Tough times in Turkey

it’s been a rough week in Istanbul. Last Saturday, we got a security notice, seemingly random, but they’re never random. On Monday, we had a meeting – the first of three during the week – to discuss the situation. Also on Monday, the department upped its travel warning for Turkey.

From the advisory: “Foreign and U.S. tourists have been explicitly targeted by international and indigenous terrorist organizations in Turkey.  …  Additional attacks in Turkey at major events, tourist sites, restaurants, commercial centers, places of worship, and transportation hubs, including aviation services, metros, buses, bridges, bus terminals and sea transport, could occur.  Extremists have also threatened to kidnap and assassinate Westerners and U.S. citizens.  U.S. citizens are reminded to review personal security plans, monitor local news for breaking events, and remain vigilant at all times.”

Not very comforting. We’ve been advised to vary our routes to work and leave at different times, plus avoid places frequented by Westerners. Luckily, the three other colleagues who live in my apartment complex all drive, two of them armored vehicles. So I’ve been going in with them and bumming rides with others home.

This is unrelated to the coup attempt but is apparently a very real threat, real enough to send all family members home. I spent eight hours in the office on Saturday, working to get people out. Lots of tears. We have a lot of young couples with little kids, some of whom came in in their Halloween costumes. We'd been told on Friday that this would likely happen. It was a half day -- it's a Turkish holiday this weekend -- and, even though the meeting ran late, everyone hung around, pretty much in shock. It's really hard to believe it's at this level right now.

The stuff that's coming down to us is that it's against "Westerners and Americans and their families." It seems ISIS-ish, and from what the Gen.  Townsend said earlier in the week to the press, it sounds like ISIS might be planning some bad stuff outside of Rakka to divert attention and forces from its bad guys there.

And this is aimed at non-Turks. One of my good friends from Guangzhou is from here, and I asked about her family. She was shocked when I mentioned the updated travel warning. It's aimed at foreigners, not locals. There are, according to the security guy, 50k Americans living in our consular district. We're the biggest group. God knows I've talked to a bunch of them on the duty phone.

The upside is, the Turkish police have been awesome, both in getting bad guys off the street and keeping our security informed. We're reporting weird stuff that happens to us at or near our homes to our security guys, who are reporting it to the TP and they are acting on it. (By this I mean seeing strange cars in housing complexes, people taking pictures of school bus stops and receiving crank calls to homes on internal apartment phones.)

I am not in security, but the feeling I get is it'll pass sooner than later. Maybe this is overly optimistic, but I feel like the 100 people we ticketed today will be back by Thanksgiving. I really hope so. But right now, it is very hard. Today was emotionally draining.

It's the new normal, at least for now. Following the coup attempt, we went on a voluntary family member departure, which only one person took up but the status still created a lot of paperwork on other travel in and out of the country. This time around, that paperwork will likely increase, and it was already about 10 more hours a week.

But in addition, many of those family members who went home had jobs, leaving big gaps in the workforce. I worked directly with three of them, with two working on a huge project that has a time-sensitive deadline. I’m a little concerned how we’re going to get everything done.

The next couple of weeks are going to be really rough.

Boats. Vessels of freedom.

Istanbul is a wonderful place if you like water. Turkey has the Sea of Marmara, just off the Aegean Sea right off the Mediterranean on one side and the Black Sea on the other, right after the third bridge connecting Europe to Asia. And connecting the two bodies of water is the Bosporus, a 20-mile stretch that’s heavily traveled by people and fish alike.

 

There are seasonal fish migrations through the river, with October being a prime one for bluefish and bonito. There are street sellers up the wazoo with loads of them, and you can see fisherman lining the docks and bridges hoping to land a few for dinner. I’ve started running along the river and have to be wary of those casting their lines as I go past. I don’t need another hole in my head.

There are also quite a few boats in the waters at any given time, and like and good Gulf Girl, I am just calmed by them. I love watching boats, and I’m in a great place to do it. Little fishing boats, ferries, barges, tugboats, Coast Guard boats, cruise ships. I’ve got them all.

And one of the things to do here in Istanbul – there’s no limit to those – is to take a cruise down the river, starting at the Sea of Marmara and finishing up right at the start of the Black Sea. And that’s what I did this weekend.

I went with a colleague, and we shunned the 60 Euro packages marketed to tourists and opted for what amounted to a $5 round-trip ferry ride, and hour and a half each way. We made five stops before reaching the final destination, within sight of the Black Sea. There, we had about two hours or so to wander around, but mostly to eat.

Here's the link. I tried to copy its map but failed miserably:  http://en.sehirhatlari.istanbul/en/seferler/long-bosphorus-tour-362.html

The little town there definitely caters to the day trippers. As the ferry arrived, many of the wait staff from all the little waterfront restaurants waved from among their empty tables. As we docked, they were there to hand out business cards and present us with menus, despite protesting that we wanted to look around for a bit first.

And a bit was all it took. Unless we were going to take a taxi up a rather large hill to a castle/fortress thing on top of it, we were restricted to the cute little waterfront, which was fine by me. They had boats there, so I could happily mesmerize myself watching them bob in the waves.

But then I got hungry, so we were shopping for a restaurant. When you look hungry, they pounce. I cannot tell you how many menus I was presented with, nor how many languages some of the languages were printed in. I let my colleague pick – she didn’t like fish, so I had to make sure she’d be happy with the place – and we settled on one of the nicer waterfront ones, rightfully reasoning it would have a well-equipped bathroom.

I let the waiter decide on which fish to get and wound up with sea bass with a prelude of hummus, which worked for me. I’ve only been here four months and I believe I’ve eaten my weight in hummus.

We each bought some souvenir-y type stuff – her a towel and me some olive oil soap – and settled into the ferry ride home. I’d brought a book to read but kept looking up at the neighborhoods and buildings going by – the Istanbul landscape is awesome to see, with all the houses built on hills and such. And besides, it’s a waterfront. You have to like that.

Once, when I looked up, I did a total double-take. There was a submarine, right out the window! It had a Turkish flag flying on it and I was so shocked to see a real, live submarine that I totally forgot I could try to take a picture. My colleague got one (she had a better angle for getting a shot as it passed) and hopefully she will get it to me, but I thought that was the coolest thing of the day.

At least until my commute home. We both got off the boat one stop early, because it was at a main (enough) transit area closer to each of our homes. She took a cab, but I decided to walk a bit before catching a bus. I’d departed for the whole day at 8:15 or so, which meant I only had time to run about 50 minutes, half of what I usually do a day, so I felt like I needed to walk.

The area I walked through was a popular area for street shopping and I detoured down one alley (I kind of meandered home), I found these phone booths and immediately thought of Leila and Riley.  The submarine was still the coolest thing, but you have to admit these guys are a close second.


(Today's blog title brought to you by Scotty Emerick. I'm not feeling creative enough this weekend to think of a more clever title, and I love the song.)

Another call to duty

It’s another one of those weekends – as duty officer. Due to a strange scheduling quirk, I had to man the phone again. I took over as being the one who scheduled it, and there was a snafu in early November done by the previous person and to fix it, I had to take over a shift this week. Sadly, there was another snafu over Thanksgiving week and I’m doing it again.

Anyway, I knew I got off fairly easy last time and would be in for some of the regular stuff we get this time around, and I was right. Scams are big here, and I’ve had two of them. They were fairly similar.

The first one was some woman who told me her fiancé had come to Istanbul in May for a two-week job on an oil rig in the Black Sea with 200 other people, 50 Americans and 150 Turks. Something about not having proper equipment and wiring a total of $450k (it was unclear as to if it was her money or his; she said it was “from his foundation account.”)  Then something about an inspection and not being allowed to leave the oil rig, followed by a song-and-dance about the 50 men (of whom fiancé was in charge of) not being able to leave, something something. Basically it came down to her having to come up with money to get them all home. She’d just sent her last $1400 or something like that. Another wife, with whom she allegedly was emailing, complained to the company and then “they cut off all the food to all the men.”

Doesn’t sound fishy at all, does it? Holy cow. Red flags all over the place. I asked the fiance’s name and she gave me a very common name, saying he was from Jacksonville. I asked his passport number. No clue. Names of his employees? No idea. Name of his employer? He was a contractor, so there wasn’t one.  The thing was beyond insane. She told me about a General Somebody Somebody who was “in charge of sending U.S. troops to Iraq” … yeah, right. He had a phone she couldn’t call but only text to. And this sounded legitimate to her.

So I did my due diligence and reported it, to which it came back scam. The person I reported it to asked me if I’d asked the big scam question, which is, “Have you met this individual in person?” I knew that, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask if she’d met the man she called her finace. I mean, WHO is engaged to someone they haven’t touched? Well…

Upon follow-up by email, I asked that very question and she declined to answer it. I also asked for his full name and she came back and added a middle initial. I replied to the email and asked for her fiance’s middle name and date of birth, adding that without further information it sounded like a scam. I haven’t heard from her since.

Last night, I had a similar one, but this was a woman calling about her husband, whom she assured me she did put him on the plane herself. But like the first one, he’d come over in May for something short and as of September some other wrinkle appeared and then all of a sudden, at 9:30 p.m. on a Friday night, she called with a whopper of a tale. These things are so implausible that I really feel like I’m the target instead of the person calling.

This one believes that her husband has been arrested and that the police are emailing and texting her to send them money. It’s like no, they do not do that. What they would do, however, is call us. And in the month that has lapsed since you believe this occurred, they have not called us.

In the course of trying to figure this out, I learned that the man was 72 years old – a bit old to travel for an engineering gig – and the wife had absolutely no idea of his passport number, his employer, his flight information or the hotel he allegedly stayed at for two months. She didn’t have a voice phone number for him, but had a number of a burner phone used just for texting. I tried to find out when the last time she spoke to him and she kept saying she’d been texting. I was like, uh, anyone can pretend to be anyone on a text – when did you last speak to him? She had no idea.

Seriously people, please travel smart. Leave a copy of your passport with somebody. Give your itinerary to someone. And if your loved one is traveling for, oh, two months, and doesn’t offer up the information, GET IT.

And if you have none of the above and cannot help your own cause, do not call me after hours or on a weekend to fix it for you. It’s not going to happen.

A weekend full of hot air

One of the big things to do in Turkey is to take a hot air balloon ride over Cappadocia.

Check.

Seven colleagues and I hopped a flight Saturday morning and took off for the area, spending the long weekend there. The first thing I learned is that there’s not a city called Cappadocia; it’s an area, and it’s got what is an utterly unique landscape.

The area is filled with “fairy chimneys,” formations made from volcanic ash (compressed into a soft rock) that is covered by a hard rock cover. Over time, if I understood this correctly, wind and water erode the soft rock, which leaves skinnier soft rocks with hard tops. They kind of reminded me of mushrooms.

There are all over the place, and some are big enough to carve rooms out of, which has been done for centuries. Basically, they are hand-carved caves.  I can honestly say I’ve never seen a landscape like it, or a city-scape like it. There would be normal homes for the area, interspersed with cave homes or businesses carved into the fairy chimneys.

Cappadocia was the land of the Hittites, of Biblical times, and it’s mentioned in the Bible, in Acts 2. It was also either the beginning or the ending of the trail of Christianity, depending on the direction you were heading. And it was a place where Christians hid.

One of those places was an entire city underground, which gave me the creeps. It was about four stories down, and the tunnels were very windy. Fortunately, no one in the group got too claustrophobic. I did bump my head. Hittites and early Christians were not tall.

We arranged a tour through Travel Refinery and got an amazing tour guide, Murat, who, when he’s not leading tours, teaches history and wine and such at the local college. Boy, did we get an education. He was incredibly smart and could speak on any topic related to the area, or pretty much anything else. I didn’t know he was a professor at first, but commented to a colleague that he was speaking to us like we were his students. Come to find out, we were!

The whole thing was top shelf, too. Our hotel, which was built into a cave, was pretty cool. I’ve never slept in a cave before, let alone one with candles, comfy chairs and a big bathtub. A former colleague had recommended the place – Kelebek hotel – and the worst thing I can say about it was sometimes the wifi gave out. But I had wifi in a cave, go figure. And the massage was nice, as was the breakfast. There was also a cool hammock with a view of the balloons.

Oh, the balloons. The ride was so serene. Murat arranged the tour with Royal Balloon, and we got the most experienced pilot they had, Suat. We had two Australians in with the lot of us, both female, so he had 10 women on his flight.

We sailed – not sure if that’s the proper term or not, but it seems right – over and between the chimneys, right after sunrise. (We had to hold off a little because of the weather, but got off just after sunrise.) It was so beautiful, with about 70 balloons up that day. I’d never done that before but would do it again.

After the flight, we had Martha Stewart-inspired mimosas and strawberries. Really. Apparently she flew with Suat a few years previously and suggested a different arrangement for their post-flight refreshments, so we had rose petals among the champagne glasses and the strawberries were dipped in chocolate as we moseyed in the field after the flight.

The link from the show Martha Stewart filmed is on the balloon company’s website:

http://www.royalballoon.com/marthastewart.asp

“The famous American television producer, commentator, gourmet and author Martha Stewart came to Turkey for the shooting of ''Martha Stewart Show'' which was aired in the United States. Stewart came to promote Turkey with the invitation of Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and during her visit to Cappadocia she had an unforgettable hot air balloon flight with Royal Balloon - Cappadocia. 

“Martha Stewart’s television program aired on Hallmark Channel on October 1st, 2010, where she talked about hot air ballooning, valleys and Cappadocia’s cultural heritage, which goes back for thousand of years. We thank Martha Stewart and the Staff of Martha Stewart Show for choosing us as their Hot Air Balloon Partner.”

Suat said right after the show segment aired people started calling from the U.S. to arrange tours. They’ve been flying balloons in the area since 1991; some couple came there and decided to do it, and it took off. Tourism there is down now, like it is all over Turkey, so it’s a good time to go.

I think it's a great idea.

Someone’s in the kitchen

Made pancakes this morning. It’s my usual weekend routine, but this time it occurred to me that I could put bacon bits in my pancakes, which made a world of difference. It’s so basic, I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before.

Although China was pork all the time, Turkey marks my third Muslim country, which means pig stuff is hard to come by. And I never miss bacon as much as when I don’t have easy access to it.

Enter Walmart and Oscar Mayer. Combined, these two are able to deliver right to me little bags of real bacon bits. Not just those little rock-like fakon bits that are basically painted Grape-nuts. I like Grape-nuts but not as a substitute for pork.

Anyway, this morning, I tossed in some bacon – real live bacon, made from real live dead pigs – and man, they were good!

To mix them, I whipped out my new little kitchen toy, an egg beater. I had tried to get my awesome KitchenAid mixer here, but didn’t order the right boxes from storage. Someone gave me a used hand mixer and I tried that, but the person was right when she warned me it might burn out. I tried to make cookies, and it died. So on that batch, as in Guangzhou, I used a whisk. And boy, it’s really hard to whisk cookie dough.

After that, I remembered the little hand-crank mixer things. Mimi used to have one and I’ve seen them in antique stores but didn’t think in this technological day and age that someone would still make a non-electric kitchen toy. But Oxo does! I think this is the GoodGrips kitchen people. I have several utensils from them and I like them, so I saw this contraption on Target’s website and knew it would be perfect. I could have gotten an electric one, I know, but somewhere I do have a hand mixer in storage – Mimi’s – and basically I don’t need another one. I could buy one here, but who knows what electrical voltage I’ll have next tour. This way, I have one that will work in every post. I love it.

It’s nice to have a kitchen again, and I’m finally starting to buy adult kitchen-y things. The big one for a kitchen is knives. I’ve never had really nice ones and decided that I should finally splurge. Except I can’t afford – at least mentally – to spring for an entire set at one shot, I’m going to piece meal my own set.

Before deciding on the knives, though, I bought this cool little knife stand. It’s adorable. It’s from a woodworking place called Missing Digit Woodshop, which in itself inspired. I had the little guy for months before finally pulling the trigger on knives. Ultimately, I probably won’t fill up his shield; I really live and die by my ulu anyway.

So for now, he’s got two, a paring knife and a petite chef knife. I went with Cutco. Great reviews and made in USA – cannot beat that. It’s probably only a matter of time before I’m missing a digit, or at least damage a digit myself. So far, I’ve used the petite chef knife once and was amazed at how sharp it is.

Ultimately, I’ll have at least five, I think, although I would like the tables knives and the spatula thing too. The little guy is holding his arm like he’s got a spear, and there’s a magnet in his helmet to hold a long knife so it looks like he’s holding it. In the ad on Amazon it’s a sharpening thing, but I’ll probably get the bread knife and use it for that.

Now I really need to find something to cook, and time to prepare it.