Yaramaz Went Away

I bought my first ever ipod today. It’s a lovely tangerine Nano, already stuffed with 6 of its eight gigs. I spent the afternoon digging through music files in my portable hard drives and cd wallets and copying them over.  Some things I hadn’t heard in a decade. I refound The Frames’ single One Irish Rover (found in a bin in Camden Market in London in 1999 or so, 5 years after I accidentally sat next to Glen Hansard and his girlfriend in a pub in Dublin during a crowded seisun I went to with Liam O’Maonlai and Luka Bloom). It brought back an immediate smack to the face of Aerlin, at that time My Bestest Friend Ever (haven’t seen her since she moved back to Melbourne in 2000 and Pieter and I moved to Cape Town). I played that song on my huge cassette-playin’ Walkman for her as she lay on her bed in her room in Table Mountain, the backpacker hotel that had doubled as our home for so long. She had just found out she was pregnant, had just broken the news to me, and the song made her cry.  We were very young. 

Also threw on very old Billy Bragg and Sinead O’Connor (Lion and Cobra!!!) and that mixed cd that Azzam and I played all the way through Oman (Dil Ki Doya always makes me think of sitting in the car on the Muscat waterfront, looking at the palm trees and waves) and a ton of Nick Cave and Violent Femmes  and Devendra Banhart and Manu Chao (and about 100 others).  I’m getting lost.

I took some photos. It’s all very subdued and grey and not at all exotic. Click here for the wonders of Victoria.

 Buy “Baker’s Boy” Caps for 84 Cents…Sell for $25Date: 09/23/2008

 

Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2008

Dear International Living Reader,

Don’t be wary about chatting to people in Turkey. Touts will approach you, but not everybody has ulterior motives. For example, Mustafa Finzilman, whose upper-floor workshop is in Kayseri’s Vezir Hani. This is the part of the caravanserai where Silk Road traders once parked their camels.

Like his father before, Mustafa makes old-fashioned flat caps…also "baker’s boy" caps from fragments of woven kilim. Velvet baker’s boy caps are currently hot sellers in England. A few months ago, I saw them on market stalls for an equivalent $25. Mustafa sells his for 84 cents to merchants in Cappadocia—who inflate the price to at least $2.50. I think kilim caps could be a great seller.

Not that Mustafa spurns turning a better profit. Only last week, a Frenchman paid $4.20 for a cap. But after learning I’m a writer, he’s really excited. After brewing cay (tea) and showing me numerous photos of himself as a young man—I’d guess he’s now in his early 60s—he wants to sit on Vezir Hani’s balcony and talk about Jane Austen’s novels and whether I think someone else penned Shakespeare’s plays. Totally surreal.

Then he waves a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (in English) and wants to discuss that. But I’ve never read it and use my ignorance as a good excuse to go. (I’ve been here over an hour.) Mustafa looks disappointed but invites me to return later to drink tea, talk, and “rest.” Rest? Literary criticism is exhausting!

But I do go find him; he may not be around long. The regional government plans to gussy up Vezir Hani. Mustafa reckons the workshops will become spaces for offices seeking a prestigious address—and given to those offering to pay the highest rents. He pays only $20 a month for his space, and believes the new rents will be unaffordable.

In Eski Bedesten, the caravanserai’s oldest part, I meet Mehmet Baspinar of Baspinar Carpeting who tells me my new literary friend’s nickname is "Cultural Mustafa." Apparently he’s always keen to meet English-speakers—and they usually find escape difficult.

Mehmet understands I only want information. He says he buys Kayseri region flat-weave kilims for $38 and sells them for $55—more if he can get it. These are handmade, but look nothing special. The dyes are synthetic and the wool is machine-spun. If a customer bought a large number, he might drop the price to $46.50 apiece. I’ve seen similar kilims on one U.S. website for $104.

Better-grade hand-spun wool kilims of a standard-sized 1.2 by 1.8 meters (similar to what some previously met Kayseri villains wanted $592 for) cost Mehmet $190 to $211. Allegedly! His "very best" selling price for these is in the region of $253. There are many designs, so it’s difficult to give a hard and fast price. But be sure that the first price quoted is never the final one.

Steenie Harvey
Treasure Seeker, International Living

http://www.internationalliving.com/publications/Free-E-Letters/IL-Postcards/09-23-08-buysell

 We have been back a week now. I’m still adjusting- it has been a lot harder than I expected. I’m feeling constantly as though my life is on the wrong path (path? what path?), that maybe I ought to settle down here for a while, start a long-term yoga class, scope out the arts co-op down the street for a pottery studio monthly pass,  start a vow of silence, a period of meditation, long daily bike rides, a low-key job in the deli at the organic market (they are advertising for counter staff), find some solitude and a center and a kindly group of friends that i don’t leave behind every few years (if not sooner).   I’ve been quite…mobile for the past 15 years (15 years!!!), always elsewhere or heading elsewhere or on the verge of leaving somewhere. I give away my possessions every few years, holding on to a few choice items, much like friends.  I’m tired. And in a month, we’ll be on our way down south- which is fine, fine- and I have no clear idea where I will be next year at this time. I must be crazy.

Take a picture of your ugly self right now, mother fucker.
Don’t change your stank clothes. Don’t fix that nasty looking hair. Just take a damned picture.
Post that picture with no editing (and we can fucking tell, you are no Picasso with photoshop. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.)

Include these instructions.

 The cool, bright air and shining, shimmering waves, fierce wind, scuttling clouds and constantly shifting pockets of heat, pockets of chill are a wonderful change from Istanbul’s unbreaking heat. I have heard rumour, however, that Istanbul is now cold and rainy and veering back to those drab and dull winter months. My lungs are in adjustment mode, barking like they did when I left Dubai for Istanbul two years ago, so hard Dixie thought I had pneumonia and insisted I get checked out. I went to Canan’s doctor-boyfriend’s public hospital, somewhere on the Asian side near Uskudar or Umraniye, where there were bundled up villagers spilling out into the halls and doctors puffed on cigarettes as they examined their patients.  He listened to my rattling lungs and declared that I needed to leave Istanbul and live in a house without books or rugs or surfaces.  He prescribed for me an inhaler, which I lost.  My lungs soon readjusted to the cold wetness of the Istanbul winter and i was relatively fine until now. I’ve been sucking back my father’s inhaler and barking like a seal until dizzy.

We’ve been going for long walks by the sea every day, trying to bring muscles and energy back to my desk-atrophied body. Today we walked along the seawall downtown, watching the seaplanes take off and land, watching tourists take pictures of each other in front of totem poles and harbour ferries, walking up and up to Dallas Road to the cliffs to watch the driftwood and waves breaking. We stopped for coffee at Ogden Point, faces pink from the wind, and continued back around until back in town. We ate lunch at 4pm, exactly 2 minutes before the lunch menus at FanTan became dinner menus, and marvelled in the delicate wonton soup and spicy noodles and my first ginger ale in years. Across the street, I in the Chinese grocery store, I bought two packets of fresh udon noodles and a big jar of hunan chili paste. For those unaccustomed to the effects of living in another country (especially another country with a relatively monocultural cuisine), you may not realise how marvellous just being able to casually pick up frozen dim sum or a can of coconut milk is. It is. By the time we got home by way of the railroad tracks, we had walked 5 hours and 10km. It felt good.

 In Canada, in Victoria, enveloped within the cozy confines of light-blocking curtains and basement bedrooms and overcast skies, trying but failing to unwind from the coiled-spring of last week’s purge and journey and arrival.  I’m tired beyond jetlag- my ten-hour time rearrangement hasn’t hit me as hard as the slow slap of reality and life displaced yet again. I’m having flashes of places and people and languages absent from my current cuccoon. Although the move was a long time coming, it arrived very suddenly and passed by even more quickly. My three bags still couldn’t hold even a fraction of what I’d accumulated over six years- the books I had separated into keep and don’t keep ended up in three new categories- those I could live without and handed out at work; those I truly couldn’t fit into my bags even at the last moment and had to leave behind, and those few I could squeeze into my surprisingly small baggage allowance (I ended up spending 500 dollars, between excess baggage and Lola’s fee).  I left behind a shelf full of much loved books along with my lovely but awkwardly shaped moroccan lamp and the lovely unglazed clay jug given to me by that potter in Avanos 6 years ago and 3 bags of winter clothes and sweaters and that lovely little beaded Zulu poem I’d pinned into the liner of my grandma’s huge, heavy coat, left behind. I left behind gifts from students that were meaningful but heavy or big.  I left behind my lovely seagrass baskets.  I think I left about 3/4 of my physical life behind, selling none of it, just passing it on, giving it all away to anyone who might see value in it. It feels odd. I feel some unnamed loss.

I arrived home to find unexpected messages here from people from my past telling me how greedy (avarice was the word) I am for even thinking about the cost of bringing my things home; messages in my inbox from the girl who took over my flat and bought my furniture for a pittance and inherited my favourite books and lamp and jug telling me that I’d left the flat unaceptably filthy and that she wants me to cough up 150 lira to pay for a cleaner (it was clean and swept and tidied but not scrubbed and bleached and it was a far cry from the construction site full of sawdust and plywood scraps and cigarette butts and old newspapers and dried paint cans I moved intoand had to spend a month cleaning by hand after work and on weekends). I feel violated.  I feel ill. I don’t feel rested. I think I need a month of solitude and quiet. 

 Back but not in the mood to write.  Argh argh argh.