More Education

If you have like 40 minutes to spare, check out this online discussion of jihad and Islamic conversion.  It’s basically these three American dudes beating up on this Turkish dude, and the last American guy is kind of annoying, but some great history and information in a (relatively) quick read.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24999

And here are some discussion questions to go along with it:

1.  So I think we can all agree that a Christian version of Shari’a would not be good.  But wouldn’t that naturally occur if the majority of your nation was truly Christian?  And if you think not, then why shouldn’t it, you liberal nazi?

2.  (For all you conspiracy theorists out there):  Is Pope Benedict the anti-Christ?  Personally, I think he looks really freaky.  And this whole business with the quote of the Byzantine emperor bashing Mohammad just makes my head spin, both the original speech and his subsequent responses.  This dude’s up to something, man.  Very, very fishy if you ask me…

 

p.s.  I will post some organized thoughts at some point…

Education at Warp-Speed

Check out this flash presentation to see the the last 5000 years of Middle East history in only 90 seconds:

http://www.mapsofwar.com/

The Mongols kicked some serious butt…

 

Woohoo!!!  Yankees suck!  

Go Mets!!!

Celebrity

Hey, my church was in yesterday’s New York Times article!  I gave an interview, but they didn’t publish it. 

“Meantime, as a Vatican official said its ambassadors would seek to explain the pope’s remarks better, a Turkish man with a fake gun tried to storm a Protestant church in the capital of Ankara.   He was arrested after worshippers trapped him in the church entryway.”

Btw, nobody trapped him in the entryway.  They just called the police.

 

 

Using My 2GBs of Pictures: Efes

Or rather, Ephesus, for you Western types.  Arguably the best preserved Roman city out there, it’s known primarily for its namesake book of the Bible, a letter Paul wrote to its church.  These days, at least in Turkey, Efes is best known for something else:

 

The Budweiser of Turkey.  Ah, yes.  Ephesus has come a long way.  Not a bad beer, btw.  Ephesus was a port city and quite popular for a few centuries until people started getting sick, and dying.  The city was abandoned, and other parts of the area grew instead.  This was a trip we took on Memorial Day weekend.

 

 

Something.

 

More somethings.

  

Me and some columns.

  

One of the smaller amphitheatres.  There’s a bigger one coming up.

 

Wild poppies grow in this area.  They smelled real good.  

 

A view of Ephesus from the top of the hill.

 

What’s left of one of the pagan temples.  I think it might have been Dionysius.  

 

Amazing that all this lettering is still intact.

 

Main Street.  Ephesus, Asia Minor.

 

A sidewalk they’re restoring.

Me holding our Lonely Planet guide.

 

Another monument to a different pagan god.  Erecting this stuff is what you did if you had money in those days… 

 

I forgot what this was, but it was really big.

 

Ancient toilets.  I wonder if you could find two thousand year-old poop if you excavated underneath. 

 

Someone constipated, thousands of years ago, looked just like this sitting here.

 

Most of the writing on this was a public legal document describing some financial transaction between two guys, but me, I just liked the little upside-down flower logo.  

 

Time to get dressed up and go to the…

 

Theatre.  Apparently, the locals still use this place to put on shows some nights…

  

There were a few sculptures at the end.  Fertility goddess, with lots of um… round orbs.  Oooh, sexy…

 

These guys look sad.

 

Not sure of the context of this battle, but it looked nasty…  

 

Me catching a butterfly with my lightning-quick hands.

 

So I dunno, ruins aren’t really my thing, but it was nice to go there, walk where Paul walked, see where he may have preached.  As it happened, we went on a Sunday and found a quiet spot there and took the opportunity to read from (you guessed it!) Ephesians, and prayed for Turkey…

 

Party in Ankara

So, uh, CC’s heading down to southern Turkey later today to help process a few thousand American evacuees from Lebanon.  Party at my place!  Anybody wanna come over?? 

Or should I not be partying?

 

Using My 2GBs of Pictures: Sardinia

Sardinia was the last leg of our trip in January.  Why Sardinia?  Well, because the roundtrip flight from Berlin to Sardinia cost us only 34 euros each, that’s why (tax included!).  And you know why it was so cheap?  CUZ THERE’S NO ONE FREAKIN’ IN SARDINIA IN THE MIDDLE OF WINTER.  Yeah, if you don’t mind 55 degree weather and you like solitude , it’s nice.  But when each stinkin’ town has exactly one restaurant open and maybe one grocery, it’s kind of annoying.  We stayed in Santa Teresa Gallura, the northernmost tip of the island, normally bustling with people during high season.  When we went, we stayed at the only hotel open in town.  I said to the hotel owner, “So how come you’re the only hotel open?”  He said, “Because everyone else has gone home for winter.  I just started in this business, so I’ve got to keep doing this (rolls his eyes) probably for another 10 years.”  Translation: Because I need the money, stupid rice boy.  We did a lot of driving in our clown car, which, btw, is not a comfy ride.  It’s a lot like riding in a Jeep Wrangler.  Loud, rough, and you feel every bump.  Plus, we only had like 3 bags, but we could barely fit that in the “trunk”.  But it’s a damn pretty place, and we didn’t even see any of the south, which is supposed to be even nicer.  I realized the thing that makes the coasts look so good are the rock formations.  Sure, every coast has water, but you need some shapes in there to make it interesting.

Our first look from the plane.

We pick up the car.  At first, we think “How cute!”  Later we get nauseous from the ride.

Our room.  It was actually very nice.

What, you mean you don’t take pictures of the bathroom wherever you go?

That’s the toilet on the left and the thing on the right is for your… feet.  I think.

Driving along the countryside…

Lots of sheep around.

We hit the water.

And a castle.

Can you see the dark looking dots in the water?  Can you guess what they are?  Hint: you eat ‘em.

How about now?  Uni.  Sea urchin.  I tried prying one out, but I really needed a spoon or something.

More of the coast.

Me and the clown.

Driving north along the western coast.

Pretty.

Some parts of this highway were a leetle scary…

Me looking gay in Sardinia.

We reach Alghero.

It’s all about the rocks, baby.

Obligatory shot of the town and all the closed shops.

If you walk down the steps here to the right, you go down to some really famous grotto, but we got there too late and it was closed.

Same place, a little higher.

Big rock.

Little rock.

Dusk is a lovely time, no?.

The castle at Santa Teresa Gallura.  And way off in the distance there… Corsica.

More of Teresa.

The left side of the beach.

The right side.  They have real sand.

More lovely rocks.

In our whole European trip, I think this is the only picture of us together.

Sardinia has a sunset too…

Using My 2GBs of Pictures: Nice & Monaco

Nice was second on our little whirlwind tour of Europe.  My first time with the Frenchies, and they weren’t too bad.  But I got the sense that Nice, like most beach towns, was a bit more laid back than its inland neighbors.  Their croissants were amazing.  I think I ate like 5 in two days and never got sick of them.  At the bakery where we got our croissants, CC was approached by this old guy who said to her, “Your eyes… zey are like… a bat.”  She thought it was his way of complimenting her eyes.  I thought it was his way of saying she looked like a bat.  On the first night, we went to eat a Lonely Planet recommended seafood bouillabaisse special at a restaurant at the bottom of a youth hostel.  The place was run by these two little old ladies, and it was dark, there were tourists pamphlets scattered all about, a couple of flies overhead and a roach, but our hosts were cute and charming.  Then the bouillabaise came out.  On an enormous plate sat a bunch of perhaps three different kinds of whole fish and mounds of potatoes.  Just fish.  No mussels or shrimp or clams.  The lightly flavored garlic and wine broth came separately in a different pan.  As I surveyed the food and the surroundings, the frog-eating sisters from The Triplets of Belleville came barging into my mind.  Have any of you seen it?  It’s a full-length French cartoon about a boy who’s obsessed with cycling and his mother who goes out to find him after he’s been kidnapped by a sinister gang.  Anyway, the mother runs into these old ladies who are triplets and used to be a singing trio, but now all they do is eat frogs they harvest from throwing dynamite into a local pond.  Yep.  It’s a strange and interesting movie.  Critically acclaimed.  But in the movie, these whimsical old ladies are poor but content, comfortable in their bizarre habits and simple lives.  When I watched the film a few years ago, I couldn’t imagine the real life people that inspired these characters, but sitting in that dinky little restaurant that night, contemplating this mound of fish staring back at me… yep, I understood who the frog sisters were.  The food was good btw, authentic like the kind of thing you’d make at home if you were out of frogs for the day.

 

I named this place Rib Park for the uhh… ribs.  A ferris wheel in the middle of town!  Romantic…

Check out the clown car in the foreground.  We drove one of these on our trip, but not in Nice.

The beach.  Not that big, which seemed to be the case for other European beaches, too.

Some fobby girl stuck her head in my picture at the last minute.

Very rocky.  But at least the stones were smooth.

Downtown during some kind of market day.

Another part of the old town.  There were a lot of antiques on sale, but not many buyers.

City center.  The main municipal building is just to the right of the picture out of frame.

An alley with clothes drying overhead.

Nice is a very tolerant city.  Note the big traffic light for the cars, the crossing sign for the pedestrians, and the little traffic light for the midgets in their midget cars.

Another large square.  We had all-you-can-eat fries and mussels here and bought a Provencal tablecloth and napkins.

This was one of the largest vending machines I’ve ever seen and I’ve lived in Japan.  Damn thing just took our money though…

And then there was Monaco.  Monaco was an hour and a half bus ride away, so why not?

We tried to go into the casino to have a look around, but it cost 10 euros just to go in, so we just peed in their bathroom and came out.  So ghetto.

That’s Evian water they use for the fountain.  (It could be!)

Kinda like a tacky European Vegas, but no Circus Circus for the average Joes.

We felt like peasants.

At least they let us walk around and take pictures.

The yacht harbor.  Mine is the fourth from the right.  No, you can’t see it too well in this picture.

Nice will always have their sunset.  Saying goodbye on the way to the airport…

Using My 2GBs of Pictures: Berlin

Next up is Berlin, which was first on our little European tour of January 2006.  This was my first time in Europe, and after all the disorder of Turkey, it was such a welcome shock to find this oasis of order and efficiency.  After we arrived, we bought our train tickets, got to the train station and found absolutely no one to take our tickets.  The train arrived, we got on, still nobody shows.  After we’d gotten off the train, we figured it out.  It was an honor system.  The Berlin train system uses roving ticket inspectors to check your tickets on trains.  So theoretically, you can hop on any train without paying anything and have a decent shot at getting a free ride.  In the three days we spent there, we must have gotten on about 25 different trains before we met up with one of the roving inspectors.  Ok, so you might think, what an inefficient and potentially expensive system.  But see, I was coming from the wilds of Turkey.  The only thought that went through my mind was “Hmm… honor system… how utterly… civilized.“  Civilization, dammit!!  I loved Berlin.  Loved seeing their little cars staying in their lanes and signaling when they turn.  Loved their beer, their sausages, and pork schnitzel sandwiches.  Mmmm…  My idea of the perfect vacation would be to travel throughout Germany and stop at every little village and sample their local beer and sausage.  Heaven!  But CC would divorce me.

My first meal in Berlin.  A hearty country omelette, but what was even better was what came with it:

No less than four different kinds of good German bread.  Yummy!

Ooooh, big buildings with cool shapes, and such a nice, wide straight sidewalk.  Oh, how I miss infrastructure!

That curvy, pointy building on the right was an opera house.  The Pokemon looking thing on the left I have no idea.

I don’t know why I took this picture.  It must have looked nice in real life.

One of the subway cars.  See that little green circle in the middle?  If you want the doors in front of you to open, you push it.  All the doors don’t need to open.  What a novel idea!  God, I love these Germans…



I was a little surprised at the amount of graffiti around, especially in East Berlin, but y’know I was already in love with the place and it just made me reminisce about the NYC graffiti filled subway cars of the 80′s…



Ghostbusters!



Gritty, but I liked it. 



The Berlin Wall.  Still standing after all these years…



Another shot of it.  Naturally, I bought a piece of it to bring home…



Checkpoint Charlie.  The last US checkpoint before you’d enter East Berlin. 



A wider shot.  West in the foreground, East in the background.



That whole period when Germany was divided seems to be tightly woven into the peoples’ consciousness.  When we visited the Checkpoint Charlie museum, about 90% of the tourists were German.



Some cathedral like thing that looked really cool at night.



The Pergamon Museum, which was completely awesome.  The sad thing is, on another of our trips in Turkey, we went right by where Pergamon actually used to be, except it’s not there anymore, it’s in… Berlin.  When the Ottomans were in power, they didn’t care about any of that historical stuff and the Germans came and just bought it and carted it away.  Oh well, what can you do…



Mmmm…  chocolate beer, from a chocolate shop.  Weird, but good.



Hot cocoa and churros.  What a combination…

Using My 2GBs of Pictures: Istanbul

Ok, here’s my bit for Turkish tourism.  Yes, there are plenty of really cool things to see here, but after a while the “what the??!!  You’re not Turkish!” stares get on your nerves, and really, they’re not the nice kind of “what the??!!  You’re not Turkish!” stares either.  Ask slouchingtiger.  This first series is from Christmas in Istanbul 2005.

We took the train from Ankara.

The rail system is government owned and heavily subsidized.  The 6-hour train ride to Istanbul was the equivalent of about 13 dollars.  Kinda like the chinatown bus but more comfortable.

Pictures from the train window.

Umm… those are gas trucks, I think.

Water, water, everywhere.

Haydarpasa train station when we arrived.  Had to take a ferry to our hotel.

The Blue Mosque at night.  Looks much better than in the daytime.  We didn’t go in cuz we didn’t feel like taking off our shoes.

Hagia Sophia Church.  An amazing piece of architecture from the 6th century Byzantines.

From inside the Hagia Sophia in the morning. 

The place is massive.  Note all the colorful Arabic script.  Once the land was conquered by the Ottomans, converted into a mosque.

These are reliefs that are all over the building.  Take a close look at this picture.  See anything missing?

Here’s another one.  Still can’t guess?

Get the picture now?  It was the only one I found with the crosses somewhat intact.  The laborer who didn’t scrape off these crosses properly was beheaded.  (Or so I like to believe.)

CC looking at our Lonely Planet Guide.

A nice mosaic of Jesus and Emperor Justinian and his wife.  They were close.

Y’know how in olden times, after you got conquered, some dude took your beautiful wife to be part of his harem?  Well, they did that with churches too.  This place just made me sad.

The Grand Bazaar.  Something like 4,000 shops inside.  Madness.  You could die in there and no one would find you for days.  We didn’t buy anything.  We’d find something we’d like and then after some comparison shopping, never find the original store again.

Istiklal Caddesi during the daytime.  The place to see and be seen.

Istiklal Caddesi at night.

The gate to Dolmabahce Palace.  Some rich sultan dude’s place from a while back.

This isn’t even the really nice place.  Topkapi Palace, which we haven’t done yet, is way bigger.

Cool skylight.

Flowery chandelier.

Spiderman glassware.

He had lots of neat stuff.

A view of Istanbul from one side of the Bosphorous.

And the other.

We’ve gone back a few times since Christmas and of course, there’s much more, but that’s the beginner’s course…