We like to collect foreign language editions of science fiction books.
We went to another bookstore and they did have a science fiction section, but with only about 20 titles. Featured is what we have to figure out is Children of Dune by Frank Herbert.
It was getting toward lunchtime and later, about 2:30. We decided to look for a place to eat. There is no shortage of places to eat in Kizilay, but most look good and we took pretty much the first we found, a fried fish sandwich place. For 300,000TL or 350,000TL you get fish fried while you wait on a half loaf of bread, with lettuce and onions and a wedge of lemon. We ordered Bass and Halibut. I would swear one of us did not get what we ordered because both are fair-sized fish and Evelyn’s was made of some small fish. Still it was good enough. I thought hers was a little bitter tasting, but she didn’t think so. So we sat there watching the passing parade, eating fish sandwiches, and drinking Cokes.
We walk around the downtown area after lunch. We consider making some purchases, but don’t. We go to a movie theater and you have your choice of four American films: Titanic, Great Expectations, and Seven Years in Tibet. We find some used book stalls and get some cheap editions of a couple other science fiction novels: Arthur C. Clarke’s Fall of Moondust and Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky.
We walked around and then sat in the public area and wrote and watched the passing parade. We sat in front of a restaurant with a huge spit of lamb meat. It must have started out three feet in diameter. As we sat there he sliced meat one sandwich at a time. It must have been down to two feet by the time we left. That is a lot of meat sold.
We probably could have gone to Istanbul a day earlier. The little bits that we are doing today do not add up to a whole lot. It would have meant missing last evening’s performance and that would have been a shame. Still there is something to be said for just sitting in a park (we are now back in the park where we had the drinks early this afternoon) and noting cultural differences.
There are a lot of military men in uniform on the streets. It must be a bigger percent of the Turkish population than of our population.
Cigarette smoking is different. Almost everybody adult seems to smoke. Well, a very big percentage anyway. In Turkey people are much more likely to sit near you, light up a cigarette, and blow smoke your way. I guess we in the US have had our consciousness raised about smoking. However most Turks prefer Turkish cigarettes to American ones. In Bergama the son of the hotel owner explained why. He had a Turkish cigarette and the Japanese gardener had one. He bent the cigarette and the paper tore. He told the gardener to bend his cigarette. On the American cigarette the paper did not tear. They put plastic in the paper so the cigarettes are more durable. American smokers are inhaling burning plastic. I don’t suppose it adds a whole lot to the dangers of smoking, but it does give one pause. I have been told that the Turks who do smoke admire people who don’t. I think they figure they have had the strength to give up smoking.
Everywhere there are people selling flags to celebrate May 19, the Turkish equivalent of Independence Day. This was when Ataturk started leading the people in his revolt against the Sultan. You are nobody unless you are waving a big flag when the day comes, I think.
The time came when it was getting hard to read and we got a bus to the train station. It really picked up a lot of people. It was not as packed as the subway trains in Tokyo at rush hour, but it was packed by US standards. It was all I could do to hold onto the bar and stand. One of the banks has a big sign that shows moving pictures like Times Square.
We recognize when we are getting to the train station because of the amusement park across the street. Their parachute drop is a tall tower, sort of a landmark. We had to fight our way off the bus. We both had to use the toilets. The cost here is 30,000 for tuvalet. Well, I guess 12 cents isn’t much.
We go into the waiting room. We still have a couple of hours until our train is ready. The train platform is one of the cleanest and most beautiful I have ever seen. The marble tile floors add a lot. We decide to get a little food. There is a restaurant and a pasta place in the station. Here pasta means pastry. They have a big menu on the wall. I order Pepsi and pizza, Evelyn orders cake and Turkish coffee. The waiter goes off and brings Evelyn her cake and me Pepsi. We wait.
Eventually I ask the waiter if pizza is coming. He seems confused.
His boss comes out carrying a second open Pepsi and a piece of cake. “Heyir. Pizza.” I write down “pizza” on my pad. “No pizza.” Okay, I take the cake.
We get our luggage and go out on the platform. There is a dog in the train station. I clearly was too harsh on the local populace. Just about everyone who passes the dog pets him or makes kissing sounds. One woman petted him. Made a one-minute gesture with her hand and went running off. A couple minutes later she returned with some wrapped cake that she gave the dog. “I know him,” she explained. He chose to sleep on the marble floor near us until we had to leave him and board the train. Also it was a he. I don’t know why but the vast majority of dogs I have seen have been female. Maybe it is my imagination. Having ridden sleepers in Southeast Asia and India I am prepared for the worst. I just hope we get put in with someone decent.
I get on the train and tell the steward our seats are “besh ve alta” (“5 and 6″}. No, we didn’t get put in with someone decent. We have a private two-person compartment. Well, I would say the accommodations are comparable to what we had on the one time we had a sleeper in Scotland. Okay, get this Southeast Asia traveling companions. Our compartment has a full complement of electric lights, and an outlet. There is a thermostat. It gets better. There is a sink and a big mirror. There are two bottles of water and glasses. There is a wall with hangers and hooks. Come to think of it, Scotland did not have a sink. Hey, it isn’t as nice as in Murder on the Orient Express or From Russia with Love, but, hey, it is way ahead of anything we have had in a sleeper car before. I just wish we could have traveled like this earlier in the trip. And it saves us a travel day. And it saves us an hotel night. But we have to pay $35 for a double. What luxury. You know, I like Turkey.
To enjoy the trip more I have myself some roast chickpeas from earlier and one of my two cans of Cappy Cherry. I didn’t initially like roast chickpeas but I am getting used to them. I think they need salt. The other problem is they get a little charred in the roasting process, which comes off on your fingers in a brown powder.
The conductor earlier offered to open the beds, but we wanted to stay up a little longer. We opened everything ourselves. No problem. I expect the rocking of the car to help put me to sleep.
