Still learning

This past weekend, I learned I am not a skier. I didn’t know this before because I’ve never tried. Always meant to, though. AAA in Michigan had a deal where you could pay $40 for a half day of lessons and then an unlimited lift pass for the rest of the day. It was only good certain Saturdays in March or something, but it never lined up that I could do it.

A colleague in Ankara tried to plan a last-minute ski trip to some city near Armenia that starts with an E, but since it was a school holiday the flights were pricey and we decided it would be too crowded. (Aside: Turkey sure borders a lot of other countries.)

Another colleague, one here, wanted to do something this past weekend so when I mentioned that I’d been considering going skiing, I guess she asked around because the next thing I know, she’d found yet another colleague (we have lots of colleagues and in general, there’s someone who wants to do something every weekend) who was going skiing in Bursa, which is only three hours from here.

Istanbul has a new bridge that cuts off a long drive around water that has chopped down the time to get to so some cities, but it’s an expensive bridge – like $30 – to cross. This means that at 7 a.m., you have it to yourself. It also means that the driver of the car is really happy to have someone to split bills with.

Bursa is in the Mount Olympus area, though no one we met could point to a specific mountain and say yes, that’s where Zeus hung out. The elevation of the national park there, Uludag (the “g” is the one you don’t pronounce, so it sounds like “Ulu-dah” is about 2500 meters and there was snow on  the ground, so getting up the twisty windy mountain in the car was a little dicey, but really not too bad.

The place was packed but it was a great way to spend a day. Also, it was fairly cheap as far as skiing goes. I mean, the meal was incredibly overpriced (I think I paid $10 for a Coke, white rice and lentil soup) but the skis and boots cost $10 to rent and then a 4-hour lift pass was maybe $25. The “all day” one was maybe $45.

My two colleagues did well on that. Since I needed a lesson, I spent a bit more, but it was a private lesson. However, since I speak no Turkish and the instructor spoke no English, it was a fairly useless lesson. Once in a while, I was clear he was trying to convey something to me, but I couldn’t ask why I needed to do such a thing, like hold the “batons” this way, jump or shift my weight one way or another. (It wouldn’t have been to turn – we didn’t make it that far in the lesson.)

What I learned in that hour amounted to this: as much as I can see the draw of skiing for some people, it’s not something that thrills my soul. I think I would like snowshoeing or cross-country skiing, but I didn’t like the idea of barreling down a hill.

Not that I made it that far. I never even got the lift ticket. After the hour lesson, I kept going back up the little slope to try to practice slow and stop. (Not to mention starting.) I’d trudge up the little slope maybe 20 yards, look down at the little paths between the scores of fellow skiers and think, “Wait, this isn’t even fun. Why am I trying to do this?”

Honestly, it freaked me out quite a bit. Maybe that’s normal, but even beyond that, I just didn’t get it. I’m not a speed thrills kind of person. I like seeing the sights: diving is awesome, I hiked Tiger’s Nest, and my favorite part of skydiving was looking around God’s creation after the chute opened. Just didn’t get skiing, though I am glad I tried it. I would be interested in cross-country skiing, though, and wonder if there’s a place around here where I could try it.

This week is already awful at work, but Friday evening I head off for the first leave I’ll have taken since I arrived at post. In 2016, I used a whopping two days of leave so I need to start burning time so I don’t go into “use or lose.” I’m more of a long weekend type of person than a weeks-long vacationer, and I like it that way – quick getaways to recharge.

But this is a full week, so of course I’m staying on the go and not just sitting in one place all week. I leave Friday night and arrive in Muscat at 2 a.m. Supposed to meet up with a friend at 8 a.m. (I won’t even have checked into the hotel) to hike that day then go to dinner, and the following day I’m scheduled to dive. I figure by Monday I’ll be ready to chill at the beach or see a movie, then Tuesday I head over to Dubai. Haven’t planned that far ahead to know what I’ll do, but on Saturday – or maybe it’s Friday --- I have to go to Abu Dhabi because that’s where my flight leaves from.

There’s still some planning to do – like everything after Muscat – but I have my hotels booked and paid for already. It’s an expensive area of the world, so I tried to pay some off in advance so I could be free to actually, you know, be able to afford to eat while I am there.

Taking stock

Looks like I need to start baking. I did another run to the base commissary in Ankara and bought a cake mix and a blueberry muffin mix. Putting them up, I realized I have a whole bunch of baking supplies that I brought with me from the U.S.

It’s not the only stuff. I bought some cooking oil, onion soup mix, alfredo sauce, cream of chicken soup and all kinds of toiletries, among other things. You never know when a post is not going to have something really important, like dental floss. As it turns out, Turkey has plenty of stuff, even Listerine fluoride mouthwash, but that’s OK.

What I need to get a grip on, though, is how quickly or slowly I am using the stuff so that I can make sure I run dry at the end of two years. This is sometimes tough, because (especially food-wise), it’s easy to go on kicks. I drained an alfredo jar in a month once already, but pulled back when I realized I have 18 months left and only five more jars.  Fortunately, the commissary has more of that, as well as other important stuff like peanut butter and grits.

I’m not really worried about running out of stuff. I’m more concerned that I am not using up some of what I brought quickly enough. Case in point: laundry detergent. I brought two large things of laundry detergent with me, plus leftovers from Guangzhou. I’ve realized that I’m now six months into my post. That means, in a perfectly planned world, I would have used up a quarter of the stuff I brought. Not even close.

That, though, doesn’t spoil and can be drug along to the next post. What cannot be salvaged for another assignment is food. And boy, I’m going to have to start cooking (and baking) to make a dent in some of what I have on my shelves.

My mental dilemma, of course, is, that while I have had the bag of chocolate chip sitting there for six months, if I use it, I no longer have any chocolate chips. Do I want to be in that situation? Of course not. Everyone needs a bag of chocolate chips around, just in case.

Ditto with the cream of chicken soup. I love to cook with it. I brought six cans. I’ve used one in six months, so I should be OK to use another, right? Mentally, it’s just not that easy. What happens if, in February 2018, I really need three cans? If I keep up this pace, I won’t have three cans left.

It’s so much harder than it should be.

Powdered sugar is hard to come by. I brought a bag. Powdered sugar makes wonderful icing. Honestly, I don’t know what else you do with it. I made a cake recently for the Marines and couldn’t bring myself to use my powdered sugar. It would have taken ALL I had, leaving me with none. And I do use powdered sugar. I’ve made sugar cookies three times so far. You can’t ice them with anything else, and of course sugar cookies need icing. So how could I possibly use the rest of the entire bag in one shot? I solved this problem by buying a can of icing at the commissary last month and using half of it instead, which is why I just bought another cake mix.

I just discovered that I have two 10-pound bags of flour. For some reason, I thought these were grits. I’d put them, along with the grits, into the fridge to stave off any bugs. They were in the bottom drawer and all wrapped up in plastic bags from Target, so I basically stuffed them in there as soon as my shipment arrived and forgot about them. All this time I thought there were a bunch of those round containers of grits, but when I opened the drawer to get a new canister of grits, turns out, the bulk of the drawer is flour.

There’s no valid reason for me to have 20 pounds of flour. They sell flour in Turkey just fine. Lord knows I know, because, not realizing I had so much already, I’ve bought it here twice. Flour’s the main ingredient for my weekend pancakes, so I keep it in stock. I just don’t know how many cups of flour (how much I use in a week), there are in 20 pounds of the powdered stuff.

The best option seems to be to start baking, especially since I also have a bunch of Crisco and brown sugar. The commissary also had some Christmas chocolate chips on sale (red and green, I guess they’re chocolate of some sort) as well as Nestle Crunch baking bits. I’m going to separate the red chips from the green ones and then use each pile with the Nestle bits with each and make cookies for Valentines’ Day and St. Patrick’s Day.

The Marines will love me.  

Not exactly a tourist hotspot, but a lot of fun anyway

Just got back, albeit a bit late, from a little getaway to Moldova.

My favorite gravestone

Yeah, it’s not exactly a place that most have heard of. But like a huge number of other places, it’s less than a two-hour, $200 flight from here. The hotel and flight combo came to $229, and then the only money I spent while there was the $90 I had in cash from my Marine Corps ball refund. In change at the airport, I had the equivalent of $1.50 remaining after my cab ride, and I spent all but .50 on a Coke and five cookies. And believe it or not, I made a big splurge while there: a $24 bracelet. I also nailed a super bargain when I happened upon a secondhand store: a cool shirt, just my color, for about $1.25, marked down from $2.50.

Normally, in Istanbul, I don’t eat out very often, but when I travel, I tend to go for Turkish food. My hotel had a nice breakfast so I really only ate out one meal a day, but on day One I had a kebab at a Turkish place and the following evening I happened upon this fantastic market and got something at a stall. It only cost something like .40, but you could offer me $400 to definitively identify it and I wouldn’t be able to do it. It was in a roll-ish type shell and the woman heated it up. I don’t think it was meat. That’s all I got, but it was tasty.

Cheap tourism is fairly easy when your plan is to essentially walk around and take photos. Well, at least in some destinations.  My upcoming travel – my first actual leave since June – is down for a place that’s way more pricey than I’m used to. The plan there is to pay hotel rooms, etc., in advance.

But that’s not til February 3. For the weekend before MLK day, I opted for Chisinau, which is the place I tried to go to in October but got canceled. It was a fun trip, but I can’t imagine spending two years there.

Arch of Triumph, Christmas tree, National Cathedral

That’s my thought with a lot of places I visit, but I’m sure with transportation options and knowledge of the places, they’d be fine for two years. So far, I’ve been extremely lucky in getting two posts that not only have a whole bunch to see and do, but are also easy to escape from so that I can see and do so much more.

But Chisinau was perfect – if a bit chilly – for a three-day weekend. I hoofed it, which is my preference, putting up 19.8 kilometers the first day and 15.8 the second. The third was mostly spent at the airport. I was due on a 9:45 a.m. flight back, with the thought of being back home by 2 p.m., but we wound up leaving at 2:30 p.m., which necessitated the Coke and five cookies.

Looks like a beach

Tourism is not a big thing in Moldova, at least at this point in time and definitely not in the winter. I saw a sum total of one tourist store, but it did have several booths in it. There was also a little street fair kind of thing, making up about half a city block, that had handicrafts and stuff aimed at tourists. That’s where I got the bracelet.

English is also not a big thing in Moldova, and in the same street market where I got the bracelet, there was a lady selling wooden 3D puzzles that came in the shapes of animals and Christmas stuff. I was trying to convey my interest and asking how much the stuff was. The lady, who was really nice, was able to tell me numbers but nothing else. I managed to figure out that the little street market would be open the following day, and when I got back, cash in hand, I could not find one of the specific designs I’d decided on.

Not knowing how to convey “seahorse” in any language other than English, or pantomime it, I just went through them as she kept pointing out the cool designs. All I could do was shake my head. She didn’t even try that much – she just grunted.

I never unearthed the seahorse, but the grunting happened later, too, when I was trying to communicate. It seemed really weird (as well as primal), but I guess really, when you have absolutely no clue what someone is trying to say, grunts work just as well as broken English or what have you.

But it's not

There were some people who spoke English fairly well, though, like the lady with the bracelets. She asked where I was from and I told her, and she said she had some American friends who lived there. They were, she told me, former Peace Corps volunteers. She was thrilled when I told her I’d served, but in Morocco. (We  grunted some there, too, but mostly made clicking noises.)

When I came back the next day to buy the bracelet, another lady, upon hearing me speak, immediately asked if I was Peace Corps. I got a kick out of that, really. There are a lot of RPCVs floating around in their countries of service. But I just float around everywhere.

Cathedrals were the thing to see in Moldova. The religion there is Orthodox, although I always thought that was an adjective, not a noun. I’m really not sure what “Orthodox,” as a standalone, means as a religion. Judging from the interior of the churches, my guess is some kind of strain of Catholicism. The interiors are very ornate, with everything painted gold and these really formal paintings and gorgeous stained glass windows. But the exteriors are very basic and functional, with the exception of the shiny domes. I guess that’s a Russian-ish thing. I had to cover my head when I went into the cathedrals, which was fine with me because I was wearing a knit hat all day long anyway.

Functional on the outside, gorgeous on the inside

The weather itself wasn’t frightful, exactly, but walking the streets was. Of the two days I wandered around, one was in the lower 40s and drizzly and the second was 33 or so and sunny. Honestly, this weather is OK by me unless there was old snow on the ground, which there was. I was absolutely terrified that I’d fall and break something but I got lucky.

There’s a big park in Chisinau – lots of them, really; it’s very green when it’s not snow-covered – and I enjoyed walking about a mile around this one lake, which was frozen. It was kind of like being at the beach, only not. Very much not. There was a little dock with a sign on the end. It was in Cyrillic, but I felt pretty sure it said something like “no diving,” which was funny because the water around it was frozen solid.

In the main square area, there was some kind of Christmas market/festival going on. (The holiday is celebrated later in the former Soviet states; I really don’t know when Christmas was, but there were a lot of lights, trees and nativity scenes around.) It wasn’t near as big as the markets in Kyiv or Frankfurt, but it was interesting to wander. They had some kids’ fair-type rides with some scary-looking Disney knockoffs.  I happened to be there right when they turned on the lights of the Christmas tree and landmark arch, so that was nice.

Really, it was a fairly fun getaway in a place that’s just not known as being a happening place. My hotel was in a fantastic location with great service, the city was walkable, affordable and gave me some really cool pictures. That’s all I ask in a destination. 

Do you want to build a snowman?

It’s a snow day in Istanbul. This “Girl Raised in the South” had no idea what a snow day really meant. I thought it was restricted to kids in school, but when you work on a very steep hill, it makes it very unsafe to get to work so we didn’t have to go today.

The snow’s been phenomenal. There’s been something like a meter and a half, and it broke a record set in 1987. And it’s still snowing. The airport has pretty much closed down (much to the chagrin of a colleague trying to get to Sri Lanka) and not much is going on.

The mall, however, was open as usual, so a couple colleagues and I went to see “La La Land,” which cleaned house yesterday at the Golden Globes. It wasn’t quite what I expected – I was thinking it would be almost nonstop music like “Chicago” or “Grease,” but I liked it.

Moroccan

After we got back, I played in the snow with a colleague, a neighbor and two dogs. Had so much fun. I’d mentioned to my colleague that I’d never built a snowman, so she set out to show me how it was done. We wound up putting together a little guy about a meter tall. My fingers were completely numb but it was so much fun.

We grabbed some cardboard and tried to fashion sledding, but our driveway, while too steep to drive, wasn’t really steep enough to help us accelerate downhill. Plus the dogs kept jumping on us. There were a couple other neighbors wandering around and I’m sure they were completely amused by the three foreign adult women playing around in the snow.

LL Bean

The pups loved it. Britta, the Doberman, loves fetching snowballs. Somehow, she managed to nail me with one. I’m still figuring that one out.

After building my first snowman, I tried to do a snow angel. My first attempt turned out well but them Britta pounced on me, ruining it before I could get a picture. So we moved on to another area of the apartment complex and I fell backwards with a thwomp – and then realized not only was my butt super cold, but the snow was way too deep to move anything to make an angel. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t coordinate with my extremities anyway. Too bad the phone totally froze up – I’m sure the video could have made me famous.

Since the snow hasn’t stopped, we’re having another snow day tomorrow, although I will probably go in at some point. Since I walk to work, I figure I might as well try, and there’s some stuff I’d like to do at work. There are no other movies showing that interest me (Hidden Figures isn’t here yet) so I need to come up with something to do.

Pakistani, from Sarajevo

Next weekend, I’m supposed to leave town again and I am just hoping that it works out. It’ll be the second time I’ve tried to get to this destination and if something happens I’m going to call it off. Fate might not want me to go to Moldova.

Even though I went last weekend, I might be adding Sarajevo on the “go to” list again. It was that cool of a place, and it’d be worth going again in the spring or summer.

I bought a rug there totally on the spur of the moment. It’s a small Pakistani rug, about a meter square. And I swear, the cost of the flight, the hotel and the rug probably cost less than the same rug would have cost in Istanbul. So I figure I go back and get a bigger rug and therefore save even more money.

Funky Turkish, from Cappadocia

When I got home with the rug – handmade rugs fold right up and I put it in my carryon – I put it in a little hall where three rooms meet and kind of stepped back and looked at my rugs collectively. I realized they pretty much all look alike. I like the Aztec-ish diamond prints. Very tribal. I have a Moroccan blanket and it’s also got Berber tribe markings.

At some point, I am going to have to buy a house, and hardwood, laminate or tile floors is going to be a requirement. Almost every square inch of the floor will be covered with some rug that I’ve bought somewhere. I really like textiles. I could buy rugs and blankets all day long.

I have a big light rug that I bought in Morocco, used, for about $20. I love this hall rug I got from LL Bean, too. I have two little rugs that I guess I bought at some secondhand store, probably in Detroit, and now the little hall one, plus the 4x6 Turkish one I bought, only it’s unlike any Turkish one I’ve seen so far. It’s stripes, not flowers. And I really like stripes!