AZERBAIJAN-KURDISH TURKEY-PARIS-ICELAND APRIL 11, 2019 TO MAY 16, 2019

ON OUR WAY TO AZERBAIJAN VIA ISTANBUL

APRIL 11, 2019 - THURSDAY - MÁLAGA TO ISTANBUL
“Turkish people not Arabs, not Arabs"
Turkish Airlines flies to more countries than any other airline. Several of larger ones can fit inside Terminal 1 at new Istanbul Airport, the largest airport terminal in the world, with room on the edges to squeeze in a few country ‘wannabes’, like Vatican City and Andorra. Passport Control is on the other side of Italy, but well signed and efficient.
Finding transportation into Istanbul is neither. The airport has been open 5 days and is staffed by newbies. They are friendly, affable, helpful, clueless. The size defeats them. “Bus 6 is down there”. We pass Albania and Bosnia, are directed back through Canada and China and finally land at Bus 6 way out on the fringes, somewhere south of Vatican City.
Less than an hour later we pull into one of Istanbul's many ‘otogar' (bus stations), pile into a cab. The driver is young, with the slightly craggy good looks common here. He tries out his English. “Istanbul twenty million people. Turkish people not Arabs, not Arabs". Though historically Moslem, Modern Turkey was founded as a secular state with clear separation of church and state. Recent governments have tried to blur that separation, sponsoring ‘Islamification’, which many Turks see as an effort by conservative Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia, to undermine their Turkish identity. Recent mayoral elections made it clear that in Istanbul that just won’t fly. The conservative national government refuses to recognize the vote. Thus: “Turkish people not Arabs, not Arabs.”

GPS is less murky than politics. It guides the young cabby off the highway in the dark up into the steep, cobblestoned, and twisted spaghetti alleys of the old Jewish/Greek neighborhood of Balat. His tires slip and whine, not catching on the slope. We stop. He tries again, reverses, takes another route. Mustafa is waiting for us outside of Number 10 Atgecmez Sokak (Atgecmez Lane, maybe Alley). Number 10 and Mustafa are new to us. No matter. Once again, we are home in Istanbul.

APRIL 12 AND 13, 2019 - FRIDAY AND SATURDAY  - ISTANBUL
“No danger, no danger!”
Number 10 Atgecmez Sokak may be an old lady, but she struts her stuff in style, romancing a color wheel run amok. The ceiling of our ground floor studio is a dark ripple of stone arches over a turquoise door, a lemon wall, and a cherry floor. Owner Giuseppe paints frantic, dreamy/gory canvases, huge flapping, wrinkled things, demented peacocks crash-landed on the walls.
For breakfasts we spiral up the three stories to the roof terrace, socked feet slippery on slick stairs Caribbean offshore ultramarine blue, holding steady on the bannister, corkscrew of tide pool turquoise. We eat eggs, cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, cheeses (three kinds, from string to chunk), toasted rolls, mint, coriander, drink small vials of thick Turkish coffee in copper ‘cozies', lounge on carpet pillows at low tables, and start the day in more colors, many more colors, painted, woven, sliced.
We wander for two days, reclaiming this city and our friends here. Istanbul has 7 hills. All 7 are between us and wherever we’re heading. The houses of Balat climb the slopes more easily than we do…and they are a lot older. Most look it, their upper story balconies drooping a bit in whispered confidences to the other side of the ‘sokaki'. Many are abandoned, mysteries. Cats like secrets. They thrive.
Dogs do not, not in Moslem countries. Istanbul is poochless. Then, we see a man and his son playing with a large mutt, square face and build hinting broadly at a pit bull hanging out in the family tree. It’s clearly a pet, and a sweet one, who recognizes dog lovers at first sniff. He wiggles over to bestow approval. The man panics. “No danger, no danger!”. Then grins. We’re strangers, linked by a wagging tale.
We pass the great mosaics at the Khora Church, one of the 2 greatest in situ collections of that Byzantine art on the planet, nod in appreciation, but keep going. From here it is down the hills to the shore of the Golden Horn for our rite of passage every time we come to Istanbul, a 50 cent ride on the commuter ferry that stitches the shores of this narrow leak between the Sea of Marmara (and thus the Mediterranean), and the Black Sea. Jason and the Argonauts sailed these waters searching for the golden fleece. We're happy for the view and a cup of hot Turkish ‘cai'.
We have arrived.
On Friday, our waiter friends, Ihsan and Hosseyn, and their magician chef, wrap us in hugs, spoil us with plates of baklava, and fill us in while the day washes from East to West across the hills of Istanbul, all just out there through the windows of their restaurant, 8 stories above the streets. We met 3 restaurants and 7 or 8 years ago. We talk so long that the sweets wear off. Cold beers are next, then hugs again.
On Saturday we cross the great square that links Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, wind down through Sultanahmet, elegantly re-coiffed younger sister of Balat , and spend the afternoon with Zeki, cold beer, and peanuts in the sun on a roof terrace across the street from where we met 8 years ago. Details of his new textile business in a volatile economy overlay hints that his marriage is also volatile. He leaves us, well hugged, but worried for him.
We have all stayed in touch with FB, Messenger, Yahoo, meet on our increasingly frequent pilgrimages to this city, theirs, and through those hugs, ours.
It's tulip season and the city shimmers with the colors of Turkey's gift to Spring gardens. Immense beds, white pinks, corals, reds, and super-nova yellow, sweep winter away in Gülhane Park. These are classic tulips, not the fussy, frilled, feathery, fussy ornithologically inspired ones of garden catalogues. The sharp outline of the lips of a classic tulip are said to resemble the calligraphic sweep of the Arabic word for Allah, a reminder of the transcendant in even a small thing.
Well walked out, much later we laze over a third dose of the ‘Şef Special' we discovered our first night at a restaurant down the hill from Number 10. “It's mine, no other place has it “ preens chef/owner Muzu. The chunks of chicken in a matrix of puréed eggplant, with peppers, mushrooms, cheese and soooo worth a revisit and now this second revisit. So is a glass of fresh pomegranate and orange juices, deep ruby, tart/sweet. Tonight he alters the Special a bit, switching in tomato for the eggplant. “You can't eat the same thing 3 times.”
Maybe.
But that’s not how we feel about his city.

APRIL 14, 2019 – SUNDAY - ISTANBUL TO BAKU, AZERBAIJAN
“The love child of Paris and Dubai.”
O-Dark Early is very early and very, very dark in the narrow alley outside Number 10. Mustafa, so quickly a lead player in our story, sends us off at 5 with Appo for the new airport. Turkish Airlines sends us off at 8 for Baku, Azerbaijan. We take off, cross the Bosporus and enter Asia. So the tourist brochures say. (Politicians never seem to know what to do with Turkey, so familiar and so exotic, in language, looks, culture.) Two hours later we cross the Caucasus Mountains and definitively leave Europe. Or so geographers say and have said for centuries.
We land, prepped. With ‘the facts'. The land of the Azeris (aka Azerbaijanis) touches Armenia, Georgia, Russia, all clearly in Europe, Turkey, status a bit murky, and Iran, clearly not in Europe. Azeris sunbathe on the beaches of the Caspian Sea the world’s largest lake. Energetic ones could swim the many, many miles across to Kazahkstan and Turkmenistan, not just Asia, but Central Asia, desert countries, the definition of remote. (Note:We dipped our toes in the Caspian a few years ago on the Iran side just over the horizon. We will not be tempted here. It's April, Spring is springing, but air temperatures nudge 60 degrees grudgingly.)
Just north and west, in Georgia, our remote ancestors left traces of their passage here 1,800,000 years ago ---not a typo, that IS almost two millions years ago--- earliest evidence of our human family outside of our birthplace in Africa. Much later, this was on the Silk Road, the link between China and Europe. Crossroads breed contrasts and adjustments. Armenians, Georgians, and Russians are Christians, though of different flavors. Persians and Azeris are Moslems, Azeris more in theory, non mosque goers in fact.
I don’t know what I expected of Baku. I did not expect the superbly efficient, hyper-modern airport, the easy trip into the city...or a city semi-accurately described as “The love child of Paris and Dubai.”
Baku is simply, honestly extraordinarily beautiful in daytime, ornate, soft beige and balconied buildings clustered into elegant streetscapes, Parisian in their grace. Towering above these are glass and silvered glories of contemporary architecture, curved, sweeping, impeccable, Dubai-like in their futuristic optimism. We are stuck to the windows of the bus. Not even a pair of architectural mishaps, most unfortunate descendants of a dalliance between R2D2/ C3P0 and a fire hydrant can dilute the impact of Baku.
Our AirBnB is also a surprise, not a good one…at first. Think every opening shot of an ‘earthy’ black and white Italian film noire of the 1950's. One without Sophia Loren. Picture the alley, the rickety stairs, laundry, the annoying, grating soundtrack. We climb the stairs, expecting portentious (or is that pretentious?) theme muzack, reach the door. No crescendo. The code won't unlock the door. We are not surprised. Not disappointed either, hoping this gives us a polite excuse to move on. A careful re-read of procedures sinks that hope. “Pull the door tight, then push all three number buttons at the same time.” The apartment is clean, spacious, with kitchen, couch, dining table, big bedroom with closets and a dresser and best of all a big balcony with chairs, table, clothesline and a 4^th story view into sycamore trees. The music changes to something by Puccini.
We forgive the stairs, the muzack, and the absence of Sophia. More on the bathroom later.

APRIL 15, 2019 – MONDAY – BAKU
“Why you no like sex?”
Yesterday we almost got to see an opera.
We walk across the center of the city from the bus station, tourist-gaga before Baku's beauty and turn down a wide pedestrian mall advertising theaters, museums, and Baku's busy music scene. Our travels usually wash us up on musical shores just after opera season closes or too far before it opens. The posters on the round kiosk labelled ‘OPERA' deliver the usual reprimand to our planning. La traviata and her camellias have expired in Paris and Santuzza has yet to discover the dark side of her heel of a boyfriend and of Sicilian ‘Rustic Chivalry'. But…today, oh blessed Goddess of the Art---there is a performance today. Both the name of the opera and of its composer are new territory, an Azerbaijani opera. The pictures are pretty. I snap one of my own to show at the box office, take it to what looks like one. Wrong. Pseudo-Box Office Guy is smart, figures us out, makes gestures clearly directing us around the building, then holds his hand high, shakes his head, holds it low, nods and smiles. Sure. 'Go upstairs, not down. Or maybe, there are no seats in the balcony, but lots downstairs. Or? Watch your heads?
Around the back side, crowds of parents and kids bubble on the square in front of Baku's gorgeous 19^th century opera house. We go in to buy tickets, photo of l'opera du jour in hand. The crowd parts, stares. Crash-landed Martians would get less amazed looks. “For children, for children” says the nice man looking at two old guys, slightly worn from a 4am wake-up, 3 hour flight, and a long walk across town, carrying 18 pound backpacks, and turning up at a place filled with kids. Now we get the hands high, head shake hands low smile message from Pseudo-Box Office Guy: no big people, kids ONLY. Chastened we walk on, once again opera-thwarted.
Later we walk the lightstruck pedestrian-only streets leading to Baku’s Fountain Square  There are chandeliers hanging over the streets, CHANDELIERS! We're hooked, eyes upward. There's a bump on my arm. She's blonde (now) and wearing too many years of baklava under a fake fur, a cheerful dumpling, about her business on the streets. “I good sex.” I thank her and give her offer a pass. “Why you no like sex?” I laugh and mention a wife. She almost giggles, good-natured, a professional. I wish her good luck and a safe night. She waves and rolls on, more likely to baklava than passion.
That was yesterday.
Today we walk down Gogol Street, across Fountain Square, through the ancient stone walls and into the Old City. Every alley tells us a story. Much of it is touristy, but gorgeous touristy, famous Azerbaijani carpets and textiles draped over stone, brilliance flowing across soft beige. We are glad we have 6 days here.
The Azeri are handsome, carrying the chiseled noses and cheekbones of the Central Asian ancestors they share with the Turks, linguistic and genetic siblings, faces a camera cannot flatten or wash out. Black hair and 5 o'clock shadow or 5 day neatly trimmed beards drive the point home. The women are especially dramatic, faces framed by masses of black hair, unfettered, even after a thousand years of Islam. We saw far more women in black or wearing a hijab over their hair, or with covered faces in Istanbul than we see in Baku. Teeny boppers in shorts, bare midriffs and cell phones, caught mid conversation in bronze, share Fountain Park with the real thing, more warmly dressed in jeans.
Islam sits lightly here on a people who were Zoroastrian for millennia. Many restaurants offer ham along with lamb, beef and chicken. Corner stores in our neighborhood have aisles of Georgian and local wine crowded by more potent stuff, leaning towards the vodkas. We drink beer in one of the bars around the corner from our AirBnB.
“Tour?” Emil hands us a brochure from ‘SMILE TOURS’ and flashes one of his own, sweet, and genuine out of a face memorably handsome. His looks are atypical, under tawny hair, perhaps not quite so camera-friendly as those of his more chiseled age mates, but he's a Perfect Boy Next Door Heart Throb. I must have an eligible second or third cousin to introduce. Having an eternally grateful younger relative could have advantages.
Emil's boss, the beautiful Aytan, helps us sort out the intricacies of using our US phones to make calls inside Azerbaijan and internationally as we try to reach our next AirBnB. It’s only fair that we book one of her tours for tomorrow. To the Mud Volcanos. Our guidebook says it is more interesting than it sounds, surely not a stretch. The tour will get us a glimpse of the hinterland. We make sure Emil gets credit for lassoing us. He could have one of my grateful relatives to support.

 APRIL 16, 20Q9 – TUESDAY – BAKU AND ELSEWHERE
“Da, da, da"
1,800,000 years ago our remote ancestors left their bones just north of here, in Georgia.
12,000 years ago they left us a message, etched in stone. Horses, cattle, people prance and dance across the rock faces at Gobustan just outside Baku. It takes work to hollow out lines in stone. It must have been important to do, or have, or enjoy these images. Maybe the message is a simple one. “This is us. We are here.” Perhaps, even, “ Remember us”.
The 7 of us climb back into the van, carrying snippets of the message in our phones, cameras, memories short and long term, some with us, others back to Russia with the two Tatianas, Ludmilla, Natalya, and The Other Russki Lady. So far our conversations have been variations on “da", in doublets ,“da, da", and triplets, “da, da, da", more ephemeral than stone, but we get the message “This is us. We are here. We see you. We share something.”
“Nyet" has yet to surface. They're an affable bunch. We will remember them.
Also on the bus is our guide, Hamida and her intern, Abbas. Hamida does her bit in Russian and English. Abbas whirls and twirls, the energy of a herd of cats, and just as hard to pin down. He's 19 and has high octane caffeine for blood. He doesn’t just speak sophisticated and accurate English, he catapults it.
He teaches us his favorite word, ‘prekrasna’, ‘amazing’, as in ‘You are amazing, Bro.’ and more frequently “I am amazing". Agreed.
Azerbaijan has famously glorious scenery, and compelling villages, but way north of Baku's flat plain, up there in the Caucasus Mountains, and too far and complicated for our 6 days to absorb. Local sights are flung across the plain, not far, but each requires returning to Baku to catch the bus to the next, one a day, too many threads to weave. Thus, today’s tour, a 10-hour braided round robin with the Da Da Da Ladies and Prekrasna Abbas.
The Zoroastrian Fire Temple is the high point. The site, and the Zoroastrian monotheistic faith, predate Islam in Azerbaijan. Nowruz, the Zoroastrian New Year, is still the major holiday. “We were fire worshippers for centuries. Fire is still important to us.” She draws a stylized flame. “See”. The stunning triple Flame Towers that define Baku's skyline are proof. Writ small, it’s a Zoroastrian theme, a universal design. In English we call it ‘paisley’.
The Mud Volcanoes exceed expectations, not a major stretch. I like geology, especially in its active form, burbled or roared reassurance that Mother Earth has not given up. The MVs go “blub" and slowly burp gas through grey mud. It’s a short stop at The MVs. Staring at Mother Earth while she farts is not for everyone.
Da, da, da.

APRIL 17, 2019 – WEDNESDAY – BAKU
Yandiran 🚬 🚬
Later today we get thrown out of a store. But, first….
…we walk south across the city on the ‘Boulvar', elegant edging between the streets of Baku and the Caspian Sea. The views seaward are not pretty. Baku is a working port driven by oil, an unlovely crop, voracious for beauty. The rigs are great metal spiders on the wet horizon.
The spectacular towering new architecture stretching the skyline heavenward away from the earth that paid for it does not come cheap, a matter of national pride. Guide Hamida and would-be guide Amazing Abbas know the Azerbaijan Monat cost of every tower. Unspoken is a judgment about revival after the Soviet days, and a thumbed nose at less successful neighbor Georgia, enemy Armenia, and perhaps even Turkey.
Istanbul alone has 20 million people, twice the population of all Azerbaijan. The First Lady of Azerbaijan greeted the ten millionth Azerbaijani, born this year, and gave her name to the baby. Baby First Lady joined the other two million Azeri in Baku.
Those 2 million do not crowd City Center and Old City. There is room for character, brilliance, and wandering. The wandering looks manageable on paper, but is a topographic challenge on the ground. For the 4^th year, Baku will host a Formula 1 race. I think it odd there is a race involving baby food. Dennis explains. I still think it’s odd. The city streets are fenced to provide a channel for the race, and space for seats for people who like to watch cars go nowhere rapidly. (Oh well, different strokes. I spend several weeks every year in flamboyant costumes standing still on the opera stage while all around me people scream at one another in foreign languages, commit suicide, steal babies, and chop heads.)
Getting from Here to There in Formula 1 Baku is not straightforward, or even straight sideways. The temptation to shortcut is best ignored. Jaywalking is a serious offense, the fines immediate and significant.
Azerbaijan is famous for carpets, always a challenge to our will-NOT power. Down the Bulvar the Carpet Museum is a safe place to indulge our eyes and deprive the wallet moths of an outing. It’s a clever urban sculpture, a long tube curved as an unrolling carpet. Inside, the carpets curve from flat to vertical softly up the walls, a genius way to display them as both functional floor coverings, and as beauty just for the hell of it.
Our digs at Number 128 have become home. We have coffee, necessary partner on my morning sits on the balcony staring into the sycamore tree, but no way to make it. Rubbing toothpicks together will not light the gas stove.
Our excursion to buy matches goes significantly awry.
My pantomime of lighting and smoking a cigarette conveys a very different message in Azeri. The store clerk wide-eyes us and waves us out of his store. We're ejected. Rejected. Definitively. Recovery requires a beer. The bar is next door. Across from us two affable guys light up with a lighter. Aha, says I. I ask them how to say lighter in Azeri. Savior One tells me. Savior Two takes the phone, writes it down, then thumb massages it and delivers the icon for cigarettes, twice. This guy is no slouch. Armed with ‘Yandiran 🚬 🚬’ we return to the store, and successfully repair our reputations, and my morning musings, with a thirty-cent purchase. What story the clerk tells I have no idea. I doubt it involves suicide, babies or missing heads, but I concede license.

APRIL 18, 2019- THURSDAY – BAKU AND UPWARDS
“We have so much oil we can bathe in it.”
We’ve signed on for a 13-hour second tour way off into the Caucasus Mountains, more to see rural Azerbaijan than with a specific spot in mind. We join Pakistani Shah and his Moroccan girlfriend, four of the Russian ladies, and a Russian couple, glad we are prepared with ‘da ‘, “da, da" and the superlative “da, da, da". There are rumors of S**W drifts up there, not an inducement, but also of waterfalls, a weakness of ours.
Past the suburbs the rolling hills are shaved green and treeless. “Water here is salty”, Hamida tells us. “Nothing grows unless it rains”. “We have so much oil we can bathe in it.” And she shows us a place where we can sign up for full body oil marination. We pass.  
Azerbaijan is oil-rich, and it shows, at least in Baku. The urban infrastructure is spectacular. Money oozes. Mercedes, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis ferry between Gucci and the thousand dollar a night digs in the Flame Towers. Wealth has been here for centuries, built the Old City. In 1905 one-half of the world's oil came through here. Millionaires built the new city. The Soviet years added a crust of ugly housing blocks. Many are already refaced to match the best of the old buildings.
Out here, the oil wealth hasn’t trickled down too far out of the city.
We rise out of Baku’s salty plain. We pass vineyards, not yet caught up in Spring, and groves of trees covered with white blossoms, cherries in the making. The waterfall is at the end of a string of bumps we grate over in a cab significantly lacking in handles, knobs, and comfort, but not rattles, groans, and rumbles from the nether regions beneath the seats. We climb the gazillion stairs to where the waters fall out of clouds, reaching the top first and impressing Tatiana Number One, who, deputed by Tatiana Two, et al, retrieves enough English to ask us how old we are. Our answer elicits a new configuration of “das", beyond superlative and well into hyperbolic, delivered by chorus. We like these ladies.
Further up country we manage a ski lift up to a famous view, but see only the inside of a low flying cloud, down to visit its offspring, the waterfall. There is S**W littering the mountainside. It is cold. And wet. And gets a definitive “nyet" all around. Smart ladies.
Thirteen hours after leaving Baku we return, say goodbye to our Russki friends, Hamida, Amazing Abbas, Shah, and walk back in the cold to one of ‘our’ restaurants.
Bob Marley serves us dinner. But, that's another story.

APRIL 19, 2019 – FRIDAY – BAKU LAST DAY
“Don’t tell my boss. She would kill me.”
It’s cold.
Last days should be languid and ours is, slowed down by Spring’s sudden retreat southward. We go out to munch and for valedictory strolls---cut as short as those low numbers on the thermometer.
We amble around the corner, pass the ‘lighter’ bar, wave to the restaurant tout at the Dőner Kebab place, and turn under the stone arches to breakfast at ‘our’ restaurant'. It drips acres of sugar and pistachios confected into shapes and piles, all devastating on the waistline, dental health, and budget. Indulgence and sugar-spawned caloric immolation are expensive in Baku. But ‘our’ place also has a lady rolling out sheets of dough that she dusts with a thin layer of ground beef, or greens, or cheese, our favorites, in that order, and folds and seals into a hemisphere and toasts into crisp-edged wonder on a curved grill. We’re semi-addicted.
And, it has ‘Bob Marley’, aka Mehmet, College Student Waiter Guy. He's a hoot. The first-time we met him, he waved us into the store, looked around, grabbed two pieces of pistachio heaven, and delivered them with a big grin and “Don’t tell my boss. She would kill me.” “You will come back.” As we do every day. And do today, our last.
Today the staff is in ‘national costume’, smashing long embroidered black coats over embroidered white tunics. The snug jeans add a certain ‘je sais exactement quoi'. ‘Bob Marley’ tops his with a stupefying Afro wig, easily the equivalent the hair of an entire reggae band. Thus, ‘Bob Marley.
Bob knows our first nibble order (one beef, one spinach), grabs the hemispheres off the grill, brushes them with oil, then dusts a blessing of pungent red stuff, puts them on a long, narrow wooden plate, folds and chops each into 4 pieces, and delivers with a bow. Roller Lady smiles at us through her mouth mask and keeps rolling. She and Bob know there will be a second course. These cost 2 (greens) or 3 (beef) Azerbaijani Monats each. That's $1.20 or $1.80. Bob, the wig, the style, his laugh are free.

Baku has that memorable architecture. Our memories have ‘Bob'.

APRIL 20, 2019 – SATURDAY – BAKU VIA ISTANBUL TO MALATYA, TURKEY

Mustafa, Jusuf, Alfaa, and Miraj

“But, you must help people.”

The taxi is promised but doesn’t arrive. The plane will not be so cavalier with departure.

It's 2:30 am, not an hour usually taxi-rich. We clump down the 4 flights of metal stairs into the dark, round the corner onto Gogol Street. Bingo! Where there are bars, there are taxis. Ours asks 50 Monat. We raise our eyebrows a few millimeters, he drops his price 20 Monat, a fair price in the middle of the njght, silent haggling, and civil.

Seven hours later we pass the ‘Welcome to Europe’ signs midway across the great bridge over the Bosporus, and leave Asia. We have 10 hours before our flight back east to southeastern Turkey near Iraq and Syria, time enough for a breakfast and an amble down Istiklal Cadessi, one of Istanbul's great walking streets, and foodie heaven.

Simits are bagels on the paternal side, and pretzels on the maternal, tougher and chewier than their ancestry would suggest, but lovely solid platforms for fresh spinach, cheese, and fried egg. Fueled, we dive into the crowds juggling umbrellas, shopping bags, and finger food. Eyes and nose vote for chestnuts roasting in iron pans. Tongue remembers past grainy disappointments, vetoes. Loaded Potato Guys slash and splay loaf-sized spuds, steamy, mealy, ivory canvasses, ready to be Jackson Pollack-ed with toppings. We detour, go straight for a sugar fix, chocolate cake, and tell ourselves it’s to get out of the rain and warm. Our reflections in a store window suggest we need to plan a trip to a place with less appealing food. Soon.

At 8, way back across Turkey, a stranger helps us find a cab by the bus station in Malatya. Our cabbie links to a site that brings the voice of a guy who speaks English, knows our hotel, guides cabbie there. He hops out, carries our luggage into the hotel. And refuses a tip.

“I've been waiting for you" and manager Mustafa welcomes us to City Kent Hotel, home for the next 3 nights. His excellent English is a surprise. Our guidebook says there won’t be other tourists for miles. We don’t expect English, but Mustafa and City Kent are full of surprises. The elevator opens. A slender and truly beautiful man walks out, an apparition. He is African, my guess is West African.

“I am from Sierra Leone. My name is Alfaa, I am here to find a soccer team. It is difficult. I was sleeping in the bus station. Mustafa saw me and brought me here and gave me a room.” Pause. “I am 19.”

Mustafa laughs. “And lazy. He won't work at the desk.”

“I don’t speak Turkish".

“You will learn. I learned English at the desk”

Mustafa laughs, turns to us again. “But you must help people.”

We are home.

APRIL 21, 2019 – SUNDAY – MALATYA

“Tammam”

It is late April, and white stuff piddles down from a flat grey sky. S**w. Even nature is appalled, zaps the white stuff with a flick of rain.

Den’s cold meds and appetite kick in and we set out to forage. Nowhere in food-centric Turkey is this much of an expedition, especially here among the Kurds, in tantuni country. Tantuni are soft taco relatives, rolled burrito style, and stuffed with minced and spiced meats. They are seriously addictive. Our Kurdish friend Zeki and his wife, Muzeyyn were our first suppliers years ago. They treat us every time we're in Istanbul, knowing we'll always come back for more. Tantuni shops are scarce in Istanbul. Here there is one on every street.

We find ours around the corner, down an alley. It's a ‘pop and sons’ operation, small, two tables, two sons, two choices, ‘tavuk’ (chicken)  and ‘et’, ‘meat’, probably beef. Sign language, pointing, smiles and good will get us one ‘tavuk’, all white meat, with all the spices for me, and one ‘et’, plain, for Dennis, and glasses of ‘ayran', yoghurt drink, for both. Our tantuni come tightly rolled, wrapped in paper, with lemon slices to squirt on sprigs of mint, and long leaves of a spinach relative. Afterwards, we have hot ‘cai', tea. The bill should be about 20 tűrk lirasi, $3.50. Tantuni Guy says ‘Tammam, tammam', ‘OK, OK’, and won’t accept our money, smiling, his hand over his heart in Turkey's graceful gesture of greeting, recognition, thanks.

We will be back. And not because of the tantuni.

Tammam.

APRIL 22, 2019 – MONDAY – MALATYA

“Maybe I will move away.”

It’s cold, snow flurries are unwelcome wisps of winter, and the snowline has drooped below the rocky waistlines on the horizon. Last week it was in the 70's. In 2 days Spring returns. So they say.

We stay put all morning in the terrace room, warm, the mountains beautiful, their snows safely on the other side of the glass. Mustafa tells us of his life. He's smart, speaks excellent English, owns the hotel, is well-travelled, sees us as kindred. And, so the conversation goes, becomes more private. It links us, friends now, so will stay between us. By two we scurry through the cold and alleys with him and Alfaa to the tantuni shop, then bring back enough for Mirag, at the front desk, and everyone else.

Malatya has energy and great life. It also has more ATMs per square meter than any place we have ever been. They line up in casino slot-machine abundance along every street, payout guaranteed. There are six to the right of the hotel door, more across the street and around the corner. Restaurants, fast food shops, and munchie-rich carts fill the spaces between money dispensers, allies in a ‘Get It Out-Put It In’ attack on wallets and waistlines.

 We pass all, unscathed, at 4, on our way to the Dried Apricot Market. Malatya is Apricot Central for Turkey, and of course Mustafa ‘Knows Someone’. The black apricots in ‘Someone’s’ shop are sun-dried. The other ones, in the yellow/orange, are ‘processed’. We forget to ask how. I have been sidetracked by a bin of chocolate nut clusters, chunky wonders. The nuts are none we recognize and we don’t care. Tongue overrules Waist. Half a kilo of chocolate joins half a kilo of black apricots, preemptions, lest starvation should loom while we are on the road. We join the line at the ATM.

Starvation is not even close at 9pm when another of Mustafa’s’ Someones’ delivers a stack of ‘pides’, Turkey’s take on how to pile a lot of stuff on a piece of flat bread, a relative of Italy's more famous solution. Italy went for round. These are ovals, and the 50-centimeter version, proclaimed in 100 point text on the box. 50 centimeters is 20 inches. These things are skateboards. We each max out at one. Mustafa downs 2, eyes a third.

By 11 we are back downstairs in the lobby ‘dancing’ to wailing Turkish melodies. Mustafa drops out of the chorus line to video the terpsichorean travesties of two puffing super-annuated nortamericanos and one incredibly fit 19 year-old African soccer player to a friend in Brazil. Another ‘Someone ‘ is playing a 12 stringed cousin of the guitar, sitar, and chitara and singing long Turkish laments in duet with the 20 year-old new Reception Guy who was a contestant on some version of Turkey's Got Talent. It's his first night on the job. He manages to keep a straight face. The kid has a future.

By midnight our day is over. We leave Mustafa and Company. Up in the terrace he said sometimes he thinks “maybe I will move away.” There are a lot of ‘Someones’ he would miss and who would miss him.

I know we will.

APRIL 23, 2019 TUESDAY – MALATYA TO DIYARBAKIR

“But the roads are good.”

Stomach pokes me awake: “it has been three quarters of a century and you still don’t remember you can't drink 2 glasses of cow juice at lunch and not p**s me off!” It's not p**s that’s the problem. Down below, Nether Regions make that clear.

We're due on a bus in 3 hours for a 4-hour bus ride across rural Turkey. ‘Facilities’ are probably of the 'Slump and Dump’ style. Nether Regions are in ‘Spurt and Squirt’ Mode. This is not a good mix. We push back to the 2pm bus, I wrestle with the child-proof, adult-proof, any-sentient-being-proof packaging, extract 2 doses of ‘Cork in a Pill’, and go horizontal.

By 1:30 the pills have done their magic. Stomach is silent. Nether Regions are cemented over, I’m vertical, we're on the street...and we can’t find the office where we got our bus tickets, and should ascend the bus in 15 minutes. Back at the hotel, Mirag marshalls resources. A platoon of Helpful Guys swirl us into the street, flag down a cab, and gargle instructions containing “late”, “15 minutes", “petrol", “understand?” Of course we do. But don't.

Cabby waves us in, all smiles below very cool dark shades, and steeple chases across the city to…a petrol station. We wander. “May I help you. I am Syrian, not Turkish.” and we turn. She is the princess from Alladin and is Scheherezade and is gorgeous. This Celestial Being does goddess finger magic, gets Daddy (Zeus? Jupiter?) on the phone. “Cross the road, take the tram, get off at the bus terminal, last stop. Don’t take a cab. They might cheat you.” Scheherezade waves goodbye. We descend from the heavens.

The tram IS across the road, but the road is a super highway with a tall barrier and a stream of non-forgiving Formula 1 wannabees between us and the tram. We go for a longer life, and the cab, point on the map to the ‘otogar’ (bus station, child of English ‘auto’ and French ‘gare', station) and leave the rest to luck. And to kindness of Second Cabby who not only does not cheat us (we did not expect he would), but rounds down the meter fare 5 Lira, and waves us off with a ‘tammam' and a smile. Our reserved seats left on the 2pm bus, but Ticket Guys just switch us to the 3, give us a seat, make tea, and escort us to the bus. None of this is in a spoken language we all understand, even semi mid-wifed by Google Translate. This is in a deeper language. All humans know it. Few use it.

The bus makes a few stops across town. One is at the very petrol station the Helpful Guys and First Cabby got us to. We didn’t need Second Cabby and Ticket Guys after all. But what fun is in that?

We show Bus Guy where our hotel is on the map. Translator software asks if the bus stops near it. Big smile, thumbs up, “tammam". In Diyarbakir, the bus pulls over, Bus Guy says ‘taksi' (Turkish has ‘eks-ed' ‘x' from its alphabet), jumps out, gets us one, explains where we have to go to the cabby, and waves goodbye.

Fifteen minutes later agriculture major Third Cabby squeezes into a narrow alley behind a mosque and we are at Köprücü Hotel (Turkish decorates it vowels, and several consonants). Ramazan and Kargi say 'welcome’, their only words in English.

Days ago now, someone said to us “Our political situation could be better. But, when we talk to people about it, they shrug and say, ‘maybe, but the roads are good.”

The roads are indeed very good.

They can't compare to the people we meet along them.

APRIL 24, 2019 - WEDNESDAY – DIYARBAKIR

“We did this.”

It’s a fifty-foot drop, six inches to the right of my foot, and all air with a hard stop.

I semi-leap over the shallow puddle on the left, and move back, way back, from all that uncushiony air on the right. I'm walking the top of the great wall that holds old Diyarbakir apart from its modern spawn. The wall is at least 1500 years old, and longer than any other (if you don’t count that really long one in China) and thicker because it is a castle 6 kilometers long, with interior rooms for troops and storage.

Like that one in China, and all the others, this wall didn't work either. But it’s a scenic ramble-scramble high over gardens, and rooftops. Dennis prefers the amble at street level, a wide arm-wave below.

From the top I look across ancient Mesopotamia, the fertile land between two rivers. The silver sliver in the distance is the Tigris River. We can’t see its partner, the Euphrates River, way to the southwest. We will cross it in a week---if there is any water left in it---near Gaziantep and leave both ancient Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent. This is our common homeland, where the first farmers laid the foundations of western civilization. Just to the south bombs fall on their descendants in Syria and Iraq.

Diyarbikar Within the Walls is low-rise, a spider web of alleys leading off wide avenues, a pattern set down 3400 years ago. It's a wander-full place. So we do. Our spiffy, scrubbed hotel is packed back in an alley ten feet from a mosque famous for its grey and white banding and free-standing minaret. And so it goes, from mosque to old houses with fountains courtyards, to alleys achingly photogenic, to markets, through clouds of temptation outside restaurants and baklava houses. We give in to tall glasses of orange juice squeezed as we wait, tarter than the Spanish, still sunlight in a glass.

This is the heartland of Turkey's Kurdish people. The Turkish government denies Kurds their identity, classifying them as ‘mountain Turks’, consider Kurdish refusal of the label as terrorism. Most of our ‘Turkish’ friends are Kurds and it is their descriptions of their homeland that get us here. The question “Are you Kurdish”, and the answer are politically loaded, especially in this part of the country. We don’t ask. But when we ordered ‘tavuk (chicken) kebab, the jolly waiter made a stab at teaching us the Kurdish word, ‘mirişk'. Bravo!

So, we don’t know if Walat, Omer, and Mohamed, are Kurds. We do know they are smart, ambitious, and charming. We meet them wander-fully. As we follow the wall towards our part of town. Two bright red spots pop out against the dark of an opening in the wall. The spots grow arms and wave. Below them and the hole is a sign ‘Café’. Surely not a true hole in the wall café. Yep.

We don’t resist, follow the wave to the wall, into it, up steep stairs, and out through a hole in the wall to a ledge with a low table, benches, and Walat, Omer, and Mohamed, our red spots with arms. Mohamed has English phrases, Omer and Walat have enthousiam. We have Google Translate. Done deal! The translations are sometimes incomprehensible gobbledygook, but Google trains us to ask simple things of it. The guys show us their transformation of the dim recesses behind them that might have been sleeping areas for travelers for troops. They look like a caravan saray (inn) we stayed in during our Iran trip. Lined with carpets, pillows, and lamps, they are truly beautiful. We say so.

“We did this” says Omer, pride supplanting Google. He has also done a movie, not surprising given his looks. We watch a chunk. There are guns, running, blood, wailing. But it’s his. And he's proud of it, and of the café. We wish the Hole In The Wall Guys great good luck as we leave. None of us need Google.

I don’t know if the Guys are Kurds. If they are I hope some day they are recognized for who they are and can say “We did this.”

APRIL 25, 2019 - THURSDAY – DIYARBIKAR

“What can I do?”

The clay figures are 12,000 years old.

They are recognizable to any 20^th century artist as abstractions of humans and animals, all but essential elements discarded, pure. They are a message to us from ancient hands: “this is important, this is us, who we are, what we believe.” If only we understood.

These people lived all over Turkey, the world's first farmers, the first peoples to stay put, tame goats, sheep, pigs, cattle, wheat, barley, the cornerstones of civilization. Their story, such as we can know it, unrolls in beautiful snippets in the museum in Diyarbikar. If only we understood.

One message we can understand. It also is in clay, made in 611bc, so, 9,000 years after the sculptures, and 2600 years before us, written in a script we can translate, product of another human hand. It's a time of great civilizations, Assyrian, and Babylonian. And great war. The writer, Mannu-ki-Libbali, fears he does not have what he needs to defend his Assyrian city, ancient Tushhan, against invading Babylonians. Supplies are running low.

“My Lord says we are all in the same boat, but am I alone going to die?...This is going to end in death”.

Mannu’s letter is the very last written by an Assyrian official yet discovered beneath this soil of Mesopotamia. Assyria's time was closing. There is no evidence that a battle was fought in Tushhan. Maybe Mannu survived. His ‘Lord’ who gave him his orders probably did. Things haven't changed much. Those who give the orders still think war is a good idea. Those who fight it don’t.

The rest of us? Mannu’s question can be mine, ours.

If only we understood.

“What can I do?”

APRIL 26, 2019 - FRIDAY – DIYARBIKAR TO MARDIN

Last night we sat in the courtyard of a 15^th century ‘saray’, or inn, nursing our ‘türk kahve' until the grounds lay thick on the bottom of the tiny cups. Memories seep into our night. We slept in such a ‘caravan saray' in Iran, on beautiful carpets.

This place tells us other stories.

For centuries traders carried silks, spices, gems off the Silk Road, through these arched doors, down those steps, across this courtyard, tethered their horses and camels where tables now crowd, climbed more stone steps up to sleep on carpets, under fleece, in alcoves where other Diyarbakir night folk now nurse their ‘türk kahve’. They wore the centers of the stone steps low. We sidestep the proof of their journeys, great adventures, go about ours, smaller, unburdened, unremarkable except to us.

This morning Desk Guy offers us ‘türk kahve' for the road and waves us off to catch our minibus. We stop for orange squeezed fresh as we wait, catch the shuttle to the ‘otogar’, squeeze into the minibus for our next stop, rattle out of Old Diyarbakir, and head south towards even more ancient Mardin. Those sleepy guys in the ‘caravan saray' took days weaving atop their camels. We do it in 90 minutes, faster but maybe not more comfortably.

The cabbie climbs the hill on the narrow road into Old Mardin, out of Europe and into the Middle East or North Africa. This could be Morocco. Mardin, Jerusalem and Venice are the three cities with the most historic buildings intact and still lived in. Here, narrow alleys stitch the stone houses into a tumble hanging off a steep escarpment. It’s the last grip of Turkey's mountains before they plummet to the great flat plain of Mesopotamia that flows to Syria, over there, just short of the southern horizon.

We walk the alleys the signs to Dara Konagi, our hotel, up, down, around, then through the arches into the courtyard. Hassan, Ibrahim, and Leyla welcome us, Hassan with fine English, his cousins with smiles and Turkey’s universal solvent, hot ‘cai’, in a tiny hour-glass. Hassan has been to America, likes it because ‘there are so many kinds of people.’ He beams over Abel's photo (homepage on my phone), points to us. “Black…white. Good”.

Our room is through an arch, then walls two feet thick. The ceiling is 4 intersecting arches, support for the floors above. The toilet and shower are in niches surrounded by translucent walls, photographs of Mardin, and spectacular. They glow. Opposite, a huge window opens into the courtyard, a frame for the grapevine climbing the wall to the roof terrace. It is perfect. Home.

The house is 800 years old, and so was new when Marco Polo broke his journey in Mardin. He had to sleep somewhere. Maybe, just maybe…..

APRIL 27, 2019 - SATURDAY – MARDIN

“Super!”

They’re ‘moblivious'.

A gaggle of Mardin’s Saturday Turkish tourists clog the narrow worn sidewalk, eyes, hands, and attention glued to 20^th century cell phones. They're ‘moblivious’ to the 12^th century glories wrapped around them. And to the rest of the weekend crowd stuffing the street.

The crowd bumps around them, taking us along, a few under-voiced ‘pardons' clearing the way.

We don’t mind being shanghaied. The crowd itself is upstaging the town, almost.

People watching has its rewards. Turks of both genders are handsome. These are not pretty faces. They are striking, memorable. We are not ‘moblivious’.

We hear no English or other European languages, nor Decibels booming from planeloads of Asian tourists on their Mach-3 Tours of The Known Universe like those we skirted in Spain, Istanbul, and Baku. The flocks following tour guides and their flags, or on their own, are Turkish, judging from their looks, language, and dress, the latter more distinctive for some of the women than for any of the men. The patterns, colors, and wrap-styles of these women's headscarves are sometimes fashion, sometimes cultural messages specific to time and place, and ancestry. I see leopard spots circling a few heads. Traditional for women of the Hemsin villages says my guidebook. Faaaabulous, says me.

Some young women do wear head scarves, from somber to wildly and enthusiastically not, for style not tradition. Most let their hair flow in long streams, deep black, occasionally tawny by nature, or blonde by design. They wear jeans, and smoke, or hold their boyfriend's hands, multiple messages, universally understood, if not universally approved. Jeans are jeans anywhere, though are perhaps a tad better here gracing the trim, lithe figures of Turkish men and women than stretched too far in other places. People watching does indeed have its rewards.

Stud muffins go for shaved heads, or lots of curls atop and in front, flat on the sides and back. Sharp-edged five o'clock shadow is in, must be maintained. Six o'clock comes fast when your beard is dark and thick, design by Mr. Gene. Small 2- seater ‘kuafur' shops for men, names borrowed from Paris, styles from Hollywood and the runway, fill the spaces between restaurants everywhere, the barber chairs rarely empty. Turkish blood might run sweet from all the sugary desserts, or clog from the meat-heavy main courses, but Turkish hair will always look great.

The crowds wear thin past the shops. We appreciate the open spaces, quiet, and senior discount at the superb Mardin Museum. One long arched gallery leads us through the many thousands of years of this region's history, painlessly, with clear descriptions in English of one or two memorable artifacts that tell the story and attach to our memories.

We walk the millennia, passing the Stone Age, the first farmers, Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, get to Marco Polo. He slept here in the 12^th century, a Johnny Come Very Very Lately in a place that had been a named place on the map of empires for thousands of years before his stopover.

Middle school kids on a field trip corral me somewhere about the 19^th century to practice their English. The girls, of course, are the first adventurers, and lead the pack. My answer to “Where are you from” gets big thumbs up, bigger grins, and “Super" all around.

We trade names, ages, pose for selfies in mixed scrambles and crowds, the boys edging closer in every shot. Curiosity wins. Then they all wave, say goodbye, leave me in the 19^th century.

They may become ‘moblivious’.

If not?

Super.

APRIL 28, 2019 - SUNDAY – MARDIN

“Exactly”

‘Puppy’ galoomphs up arms and feet flapping. He is Anwar, the night desk clerk, go-fer, all purpose guy at the hotel, 20 years old, 12 days into the job, fearless at trotting out his fledgling English. He is eager to please, spindly arms and big feet just under control, unlike his enthousiastic, but free-form, chewing of the syntax of English, and endearingly goofy. Thus, ‘Puppy’ to us. His favorite word is “exactly", his all purpose follow up to anything we say, understood or not. He rushes off to confuse other guests at the hotel, leaving a gap in the day, and leaving us on two wooden chairs, tea in hand, an eddy in the flood around us.

Yesterday Mardin was just crowded. Today it is stuffed, a circus, five rings---at least---worth of Sunday tourists shoe-horned onto the narrow sidewalks, oozing through the streets. They flow around the clown in front of the coffee store, between the pine-nut and blue coated almond store, and the store selling engraved metal tea and coffee sets, normal things. Most adults ignore the guy in clown drag, technicolor bride of Frankenstein wig, bulbous red honker nose, sidewalk eating flap feet and all. The kids stare, not sure of this. We ‘get’ fear of clowns.

We contribute 15 Lira to the local economy and buy a pound of pine nuts for under three dollars. In a narrow split in the walls the cheerful cook dismisses Google with a wave, drops his hand to about two feet above his shoes and goes “baaa, baaaa", confirming that the thick eggplant casserole also contains veal. A great broad laugh and a high five hand slap confirm the deal. A plate please, some of that other stuff, and rice, and that crispy fried thing. It's all delicious.

As is Mardin.

Exactly.

APRIL 29, 2019 – MONDAY – MARDIN TO SANLIURFA (aka URFA)

I try words, but they sputter.

What I am seeing reset the calendar of human achievement when it was discovered a few decades ago. Stonehenge in England, and the pyramids in Egypt are old, 4000 to 4500 years old, defining ‘old’ in the realm of human structures. I look down at Gobekli Tepe on its hill in southeastern Turkey. I am numbed by time.

Ten thousand years lie exposed below me.

Gobekli Tepe was 6000 years old before the first stones were piled towards the sun at the pyramids near the Nile or those rough megaliths lifted towards the cloudy sky on the Salisbury Plain.

These stones stand in circles like those at Stonehenge, but they are finished smooth, angled pillars decorated with images of animals, designed architecture in the round with connecting walls and evidence of roofs. Some rest on bedrock. Some have terrazzo floors. There are six circles here on this hill, the highest for miles, evidence of others still buried under the green fields. These are buildings, not piles of stone. They are huge, complicated, requiring great coordination and effort, and with a great purpose. Archeologists think Gobekli Tepe was a temple, a connection to something great. Could be. There are images of animals, and other markings carved into the stones. Some suggest they could be precursors to writing, usually attributed to the Sumerians 5000 years ago…5000 years later than these. Could be. Anything seems possible for the people who built this.

To journey so far back in time we journey 4 hours across Turkey on yet another of the country’s long distance busses. Our seats have movie screens, chargers for our devices, flip down tables. It’s more than a step up from the ‘facilities' reluctantly provided in steerage class on most airlines. We even have a friendly ‘flight attendant’ who handles collecting fares, returning our passports from the checkpoint inspectors, and keeping us on time at our pit stop two hours in.

Somebody has barfed in the back of the bus, 2 rows behind us. Bus Guy unloads us, sends the bus to the cleaners, and we’re off again in 15 minutes, sprayed and dewy.

Asian Guest House is deep into pre-Ramadan cleaning, but Aslam himself finds room for us way up top when we ask to add a few days. Turkish Saluddin, and Spanish-Scottish Oscar, recognize us from Diyarbakir and join us for time travel up to Gobekli Tape. They are equally speechless, in two more languages.

We recover under the influence of cold beers in the courtyard of Aslan, swapping stories with Norwegian Paul.

The neighborhood mosques don’t notice the beers, send out their calls, their world filled with bigger things. Their ancestors up at Gibekli Tepe are silent. Except in our imaginations.

APRIL 30, 2019 – TUESDAY– SANLIURFA (aka URFA)

 “Yala, yala"

Eyes say it's not straight up.

First Gear begs to differ, groans, and takes a break to have a smoke.

We’re cresting 6000 feet, just below the s**w. Spring has already rescued this landscape from winter. Trees and fields are trying out the latest thing in green after the months of brown. Three hours after leaving the guesthouse at 6am we walk across a Roman bridge, 1800 years old, 400 feet long, 90 feet high, 16 feet wide, and built by Emperor Septimus Severus, ‘7' to his friends. Numbers crunch my brain, then release it to the cool air.

Muhammad drives. He’s a communication genius. His tools are a rubber face, a mess of English words and three all purpose suffixes, “Go", “No", and “Good" as in “CaiGo" (Let's have tea.), “TimeNo" (Don't take too long.), “TurkeyGood" (What do you think of Turkey?)

His real genius is hand gesture. He is fluently ‘ambi-manous', in both hands, useful while driving. “Morning. Six (hands point to room 6, make banging motion), Go.” So we knock on his door when we get up, pile into his car, and go. By 8 he stops on a street, hops out, returns with breakfast, a 14 by 6 inch flattened croissant, all flake and flavor. “FoodGood”…sees the signs of epiphany on our faces, rolls those hands (“I'm going to get more"), pops out, back in, reloaded with breakfast heaven. “CaiGood" and a thermos raised high offer us breakfast tea, official finish to a meal, even one in the front seat of a car.

Then “Yala, yala, (“Let’s go”)

There are mountains to climb.

The s**w banks are five feet thick. Muhammad teaches us the Turkish word for s**w. It's ‘kar, easy to remember and not literally a four-letter word. Then he laughs, points to his vehicle, retrieves another English word. “Turkey taksi, America car". Points to s**w. “Turkey kar. English?” He struggles with ‘snow', shakes his head, “KarGood", “ I'll stick with kar".

We climb the last few hundred feet to the summit on stone steps, then gravel, then slush. Knees are not happy, slip and slide not being their forté. But even they approve of the immense statues and bodiless stone heads on the summit.

The statues of Nemrut Dagi are spectacular in a spectacular setting, grey stone against white ‘kar’ and blue sky. The ego mania that tries to pass for leadership in 20^th century America apparently has antecedents in First Century bce Turkey. Heads made of rock are prominent in both, staring brainless into the void. These may be here forever. Today's must not be.

There may be mountains to climb to do it, but….

Yala, yala.

MAY 1, 2019 – WEDNESDAY– SANLIURFA (aka URFA)

The mattresses pile up and fill the courtyard.

It's Ramadan Cleaning Time and Asian Guesthouse is fired up. Ramadan starts in a few days, and Aslan will be ready. Many Turks skip the fasting bit, but a holiday is a holiday and has its own momentum. Turks may be eating instead of fasting but they’ll do so in revived and renewed homes. That's part of the truth of the fast, anyway.

Memories spring off the mattresses. We’ve been here before, a few years ago in Ethiopia, where Hageera, our host, emptied her house, and filled the courtyard with mattress stuffing that needed airing, cottony snow drifted against just repainted pink, and purple, and turquoise walls. I sat in the sun then, recovering from flu bugs, drinking Hageera's tea, and neighbor to a harmless avalanche.

Here the mattresses contain the avalanche. We chat with Norwegian Paul, lounge, make plans, forget them, watch the day disappear under clouds promising rain, timing the day by the stand, number of mattresses in the pile. At about half past 8 mattresses or so we head out.

First , we go north to try out the ‘tantuni’ place we found yesterday. Tantuni Guy calls his brother who offers to help us with the menu, long distance and in excellent English. We survive with pointing and fetal Turkish “evet iki tavuk lüften” and get our two chicken ‘tantuni’, here stuffed into foot- long soft rolls, not rolled into soft lavaş (giant cousin to crêpes and flour tortillas). Down the street Juice Guy waves us over to his stand, gestures to the two chairs under the overhang, and squeezes us two big glasses of ‘portakal suyu' . Our taste buds don't remember any fresh squeezed orange juice this good in Florida.

At the other end of town, past the bazaar, and half a dozen mosques, we sit under the trees in a park, ‘cai’ in hand, like the dozens of people around us. This is where a prophet was swept into heaven a few millennia ago in a swirl of heavenly waters and fish. The waters remain in a shallow lake rich in those fish, now languid instead of airborne. It's a lovely place. Too bad the prophet missed it.

We zig-zag back to Aslan through the bazaar. We pass shops bright with brittle light reflecting off the copper and silver, local specialties, but succumb to the aromas replacing air outside a pastry shop. Sesame wafers offset the caloric invasion of the crumbly, pistachio and sesame paste-filled shortbread crumpets. These go into our ‘Ramadan Stash' of munchies in case our next digs do not have any food available between sunrise and sunset. They join our kilogram-plus bag of ‘trail mix' we created from three kinds of raisins, peanuts, and chocolate gravel, irregular bits iced in jewel colors, Designer M and Ms.

Only one of the crumpets makes the journey back to Asian.

The mattresses are gone, ready for Ramadan. A few crumpets shy, we're not.

MAY 2, 2019 – THURSDAY– SANLIURFA (aka URFA)

“Maybe they will see.”

The Amazons ride and hunt, huge, strong, accurate, deadly, and wide-eyed, surprised by our attention, even after 2,000 years.

They are below us spreading in tessellated mosaic across the floor of the ‘Amazon House’ and above us enlarged many times over in pixilated photos across the walls of the Sanliurfa Mosaic Museum. They face Achilles and his famous heel, his mother holding him by that heel, rearng centaurs, a docile zebra, and expanses of mosaic without a central theme, but with great beauty, the wholes sublimely greater than their tiny parts.

The Sanliurfa Mosaic Museum protects the mosaics under a flying saucer and Plexiglas walkways. We start out solitary guests of the Amazons, as quiet as they are, in the immense space, equally wide- eyed. But it’s museum field trip day for a local school, and the Amazon House is suddenly host to busloads of frantic teachers herding posses of kittens with the attention spans of senile gnats.

“They say it is useless coming here because they won’t understand. But it's a museum. They must come. Maybe they won’t understand. But, maybe, maybe they will see.” He's articulate and fluent, this 40-something teacher, one off the many male teachers in the group, and may be the oldest. He shrugs, hopeful for his kittens, as all good teachers are.

Later, in the companion Archeology Museum across the park, the kittens are moblivious but I see a few touch a statue then quickly jump back, perhaps shocked by the power of the millennia stored in the stone. Maybe they will see.

We walk through a full-scale reproduction of the major circle at Gobekli Tepe, stand tiny against the stone rectangles. We were wrong about the original being 10,000 years old. It’s 11,500 years old. That’s over 7,000 years older than the pyramids and Stonehenge. With that bit swirling in our heads, we move quickly through the next millennia, stopping briefly at the invention of writing here thousands of years later, and many thousands ago, then exit, and re- enter modern Turkey.

It’s our last full day here, time to pick up the pieces we've noticed, passed, and let lie. We try the roasted chicken place at the other end of town, fall a bit short in the Turkish fractions department, wind up with half a bird each instead of a half a bird between us, plus fries, salad, garlic yoghurt, humus, and fresh bread--- all scrumptious. Our belts may recover. Eventually. We consider the meal Basic Unexpected Ramadan Preemptive Preparation, BURPP for short. And then wash it through our overloaded guts with more orange juice. Juice Guy waves us to ‘our’ seats, squeezes us 2 big doses of his addictive orange miracle and cuts us a Frequent Drinker Discount on our daily fix.

Back at Aslan, Norwegian Paul, Turkish Saluddin, Spanish-Scottish Oscar, and the three jolly cooks on holiday from their restaurant on the edge of the Black Sea are all gone. As do all the moments of our days, they stay with us, extraordinary gifts, tiny pieces of a picture spreading over the landscape of our lives, a picture not needing heros or Amazons, but leaving us wide-eyed, grateful for the seeing.

MAY 3, 2019 – FRIDAY– SANLIURFA (aka URFA) TO HARRAN

“Ekstra"

She Who Is in Charge, babushka-ed Breakfast Oracle, makes it clear. “Cai tammam, Türk kahve ekstra". We're tammam with that, plop down our 80 cents each for 2 tiny cups of Turkey's nerve jolting brew. This morning she adds circles of eggplant and strips of semi-incendiary green peppers, sautéed to charred perfection, to the breakfast buffet of olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, cheeses, warm frisbees of fresh bread, and all that free ‘cai’ we can drink.

Rose vines crawl over the wire trellis that covers the courtyard where we eat, translucent bright green, with puffs of red, spotty shade from the heating sun. Urfa may be in Anatolia, and Asia, map-wise but it is well into the Middle East climate-wise.

Four affable Syrians join us on the divans under the arc-ed roof of the lounge just off the courtyard and want photos with us. They are on break from installing an awning between the roof terrace outside our room and that Middle Eastern sun already revving up for its Olympian leap over 120 degrees come July.

We leave Aslan's, catch a cab to the minibus station, then ride around town in the ‘Harran' minibus, getting a tour of the new part of Urfa while the driver and his buddy hawk the remaining body-free inches to anyone willing to suck it in, re-arrange body parts, compress, and join us for the 40 kilometer, $1.40, ride south, stopping just north of Syria in ancient Harran.

Two hours later, we are welcomed to the family compound by host Ibrahim and his large family. (Grand-daddy had 45 children by 7 wives, he himself has 5 brothers and 5 sisters. I begin to understand why ancient Babylonians counted in luxurious base 60, not piddling base 10) . Tea lubricates our welcome while Mama reformats breakfast as lunch.

Take one of those cartons with indentations for 18 eggs. Turn it over. Imagine the indentations are not round, but pointed, now facing upward, and 15 feet high, with a hole in the top, and opening one to another, cells in a beehive. That’s a Harran beehive house, each egg cradle is a room, high and thick-walled, and cool because of it. These houses exist in only 3 places, here in Harran, south of here in Syria…and studding the boot of Italy. Go figure.

By mid-afternoon we lie, unfolded, and fed, on rich ruby carpets and thick pillows in our room, first on the right through the thick wooden door. It's ours for 3 days…and Main Stop Number One on The Tour of the Traditional Beehive House, especially the room with two supine foreigners in residence, and right on the path to the ‘Pick A Traditional Costume To Take A Silly Photo In’ Rack, and the tables and walls sprouting stuff, aka ‘The Gift Shop’.

All afternoon tourist groups by the bus load troop through our room, pass us, grab robes and head dresses, troop outside, and pose for photos in outfits sure to be regretted later when they appear on Facebook. They do their loud, holiday, photo-snapping thing, noisy, but good natured. If they are puzzled by the two resident foreigners lounging under their beehive---as anyone with more than one synapse would be---they don’t say. They are polite. No one steps on us.

Around Visitor Number 500, we begin to question exactly what the AirBnB description meant by ‘traditional village experience’. And for whom. Is this a lesson in what it feels like to have US invade THEM? That suggests options. We could charge for the photos---fun, but I reject it as unfriendly, and a bad example. I go for donning traditional clothing and passing for somnolent ancestors, part of the show. I’ll just play it like one of my super roles at the opera---scenic, deaf, and silent. Dennis, long retired from the stage, isn’t so sure. We pass on a Turkish debut.

We give in, get up, go out, turn the tables, and play Watch The Tourists, version T1 (Turkey). The lady wearing an afghan hound dipped in ketchup as a hairdo is not improved by traditional clothing. Politeness constrains me about the rest.

Dinner of couscous, chicken, and veggies is delicious and chaotic. It’s just us and the men of the family. We sprawl on the floor with four of the handsome brothers and cousins while a hive of their kids buzz around us. Three climb over tall Halil, Brother Number 3 of 5, who laughs through a jumble of arms and legs. “I have 4. Fabrik (factory) is closed.’ And his hand cuts through the air, message clear. Then he picks up one of his three daughters and smothers her with kisses.

This is why we travel. Life as it is. There's nothing ‘ekstra’.

MAY 4 , 2019 – SATURDAY– HARRAN

Brothers: Ibrahim, Halil is cowboy, Mahmoud, Haldun is a cousin

 “Moses’ father-in-law lived there.”

And the village is a few kilometers down the road from where Abraham married his first wife. A tablet discovered on that hill says so. Brother Ibrahim is an archeology guide. He leads us up that hill. We look across to the walls of the oldest university ever unearthed. By 1000bc there were astronomers here, watching the movements of heavenly bodies from a tower that still stands. They recorded a solar eclipse in stone, the curve of the moon clearly cutting into the sun during the heavenly dance.

Ibrahim drives us over modern roads, remnants of the Silk Road that connected China and Rome. Rome built much the wall that surrounds Harran, Christians added churches, Moslems added Mosques. The Mongols reduced much of it to rubble. Turks rebuilt it.

Harran doesn't have history. It is history.

Our chunk of it is a hoot.

Kids ran around us and stuffed red poppies and dandelions in our shirt pockets as we climbed the hill to ancient graves.

Sleeping in the beehive houses layered between thick rugs, mattresses, and heavy quilts, is cool, quiet, anthropologically orgasmic. Ibrahim’s family is colorful from inside out, cradle on up. There are kids everywhere, coddled, hugged, kissed, rocked, played with, important.

They seem to grow up well, fun and theatrical. Official host Ibrahim drives hands free so he can arm-dance to the music blowing the car’s speakers. Brother Halil dances on the table in the courtyard, his arms filled with adoring nieces and nephews. Oldest sister (update---step sister from daddy's first wife), and semi-vampire glamorous in jet and silver seems a tidbit short of a full kebab, but can sell those tourists anything they never wanted. And she speaks the best English. And is smart. Cousin Linda is a voluptuous widow slicing manicured hands across her throat…”Husband very dead. Good. He not good.” ‘Mama’, a more recent widow, mother of 10, presides over the enterprise, omnipresent, bouncing babies, flattering tourists, a huge key hanging from a thick belt wrapped around her considerable black-upholstered girth. Mahmoud, Brother Number 4, laughs off questions about fasting during Ramazan, which begins the day after tomorrow. Fasting is clearly not buttery Mahmoud's forté . “Ramadan outside. Inside OK!” I wonder what ‘Mama’ thinks of that.

Dinner spreads out across the floor. It shares space piled with brothers, cousins, and kiddies, four of the former, standard 12-pack plus of the latter, and us. Cousin Linda has made stuffed grape leaves and stuffed green peppers, deep green against the ivory yoghurt and cucumber soup, and all good wrapped or dipped with leafy tissues of thin bread. Favorite Uncle Halil plays Hide and Seek with the kiddies.

We sleep well, again.

MAY 5, 2019 – SUNDAY– HARRAN

Abdul counts on his fingers in English to 10, goes beyond. “I am 14.”, then laughs. “No, 17”. He is a refugee from the war in Syria and has been living in a refugee camp in Turkey since he was 11. He and his three cousins, serious Hassan, quiet Yusuf, and rubber-faced Saddam, are from Aleppo, now rubble. They work on weekends here at the Beehive Traditional House serving tea to tourists and straightening up between hordes. Abdul is already handsome, with a killer smile, and easy grace. At 30 he will be a memorable man. If he gets that far.

Now, he is curious about us, the first of the four cousins to cross to us, and across the Arabic-English language bridge, fingers-adept at twisting Google Translator Googledeygook into messages we can respond to. The American president gets a thumbs down and a “brain like a stone” review. The Turkish president gets a “good… he lets us come to Turkey", survival winning over democracy. (That gives me insight into why people might have voted as they did in our country. He promised an America they could be ‘safe’ in. It’s too bad they saw that America as defined by privilege limited to a few, rather than defined by our Constitution, our vision, and the generosity of spirit that makes us truly great.)

The free form English class for Abdul expands to Google-confuse cousins and friends. They are breaks between drinking tea and ‘Watching the (other)Tourists’. Almost all are Turkish, women of the urban and urbane variety, hair flying, tight slacks stretched to the limit, long released from head scarves and robes…and rushing to don them again for their group photos. The men stick to checkered head wraps that turn them all into sheiks, a romantic look even here. A few Germans blitz through. No one stays more than an hour. Our last of 3 days is already winding down, too soon. We have just tonight before we leave Harran for Gaziantep tomorrow.

Mahmoud says there will be special food tonight. Tomorrow begins Ramadan. Then…”It is my birthday”. Laughs. “Ever day is my birthday.”

We get it.

MAY 6, 2019 – MONDAY - HARRAN TO GAZIANTEP

Ramadan doesn’t erase hospitality. Mama makes sure we have a final big breakfast, and Saddam and Yusuf bring us tea, even if they can't eat or drink themselves now that the sun is up, though behind rain clouds. She fills the thermos for the warm, young Russian couple who set up their tent on the roof of her house last night, new travel junky buddies in five minutes.

Mama waits with us outside the gate for the minibus one of the brothers has called for our ride back into Urfa, takes charge when it doesn’t come, mobile and voice in This Is Your mother Speaking Commando Mode. It comes. Mahmoud hugs us goodbye, Mama’s arms tell us to return. A pile of kids wave. We wave, are gone.

The minibus from Urfa to Gaziantep is a local. We're in no hurry. The fuzzy lollipops are pistachio trees, dots in the green gridwork that overlays the smooth hills to the horizon. This is the western edge of ancient Mesopotamia. A week ago we stood atop the walls of Diyarbakir and saw the eastern edge, the Tigris, barely a micro sliver across the plain, but still a river. Today, at just before one in the afternoon outside Birecik, we cross a cement canal no wider than our minibus is long. It’s the Euphrates. Or what's left of the river as it flows here. It defined a world for millennia. It has been sacrificed to feed pistachio trees. That's just nuts.

Deep in the alleys of Gaziantep, Mustafa walks us across his courtyard to our room, pantomime showing us the keys, towels, bathroom. At the small fridge with cold water, his English breaks out of his smile…“no money”. He's a natural at Google Translate. Whatever he says in Turkish comes out in clear English, not Googledygook. We're set for breakfast tomorrow at 8 with smiling Nethsibeh, a choice of 2 restaurants for right now, and an offer for a lift to the air port in two days.

Our room is dark wood. Lace filters light through 5 tall windows, deep set into the stone walls. The beds are celestial. The duvets are angel down clouds. We resist, Stomach in Charge. Taste Buds moan through the crumbs of pistachio baklava, better here than anywhere in Turkey. Is that worth a river?

MAY 7, 2019 – TUESDAY - GAZIANTEP

She's stunning.

There’s only her face, tousled hair and those eyes staring straight across the centuries, but she is magnificent. She sits alone in a totally black space, floating above time and art, a gift from an unknown artist 1700 years dead, hidden from looters for centuries by wind-blown sand, rescued from the flood of a man-made lake, offered now by Gaziantep’s world class Mosaics Museum.

They call her ‘The Gypsy Girl because of her wild hair. Gypsies wander. Her face comes with us as we roam across immense mosaics, rescued floors of 2^nd and 3^rd century Roman houses, gypsies through history. Some cover scores of square meters, images of god, goddesses acting and telling their stories, big bits of ancient life built of tiny bits of colored rock. Venus is born from a shell, fully formed and perfect. Young Icarus and Daddy Daedulus sit by Momma discussing how they will join the birds in the sky, no hint of the sad fall from grace that ends their story. Satyrs chase nymphs, who dawdle a bit in ambling flight. They sweep us into their exquisite world, a whole so much richer than its tiny parts.

Gaziantep does the same. The stalls in the bazaar are no more colorful than they are elsewhere, the alleys no more twisting, but...there is something here, an energy, a grace, a swirl of seduction. We follow it. The Gypsy Girl would understand.

Ramadan is new, just a day old. Food is available…during the day. Once the cannons blast the message that the day's fast is over, people rush from day's fast to nighttime’s feast. (Getting from fast to feast with ‘e's.) They go home, not out, to eat. All of Gaziantep closes down, restaurants included. The bazaar is dark, the streets are empty. Our stash of pistachios back at the house is looking might fine to Stomach, never very critical. Tongue has other fantasies, as usual. Eyes spy lights in the dark, call the shots. Legs lead. Dinner of two veggie casseroles keeps all parts happy.

We walk back through the dark. The day is done, bigger than all its tiny parts.

MAY 8, 2019 – WEDNESDAY - GAZIANTEP TO ISTANBUL

That sweep of blue is the Sea of Marmara.

Jason and his Argonauts sailed it looking for the Golden Fleece. Odysseus sailed it in his odyssey to find his way home. Landstuck, we keep it in sight as we walk down the steep streets looking for our hotel, home for the next five days, and at a price way this side of being fleeced. It's perfect, a 2-room studio with kitchen and double bed, and a single in the second room, down here by the sea, way away from the hordes up the slope, and in a neighborhood we know. The balcony nudges Spring trees. The enclosed roof terrace anchors us to the Sea of Marmara, 180 degrees of blue and blips, modern argonauts slipping off the edge of the horizon.

We follow the long strides of lanky Manager Edip on his walking tour of ‘our' neighborhood, passing the hotel we stayed in last year, then The Breakfast Place, from last year, rounding the park, nodding at The Pomegranate Juice Stand, and The Chicken Place, then heading down an alley to new territory. He stops outside at his favorite restaurant. “This is where workers come". The menu has lentil soup, and ‘patlican moussaka’, eggplant apotheosis. Nose leads us to the bakery. “I like them hot" and Edip nods to the baker, who knows him. The baker pulls circles of fresh simit, still hot, from the basket next to the oven. We crunch through the sesame seeds on the crisp crust, sink into the fluffy gift inside. Cooled, in stacks on the simit stands, or hawked from baskets, simit are always good. Still hot, crispy-flaky-tender, they are a different thing all together.

By dusk, we hike back up the cobblestones and catch the tram down again, east, towards the Bosporus. Ihsan, Huseyin, and Menit, friends now for 6 or 7 years, and of at least that many trips to Istanbul, hug us into the rooftop restaurant they manage floating 8 stories into Istanbul's sky. The Golden Horn, the Bosporus, Aya Sofia, the Blue Mosque, the mosque of Suleiman, the Magnificent, Europe, Asia, all of Istanbul, are right there, riding the evening light into the dark.

The guys know what we want. Chef Menit’s marinated chicken on a bed of eggplant purée is always our official welcome back to Istanbul. They follow it with ‘ketmer’, warm crêpe wrapped around cold clotted cream and sprinkled with pistachio dust. There is no check.

We're home again.

To seal the deal we walk back through the great square anchored by the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia, floodlit brilliance erasing the stars. Seagulls flit into and out of the light, graceful parabolas, swooping, feathered meteors.

We leave the light, turn down the steep hill, south, and seaward. To bed, luckier than Jason and Odysseus.

MAY 9, 2019 – THURSDAY - ISTANBUL

Some days you just gotta sit.

And we do. In bits and pieces.

Edip makes us breakfast in the roof terrace room. He is on a forced break from his PhD program in Child Psychology, articulate, and a sponge for new English words. He trots out yesterday's ‘strong and ‘weak’ as in coffee, applies them to tea and makes us some. We sip the tea, and talk, and watch the ships drop over the horizon. Our talk travels great distances, best left unmapped. This man will be a friend.

He walks with us up the hill by a new route, less steep, that drops us in the Hippodrome, where Romans raced chariots, next to the obelisk looted from Egypt, and in front of the Blue Mosque and its six minarets. I upcharge my IstanbulKart, sweep it through the turnstile, and we hop onto the Tram to ride the tracks down Divan Yolu, still a main street to the Golden Horn 2,000 years after the Romans laid it down.

We sit all day with the Ihsan and Huseyin 8 stories above this most compelling of cities, talking. Ihsan plates up some desserts for us, several variations on the theme of Death by Baklava, one chocolate coated. Desserts assured and done, we safely move on to variations on the theme of Ecstasy by Chicken and Eggplant.

The view changes, now lit from the west. The domes and minarets of the great mosques on hills towards the sun are side lit, gold toward the sun, silhouettes away from it, enameled in the sky. To the East, ships strew sequins on the surface of the Golden Horn and Bosporus. Away, slightly south of East, the windows of Asia ripple.

The city and our friends here seep in.

Some days you just gotta sit.

MAY 10, 2019 – FRIDAY - ISTANBUL

“Why do you like Istanbul?”

The walk is more gritty than pretty.

But it gets us to the huge plaza surrounding the Yenikapi train station where Edip and the internet promise there is a stop for the shuttle to the new airport. These cobblestoned alleys are far from the exoticism up the hill. They scrape along the fence that keeps the traffic on Kennedy Caddesi out there along the Sea. Down here Istanbul isn't pretty, just flat. It's good for the Knees who vote for not schlepping the backpacks up the steep hill to the stop we know by the Blue Mosque. And for the eyes, so easily seduced by the surface of Tourist Istanbul, up there on the hill, and forgetting that Istanbul is life lived, not life performed for the tourist. It may not be pretty, but there's no downside to this walk on the down side.

This is a trial run for the real thing in 2 days, early on Monday morning, pre-emptive perambulation, a good move in IstanbuL, where signage is enthusiastically rampant…and often rampantly unhelpful. Around the plaza, there are stacked signs pointing towards destinations all over the city, and beyond, even to Edirne on the border with Bulgaria, and to the old airport, Ataturk Havalimani, now seriously defunct, but none for the shuttle to the new one, seriously not.

Like Blanche DuBois we “get by with the help of strangers", a helpful passerby and a cabbie who point thataway, “first left, first right". That, luck, and a final unpromising scoot “right”, into dimness under an overpass, get us to a sign for the shuttle, well-intentioned and just as well-hidden. It's spiffy new, fresh, sparkly even, in the gloom of the overpass penumbra, enthusiastic, and almost truly helpful. There's a big white wilderness on the sign where a schedule could fit, blank now, though promising for the future, perhaps maybe for our next trip. Or the one after.

We settle for knowing How, and Where, and leave When to the Travel Goddess, and her minions hiding on the Internet. We time the walk back. 25 minutes should get the Knees, the backpacks, and us here on Monday, with an ETD from the hotel of 06:30.

The rest of our next to the next to the last day unwinds with friends. We three sip cai à la Edip and chomp fresh ‘simit’ à la us on the terrace most of the morning. We untangle ‘tie and ‘untie’ for him, assure him he has a grip on ‘loose’ and ‘tight’. And listen to his far-ranging stories. He's sharply intelligent, generous, kind, open to the world, curious, questioning, non-judgmental. That's perhaps no more welcome in Turkey than in ‘truhmerica'.

At 4, Huseyin meets us for cai at his friend's restaurant down by the Golden Horn. The view is up close and personal with the frantic buzz of the city. Off to the left, up the Horn, fishing lines catch the light as they cataract off the Galata Bridge. Huseyin loves his city, but he wants to know why we do. “Why do you like Istanbul?” Our words crash land in triteness. Then, we shrug, throw our arms open to the view, then around him. “Me, too", he says.

We spend the late evening with our friend Nüri and his wife of 8 months, architect Ece, eating through a feast at ‘our’ restaurant. It’s on us, our invite to celebrate their wedding, which we missed by a few weeks last year. Ihsan delivers a plate of desserts “on the house". We increase Nüri’s keychain collection to almost 60, with additions from Portugal, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Senegal, Madagascar, and Azerbaijan, delivered one by one between bites and updates. At the next table, a birthday celebration for a grandmother erupts into applause. A young man is on his knees, ring in hand. “Evet, evet, evet", screams his lady. The restaurant cheers. Nüri hugs his wife. Next trip---already skipping across the 2020 calendar---they'll help us find an AirBnB “on the Asian side" near their flat  It’s close to midnight when they leave us with a box of candies, traditional in their home city, and hugs.

We catch a crowded tram for one stop back up to the top, walk through the floodlit fantasies of the Blue Mosque, Aya Sofia, and their magenta dancing fountains, down the other side of the hill, through empty streets to our digs.

Why do we like Istanbul? Obvious, no?

MAY 11, 2019 – SATURDAY- ISTANBUL

We laze about. On our balcony, on the roof terrace, over breakfast, the day generous with hours. Then it’s night and we're topside waiting for Zeki, his wife Muzeyyn, and their soon-to-be 4 son Yusuf. Eons ago, he was the desk clerk in our hotel. Now he has his own business, wife, son.

Zeki doesn’t fast during Ramadan, but Muzeyyn does, so we meet late, after she has eaten after fasting for 16 hours. We sit late over tea, playing with their plans to visit us in Florida. Just before midnight we hug goodbye. Muzeyyn's fast begins again in 4 hours. They have a long drive home and a short sleep before she eats and drinks the only nourishment until 8 tomorrow night. “She likes it”, says Zeki, “but it’s not for everybody. Including me.” And he laughs.

We walk back down, stopping at The Juice Guy for a glass of fresh squeezed ‘portakal suyu' We nurse our citrus nightcap at the small curbside table as Saturday becomes Sunday.

 MAY 12, 2019 – SUNDAY - ISTANBUL

“He’s a psychopath, a sociopath”

I am still disturbed by what the passerby said to me last night.

“Your President has no empathy, no sympathy. He’s a psychopath, a sociopath.”

We hear this over and over, in Spain, in Azerbaijan, in Turkey. America is significantly diminished in the world, no longer great among the community of nations except in the fevered imaginations of those who equate greatness with hate, racism, cruelty to women, children, and people of color. Many in the US will say “Well, f**k ‘em. Who needs ‘em anyway.” Like the man bivouacked in the White House we should all remember that we survive because we sell our produce and our products. And we’re no longer the only game in town. It isn't hard to sell “Take down the bully” when the bully no longer has anything to offer but disdain.

My day brightens when I meet Murat, owner of our digs. He soars across the roof terrace, bouncing on bubbles of enthusiasm and kindness, to grab my hand.  “I love literature, especially ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, my favorite book.” It’s one of mine, too! His students in the high school halfway back up the hill are lucky. He's a sweet, kind man. I thank him for that silently.

We take a last walk up the hill through the Hippodrome, past the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia, to the tram stop where I add enough Lira to our IstanbulKart to get us rides on the shuttle to the airport.

On the way back, we graze on rice and a few plates of delicious stews, one beef, one chicken at a ‘lokantasi’ (simple cafeteria), empty but for us, the day’s fast not quite over for many in the neighborhood. By the park, scores of people sit at tables waiting for the cannon to boom the end of their fast and to share the communal ‘break fast meal’, open to all who have fasted. We don’t qualify but would be welcome, or so Edip told us, even if we are not Moslems or do not fast. We pass, shy to join without Edip.

I end my day thankful to see kindness and inclusion.

MAY 13, 2019 – MONDAY - ISTANBUL TO PARIS

A day book-ended with Istanbul and Paris is a travel junky fantasy, today honed to perfection.

We walk the alleys of Istanbul to the shuttle just after dawn, passing chunks of the wall that surrounded Istanbul for centuries, ultimately useless then as most walls are. The shuttle stop to the airport is not quite where we found it a few days ago. An ungraceful hop over a highway barrier and a dash across traffic fix that. We're not ready to leave, but know we will be back.

Hours later, we climb into Paris from the airport train, up the hill towards the Panthéon, left around the church, right onto Rue Descartes, to Number 16. The sky is blue, the day warm, Jacqueline's hugs deep and long. Dinner, under the rough wood beams here since 1680, is chicken in butter, cream, and tarragon, a casserole of zucchini and cheese, a lot of Burgundy, then her own tarragon liqueur. And stories. We stay up late to watch a film about her Argentinian musician husband, Jose Pons, and their friends, Astor Piazzola, and Atualpa, all famous in the tango world. The music and singing are as seductive as the dance, inseparable from it. Images of sweeping feet and linked bodies flash through the notes.

The day takes its toll, drags us to bed.

We have tomorrow, only one more day with Jacqueline…and Paris.

MAY 14, 2019 – TUESDAY - PARIS

Notre Dame stands.

Parts are just stone columns framing the sky beyond, but the great façade stands. People crowd and click images. A few just stare, or shake their heads  One bulky, bearded, redhead has tears. Below, boats chug down the Seine hitching a ride on indifferent waters hungry for the sea.

Gothic has never been my favorite choice. It's too spiney and sharp, not comforting. But, the windows are glorious. So, we retreat from the grey shell of Notre Dame to the brilliance of Sainte-Chapelle, one of our favorite places on the planet. Add Peru’s Macchu Pichu, India's Taj Mahal, the Prayer Room of the Royal Mosque in Esfahan, Iran, the reliefs at Egypt's Abydos Temple, and Cordoba Spain's La Mesquita and that’s our current list of Essentials, proofs that humans have not wasted our time on this planet. If pressed to make it an even ten, I’ll add the stone garden at Ryoanji in Japan, the Confucian Temple in Lukang, Taiwan, Aya Sofia in Istanbul, and Michelangelo.

At home, Jacqueline cooks another marvelous meal from her native Brittany, the sort that begins with a kilo of butter, “salt of course, not that other kind that's not worth mentioning”. She spins more stories of her fabled life married to Jose, and at the center of the music life of Argentina. She shows us a film of a homage to her husband and herself by the greats of Argentina’s musicians. The greatest of all living tango dancers sweeps her through the crowd, across the floor. “At least I did not embarrass myself, but I told him if Fred Astaire is going to dance, he should really have a Ginger.” And she laughs with that whole body happiness that captivated Jose 50 years ago and us every moment we are with her.

In our life, she is proof that we humans sometimes get it right, so very right.

MAY 15, 2019 – WEDNESDAY - PARIS TO REYKJAVIK, ICELAND

The sky is a silent growl, grey, heavy, pressing against the flat land, scowling, dripping rain, unfriendly. The landscape has forgotten or not yet remembered botany. It is all geology, black, cobbled volcano spawn.

In a week it will be 48 years since my last ride into Reykjavik. I still remember this stripped land, then dotted white, with sheep, life. We ride a long way before life pushes onto this bleak stage, white, but stucco or cement and angular, cubist, efficient, cold. This I don’t remember, nor would want to. But, downtown Reykjavik is seaside, charming, colored houses, odd angles, nooks. Our hotel has a bright red floor. The bathroom has rescued those volcanic cobbles, spread them on the walls and floor. It’s beautiful and great fun. And wonderful on our feet.

Everywhere we see the pale half faces of tourists under umbrellas, then remember pale is native here. These pale faced bundles in down are Icelanders. They are friendly, helpful, fluent in English, and in Euros, dollars (all flavors), Pounds, all the Scandinavian currencies, as well as their own currency, the Króna (222 to the US dollar). Icelanders pay for everything with credit/debit cards, so we’re saved from converting currency. Prices are high, even by European standards. We ask Orres, helpful Front Desk Guy, for a ‘budget place'. “Burgers are cheapest, and right across the street.” Two burgers, fries, colas come to just under $33. There are lots of restaurants. Most offer Euro-food. ‘Reykjavik Street Food’ lists soups and fried platters of ocean denizens. The lobster soup tempts us as prep tomorrow for our 8 hour foodless flight on Icelandair. The ‘smoked puffin’ and ‘whale pepper steak’ at ‘Puffin and Whale’ do not.

MAY 16, 2019 – THURSDAY - REYKJAVIK, ICELAND TO ORLANDO AND HOME

48 years ago I spent three days here in late May. At 2am it was light enough to read outside. I gotta try that again. I wake up just before 4am. The sky is grey, but it passes the Read Test.

Later, we carbo-load for the 8-hour flight south from Latitude 66 North to Florida. The rich breakfast and two cups of cappuccino each at a ‘budget’ breakfast place costs $58. Down the street in the bakery, affable Surfer Dude from Czech Republic who used to work on yachts in Fort Lauderdale, and comes from surfing the waves on Senegal’s pristine coast, is here in Reykjavik between there and catching The Big One off Portugal’s coast. He recommends round smoked salmon sandwiches. A pair of ‘love balls' joins the sandwiches in the bag for twenty bucks, a bargain here. More details available on request.

Pre-loaded and supplied for Icelandair, we check out, leave our bags at the hotel, and walk down to the sea. To the left is Reykjavík’s great harbor, flat and silver, hemmed in by mountains. We see only their roots. The sulking clouds are eating their tops. On the right, modern Reykjavik is tall, angular, efficient, unmemorable, boxy, Ikea By the Sea.

Under the clouds and in the wind, it is chill November or February. In the sun and blocked from the wind, Spring is clawing at those most dreary of months. The landscape on the ride to the airport is even less compelling in bright light. The clouds have retreated, nonentities now, adding nothing glowering to the flat-scape, dropping no rain to add sheen.

At the bus stop a group of back-packing seniors huddle in a tight group, talking loudly about their trip, dropping names, volume reviving memory, re-assuring that they really did have a good time.

We have no doubts. Three more travels are already in the plan, others lurk, nudging the calendar on both sides of the opera season. We both miss the desert, waving wildly from our memories, ready to elbow journies-come-lately off the schedule.

But, first, home.