Istanbul 1995

Friday May 19

The sound and light show at the Blue Mosque could be heard from the roof terrace of the Ramis Restaurant where the four of us had dinner. The restaurant is a short walk from the Valide Sultan Hotel, which was built only a few months ago. Our rooms smell of fresh paint still. The rates are very reasonable, especially when compared to the smaller and less attractive Alp Guest House where we had stopped on first arriving in Istanbul. The whole area behind the Blue Mosque abounds in cheap bed-and-breakfast places that seem to cater more to the younger backpacking crowd.
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Saturday May 20

At five in the morning the loudspeakers from the minaret of the mosque blare out the call to prayer. We had breakfast at the hotel — toast, cereal, hard-boiled eggs. Then we went out to the square between the Sultanahmet and Ayasofya mosques. From there we followed the tramlines on Divan Yolu Caddesi to the covered market, spotting a few likely restaurants along the way, for future reference.

The bazaar has 18 entrances and 4000 shops — a veritable nightmare for non-shoppers like me, and a paradise for shoppers like my wife. After an hour or two of braving the crowds we went downhill in the general direction of the Bosphorus and the Galata Bridge, and lo and behold, we found ourselves at the entrance to the Misr Casesi, the Egyptian Spice Bazaar, through which we wandered, buying some dried fruit and spices, and meeting some Portuguese tourists. The bazaar opens out onto the waterfront with the New Mosque to one side and the Galata Bridge right in front.

All around are tourists galore, alongside shoeshine boys, and sellers of punch in colorful traditional garb.

A bright day, warm and a bit hazy. We walked to the ferry piers, but not knowing the language or their destinations, did not venture aboard any of the ferries.

We took a taxi back to the Blue Mosque, which upon first entering would have been much more impressive were it not for the major flooring construction that required the area beneath the huge dome to be cordoned off. From there we walked to Topkapi Sarayi ($5 admission) and spent the better part of several hours touring the museum. We were charmed by Turkish kids wanting to practise their English on us.

Homage to E.H.

It is night.  The cat makes its rounds through the stillness of the night.  It pads across the deck on its white paws, not caring what anyone thinks of its leaving paw marks on the clean, not-well-lighted wood of the deck.

The cat scratches the glass of the window.  It seeks the food it needs to sustain its nocturnal rounds, as it does very day.  It has come for the food in good times and in bad.  These are good times.  Later it will be bad.

The cat finds its food in the dish set outside the door.  It eats hungrily, for it has had nothing to eat since the previous night.  It is a medium size cat.  Its calico pelt hides it well in the places where it spends the nighttime hours.  There are enemies out there in the dark.

It eats its fill, and then leaves.  No one knows where it goes.  Night after night it comes, eats, and leaves.  Not shoots and leaves, señor.  It eats proper cat food.  Sometimes the food comes in cans.  Other times it comes in large paper bags with the picture of a happy kitten printed on the outside.

The cat has not eaten all of the food.  Its stomach is filled, and it leaves, and leaves part of the leavings as leftovers in the dish which has been set out to feed it.

The stillness of the night is wounded by sounds of quarreling animals.  Perhaps the animals are mating, for it is spring, and animals in the wild often mate in the spring.  As they also drink from it.

In the darkness, a family of beasts arrives.  They have snarling faces with white burglar masks over their dark eyes.  There are three of them, two large, one small.  They eat the leftover cat food in the dish.  They drink the water.  Their tails are bushy and have stripes.  They have very long claws that can tear a can open.  One does not confront beasts such as these.  Not in the night.  Not unless one has a firearm.

The cat does not appear the next night.  Or the next. Or the one after that.

The food that has been set out night after night for the cat is eaten.  It is eaten by the family of bandit beasts, who leave their paw marks and spilled food across the formerly clean, not-well-lighted deck.  No more food is put out for the missing cat.

One wonders about the cat.  Has it, too, become cat food?

Politician-speak

Politician on TV (really, cross my heart!):
"Nobody doesn't think that nothing shouldn't be done."
(I can't remember what the topic was.)

Italia, con amore

My wife's cousin in New York just returned from a vacation in Italy. She had some wonderful stories to tell, about the travails of traveling with her elderly aunt, about World Cup fever and inattentive waiters and cooks who forgot their hungry customers' orders because they were glued to the kitchen television set, and about some kindly British ladies on the bus who were so solicitous of the two of them.

They visited Tuscany and Umbria, Rome and Naples, and acknowledged that the Italians are much, much warmer towards foreign visitors than are the French. Senza dubbio!

In Florence, the lady in question was determined to visit the Church of Santa Croce. But a sign posted on the door said that the church was closed due to an historic event. She assumed that Italy was playing in an important World Cup match, and so no one would be expected to be in the church. Only later did she discover that the "historic event" was just a soccer match between two local teams.

Bella Italia.

Heat

A sweltering day.  Not a cloud in the sky.  No fog in the City as I drove in, intending to visit the Monet exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Got stuck in traffic as I exited the freeway onto Bryant and then headed up Third Street.  It was lunchtime; maybe that was the reason for the crush.  Cars to the left and right of me tried to cut into my lane.  I let them in, and they got stuck in the "Keep Clear" zone at the intersection as the traffic lights turned red. The lights were slow to turn green all the way towards Market Street. Not a good day to come into San Francisco.

Financial District today has a whole different breed of office workers compared to when I was working; they dress so differently now, especially the young women who display such a surplus of epidermis.  How do they get away with it?  And those tattoos!  

Decided not to try to find parking downtown, and drove up Pine Street all the way to The Richmond.  Had lunch at an Indonesian café on Clement Street.  Did some shopping there, then decided to head home, and forego seeing the Monets. It was much too hot.  The plastic bottle of ice water that I had brought with me was hot by the time I got in the car again.  

No pictures today, not much accomplished on the Day of the Solstice.

The Magic Half-Hour

Do not go to a Chinese restaurant between 3:15PM and 3:45PM even if there is an "OPEN FOR BUSINESS" sign in the window. This is the restaurant staff's lunch half-hour, and in Chinese restaurants the staff lunch is a ritual that any prospective customer would be wise not to interrupt.

It is the one time in their busy day when the staff can sit, relax, and chat while downing heaping bowls of rice and enormous platters of appetizing meats and vegetables that do not show up in the regular menu. It is also their main meal of the day, which explains why the portions are generous - they tend to be larger by far than the platters served at $300 twelve-course wor choi banquets - and are unlikely to be laced with sodium glutamates, whether mono- or di-, with which the paying customer's meal is typically impregnated, often in total disregard of earnest pleas of "No MSG, please."

Knowledgeable diners stay away during that critical half-hour. Our advice is intended for other diners who, because they may be less culturally aware (or may be inconveniently hungry), could wander into a Chinese restaurant only to discover to their chagrin that the "OPEN" sign really means the following:

'Yeah, we're open because our sign says so, but it is hardly convenient at this time for us to leave what we are doing, namely, enjoying this delicious meal with our fellow staff members, who, though we love them dearly, are not above picking the choicest pieces from these dishes, while one or another of us waitpersons is gone, having been designated to be the one to do the job because you the thoughtless customer happen to catch his or her eye, and because our job description requires that he or she attend to your needs by getting up off of this here table and walking over to take your order, then to write it down in shorthand and then to bring it in to the glowering duty cook standing there by the door of the kitchen sucking his teeth, whose turn it is to fire up the wok which has been on high alert since we started eating, a cook, by the way, who it behooves us to be considerate of, since he not only stir-fries for you the customer but also for us the employees of this establishment for whom this half-hour meal is by custom and tradition the high point of our daily labors, breaking up as it happily does our busy day by separating the hectic lunchtime crowds from the equally hectic dinnertime crowds, two groups which, if you were not the inconsiderate character that you appear to be, you would have had to elbow and jostle while standing in line to get a table because this establishment has such a reputation for good food, having been favorably written up by the food editor of the local newspaper, that it does not even take reservations nowadays, so that it would be highly unlikely for you to be seated even after a half-hour's wait, and all we are asking at this time is for you to leave us in peace for just another, say, twenty minutes or so of our very own to allow us to finish this meal, which if we were to abandon even for a minute to see to your needs would be stone cold by the time we resumed and is it really so much to ask that you to show some thoughtfulness for just a few more moments so we can chew and swallow our food and not have to rush around like chickens without heads and thereby risk an attack of indigestion, and for us to be adequately nourished before returning to setting tables, wrapping won tons, and plucking the tails off of bean sprouts, until the dinnertime clientele descends upon us again, which will be sooner than you might suppose, and usually around six o'clock. In short, if you would be kind enough to stroll around the block for let's say fifteen minutes, it would be much appreciated by our by then well-fed staff who should be ready to attend to your needs when you return."

Teepee

Should the end of the roll of bathroom tissue (a.k.a. toilet paper) hang over the front or the rear of the roll?  Is there a right or a wrong way? And does it matter?  Will the world end if we insert the roll one way or the other?  Gimme a break.

All I can say is that most decent hotels seem to prefer the front overhang.  Not only that, but any observant new guest in any decent hotel will note that the end of the roll is folded over so that it comes to a neat point. Cruise ships do the same thing.  

Speaking of toilets, jetliners and cruise ships have this in common — theirs are flushed using a powerful hydraulic sucking action, with just a minimum use of water.  Unlike their land-based cousins, ship and plane toilets must use as little precious water as possible.

First time air travelers are usually startled by the loud swoosh of air that follows the push of a button or lever beside the toilet.  And pleased by how the Teflon-coated bowl is so efficiently cleaned in this way.

Comics

I wish I had kept all those comic books from my growing-up years!  

My earliest were issues of the pre- and during WWII era superheroes: Superman, Green Lantern, Hawkman, The Human Torch, The Flash, The Sandman, and all the rest of the bunch that made up the 'Justice Society of America' (I don't recall that Batman was ever inducted into the Society). All of those comic books of mine perished during the war, though many of the characters survived into the Fifties, and some are with us today and even more famous than they ever were.  

Other pre-war comic book heroes were the fish-faced Submariner, the space cowboys Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Red Ryder, Smilin'Jack, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and a host of others.  During the forties, while the U.S. was at war, Captain America and Bucky came along to fight the good fight, as did the Blackhawks, a band of blue-uniformed airmen in special twin-engined planes with terrific firepower, and Terry and the Pirates, and Daredevil, and Airboy, who flew a special plane that flapped its wings.

All for ten cents an issue.

Each issue contained 64 pages, the last of which usually featured an ad for Charles Atlas' 'Dynamic Tension', a body-building method that turned ninety-eight-pound weaklings into he-men after having sand kicked in their faces by a beach bully.

I really liked Flash Gordon, especially when Alex Raymond started drawing the strip after the war.  The strip had a cast of unforgettable characters — the beautiful Dale, the bearded scientist and Flash Gordon's sidekick Dr. Zarkov, and of course the evil Emperor Ming of the planet Mongo, who had slinky Oriental temptresses in his palace always ready to seduce Flash away from the beautiful Dale.  (Some insidious racism here, but comics in those days were not drawn to be politically correct.)

Alex Raymond also drew the fabulous strip Rip Kirby, a special agent who was suave and smoked a pipe, and who battled evil communist spies and other evildoers.

After the war there appeared the whole Captain Marvel family of superheroes (kid-next-door Billy Batson was transformed into red-suited Captain Marvel by the simple expedient of uttering the magic word "Shazam!").  There was also Mary Marvel for the girls, and even an Uncle Marvel (if memory serves), and the evil Doctor Sivana, a skeletal bald guy with thick glasses who was continually hatching evil schemes in his lab.  

Also around that time came other superheroes with special skills.  Plastic Man could flatten himself as thin as a sheet of paper to slip through the bottoms of doors, or shape his flexible torso into telephone booths or trash cans, though colored red like his outfit, with black and white stripes around the midsection. All that transmogrification just to catch an unwary criminal.  Similarly, Spider Man could attach his web to buildings and swing himself across an urban landscape like a red-and-blue suited chimp to land on a bad guy.  And the gorgeous Wonder Woman could deflect bullets with her magic wristbands, or lasso a plane with a magic rope.  The plane she flew in was transparent, presumably made of some special kind of glass or plastic.

Another classy comic book character that I came to admire was The Spirit, drawn by the talented Will Eisner.  The Spirit was a masked crime-fighter in a rumpled blue suit, white shirt and red tie, who lived in an underground hideaway under a cemetery.  He had a lot of femme fatales to deal with, but it was the Police Commissioner Dolan's daughter Ellen who remained his true love.

I resumed my interest in comic books in the late-Forties, and had quite a collection by then.  The science fiction ones from the EC group, like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, were followed by the horror ones from the same shop, like Tales from the Crypt. Added to them were the Crime Does Not Pay and Crime and Punishment comic books, which were gory enough for their time, though nothing as bad as some of the graphic novels of today.  And then to improve my mind, I also collected the Classic Comix, such as A Tale of Two Cities, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Corsican Brothers.

I wonder how much my old comic book collection would fetch today if I could put it out on auction on eBay.

Various Shortenings

I really have no idea how it all started, but I have some vague sense that some years after my retirement was when I first noticed it. Having many hobbies to keep me busy, I did not pay much attention to this strange phenomenon at first, dismissing it as a quirk of my perception.  One's mind does tend to play tricks, you see.  As does one's memory.

It became a bit more noticeable as time went on.  When I reached the age of sixty, I discovered that indeed the seasons had become shorter, and so likewise did the year.  I noticed this because no sooner had the vernal equinox passed, and we were in glorious springtime, than the summer solstice came hurrying along, bringing with it the heat and the roses and all the summer duties and social obligations.  Before you could do much about anything, the autumnal equinox hovered near, schools had resumed, more chores began to pile up, and several holidays came along in rapid succession. And then it was winter, and the end of another year.

Soon after my sixty-fifth birthday I was conscious that the months had started to shorten, each of them, not least the month of February, which now seemed shorter than ever. It was my perception that no sooner had I finished paying the household bills than a whole set of fresh ones would show up in the mail, and from the same people!  It made no difference that I had chosen to settle some of the accounts online to save a bit of postage — the online payment notices were now coming in by electronic mail with greater frequency and efficiency.  Even the bank statements arrived with punctilio, delivered by a postal service not hitherto noted for speed.

Not long afterwards, the weeks began to shorten.  (I think I may have, in a previous posting, mentioned this oddity, when I remarked that Fridays now seemed to follow Wednesdays.) Week followed week with an almost indecent alacrity, as though impatient to get me to take out the garbage and the recyclables, even though there were no more Thursdays.

Now I find that the hours are shortening as well.  I may get up at dawn, do what a newly risen human being has to do daily, such as check the e-mail and gargle, and in a few short minutes I look at the clock and it's nearly ten.  I read the papers, what little there is of it these days, with the print media's fortunes spiraling downward into oblivion, and now a glance at the clock tells me it's lunch time already.  A short walk, if I'm so inclined, and a drive to pick up a few items at the supermarket, and it's time for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, a program I try never to miss.  Even the News Hour has become shorter now.  They may tell you that it is because they must allow time for their public broadcasting member stations to seek pledges from their viewers.  They may say that.  

But I know better.

*          *          *          *          *          *
It is with heavy heart that I report the passing of a good friend in Jerusalem.  This was a kind and generous man, a devoted husband, father, and grandfather.  May he have eternal rest.

Food Court

Yesterday I had to take my car in for service.  Having about an hour to kill, and it being close to lunchtime, a nearby shopping mall was where I headed to get a bite to eat.  This particular shopping mall is a large one that boasts — along with six or seven shoe stores and numerous apparel stores whose target clientele seems to be under the age of thirty — a spacious 'food court'.

In this court are purveyors of various cuisines, among them Chinese, Thai, Italian, Mexican, Filipino, and meat-and-potatoes American.  Their prices are all within the same approximate range.  A quick survey of what each steam table has on display does not awaken my appetite.  This may be because, having just returned from a leisurely cruise in which food was ever-present and in great variety, I do not find at all appealing the food court's offerings. To paraphrase the guy in the television commercial for a certain cruise line, a week or so ago I was treated like royalty; and now I am reduced to having to choose between nondescript pizza, pancit, and pad thai noodles.

No matter. The twenty or so tables in the center of the court are filled with customers.  The tables are not assigned to specific establishments.  They are shared by all of them.

Finally I settle on Burger King, ordering a fish sandwich and a diet soda.  The young fellow behind the counter is courteous enough to let me know that for about the same outlay I could have the combo meal, which would include french fries.  And also qualify for a senior discount of twenty-five cents.  (No, not twenty-five percent, just twenty-five cents.)

The seating area in the Burger King, located at an intersection within the mall, is open to the pedestrian areas on two adjacent sides.  A table at one of the openings offers a fine view of the comings and goings of the mall's customers.  It is here that I eat my fishburger and fries, all the while making notes in my little journal (from which I am adapting this piece), as I watch the people go by.

An elderly Latino couple, the man nattily dressed in a dark shirt and trousers, a brown necktie, a tweed cap; the woman beside him, presumably his wife, is short and plump, cheery, ebullient, chatting away at him and glancing up at him from time to time, though seemingly he pays her no heed.  The man carries a cane.  He and his wife both limp on the left foot. They limp along in unison, one short, one tall; one talkative, one silent.

The mall is well represented by seniors of the Filipino community, a large percentage of them male.  They come because the food court has decent homestyle old country fare.  Almost all the tables near the Filipino food counter are occupied by elderly Filipino men.  They all wear baseball caps.  Most of the caps bear the San Francisco Giants logo.

A Caucasian woman walks by.  She is large, has a mottled red face, a very large bust in a green blouse, and ankles that look swollen.  She walks with a kind of shuffle.

A couple comes.  They are short and barrel-chested, and I suppose they are Latino.  At first I take them for husband and wife, but as they approach I see that they are probably mother and son.  The son is blind, wears a felt hat, and has an telescoping aluminum walking stick, which he holds in the crook of his left arm, while his right arm is held by his mother as she guides him forward.

Now another family comes along, a Chinese family of four.  Ahead is an old man in a wheel-chair, pushed by a young woman who may be his granddaughter.  Behind her walk a man and a woman whom I assume are the children of the wheel-chair-bound man.  They appear quite devoted to both their father and their daughter.

A band of teenagers passes noisily by.  Four of them are wearing those ridiculous shorts, the seats of which are so low down that they are at a level with their calves.  The fifth wears trousers of an ungainly and baggy appearance, again with the low seats, except that the trouser legs are bunched up accordion-like around his ankles, practically hiding his outsized tennis shoes.  They all wear T-shirts which are much too big for them.  On their heads are baseball caps, some worn backwards so that the bills cover their necks.

Next comes a Muslim woman with a white head scarf, and a long dark brown dress.  She pushes a large-eyed child in a stroller.  The woman is plump and pretty.  Her derriere is, however, rather too abundant for her small frame.

A soldier in green-gray fatigues but no cap strides through.  He is tall, trim, and smart-looking.  His hair is cut very short all around, except at the top.  He could be a reservist home on furlough from the Middle East.

A young man, Filipino, crosses over to the Burger King.  He walks with a languid gait, almost a swagger, as though time means nothing to him.  His sunglasses are on top of his head.  He has a gold bracelet on one wrist.

A young couple, Latino, walk by, holding the hands of a young boy between them.  The woman is attractive.  She wears a bandanna tied at the back of her head, pirate-style, and a tight-fitting sweatshirt and blue jeans which show off her fine figure.  (I'm sorry, I do not recall what the man and the boy were wearing.)

Serenade to Alaska

It has been almost a week since our return from Vancouver and our Alaska cruise, and I'm only now getting around to posting here again.  Just getting our mail sorted out, the bills paid, and the laundry done has taken some considerable time, as did other duties of a pleasanter nature, such as attending our granddaughter's high school graduation ceremony.

On this cruise, our group of over thirty people might have seemed too large to be really wieldy, but in the event, it really wasn't, and everyone in this contingent of friends connected well and often.  We were blessed with fine weather, sunny and warm most days except for a sprinkle or two when we got to Ketchikan.

The massiveness of the Hubbard Glacier has to be seen to be fully appreciated.  Mere photographs cannot do it justice.  The captain guided our floating city to within a harpoon shot of the glacier's mighty rim, close enough for the sights and sounds of the calving ice to be recorded by a thousand digital cameras, many of whose electronic flashes sparkled needlessly in the bright sunshine, as their owners crowded along the ship's rails and clicked and clicked.

The towns we visited, including the state capital of Juneau, are set into the edges of some of the state's most placid bays and fjords, and one could be forgiven for thinking that their citizens do nothing more than sell overpriced jewellery and oversized T-shirts and locally crafted gewgaws to the summer's flock of tourists. Russian products are much in evidence these days in Alaska.  Among them are brass samovars, religious icons, and even Soviet-era fur caps complete with tied-at-the-top ear flaps and the old hammer-and-sickle insignia.

The tourists came from all corners of the world.  We shared meals and conversations with our friends from Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and the United States.   We sat and chatted at breakfast with strangers from New Zealand and Michigan and Wales.  We took an exhilarating journey from Skagway in an 1890's railroad car up through mountain passes and tunnels and rushing streams and waterfalls.  Our travel companions on this ride included a family from Indonesia.

We took group photos — oh, there must have been dozens of group photos in every one of the digital cameras that each member of the group brought along.  We captured video shots of one another at every opportunity, to be edited eventually into a suitable memento of our trip.

We are happy to learn that two members of our group who fell ill on this cruise are now fully recovered.  We look forward to seeing them again, together with all those with whom we shared this fun week.  And very soon.