Genius

I heard a quote that I have loved ever since- "Smart people copy. True geniuses steal." So in keeping with that spirit, I'm stealing my good friend Jaime's posts from her blog. They are similar experiences to mine, only she writes about them much better than I could. And she notices the little day-to-day silliness that I giggle about and then promptly forget to tell you all about. So here it goes. By the way, if you want to read more of her blog, you can find it @ http://jmillerrapp.blogspot.com/. Happy Reading!

Gevrek Geliyor (or, The Bagel is coming)

I've heard him many times before. Walking around the neighborhood, hollering something to draw attention. And despite his daily tour and incessant wailing, I could never understand what he was saying--is he collecting junk? talking about vegetables?--until yesterday. I left the house at 8:28, still in a fog of sleep. As I stepped onto the sidewalk, a teenager sauntered by with a tray of gevreks (the Turkish equivalent of the bagel--only waaaay cheaper and more common and CAKED in sesame seeds) resting on his head.

He hadn't finished his first holler before I recognized him. It's you! You're the one disturbing the neighborhood's peace. Every. Day. At about 8 am. I sped up, wanting to evade his path. When I was a mere meter in front of him, I could sense an immanent holler. The air behind him was sucked into his massive lungs and experienced a momentary vaccuum right before he wailed.

"Sicak gevrek." (Hot gevrek.)

God it was loud. Sort of sing-songy but unappreciated since I was still technically asleep. My hollerer kept hollering.

"Gevrek geliyor!" (The gevrek is coming!) I walked faster, joining the few other people heading to work. No one looked particularly excited about the hot, coming gevreks, let alone rush over to him to buy their own piping hot gevrek before all the gevreks are gone. In fact...

"Sicak gevrek... bir lira... Gevrek geliyor!" (Hot gevrek... 1 lira... the gevrek is coming!)

... Everyone else was ignoring him, too, rushing away, trying to avoid the blast of sound emanating from his fit, soon-to-be-man lungs. He should still have been in school. Maybe he's practicing to be an imam, I wryly considered. He could do the call to prayer without the frigging megaphone broadcasting to the neighborhood.

I kept my pace up. After awhile, he stopped hollering about the gevreks being hot and simply kept repeating that the gevrek was coming.

Eventually The Hollerer must stop and set up his tray somewhere like all the other gevrek vendors. God only knows where he stops, but he uses my neighborhood as part of his route to the eventual resting point. It's a trade-off: Would I want him anchored to my corner, hollering all day, or would I be happier with his current morning route? I don't know but I'm just glad it's not me doing the hollering.

Domates--Bir Kilo, Bir Lira

I am living the life: sitting on my balcony in a light breeze, drinking my morning Nescafe and eating my muffin, watching the waves a few hundred meters away.

A truck rolls slowly down the street. The driver is on a loudspeaker blasting: "Fresh tomatoes--one kilo for one lira." The message ricochets off the tall walls created in the corridor of apartment buildings lining Mithat Paşa Street. His son stands in the bed of the truck, yelling a similar message at a lower volume.

The truck--laden with tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers--stops midway between the two small grocery stores in front of my flat. The driver gets out, stands in the street and hollers about his tomatoes again.

Women in the flat directly above the truck start to notice. A couple poke their heads out of windows and lean off of balconies, craning their necks to see the produce. One on the sixth floor confirms the price with the driver and disappears into her flat, only to emerge a few moments later on the street to buy.

A head appears in a second floor window; her friend from the sixth floor buys her tomatoes for her.

The driver, as he looks around at the tall flats and balconies, notices me peering down at him. He hollers about tomatoes at me, but I sink back in my chair, out of his line of sight. Thankfully I didn't have my camera out right then when he looked at me. What a yobancı...

No one else comes to buy and he climbs back into the cab, his son braces himself against the truck walls and they continue their crawl down Mithat Paşa.

This kind of thing happens regularly in İzmir. Farmers with local, fresh produce park their truck--often in the street--and set up temporary shop. I can't imagine that local manavs (green grocers) are happy about this, but what can they do?!

Maybe I never lived in a big-enough city in the States, but this approach to food is entirely new to me. I think that there would be all sorts of red tape stopping my farmer and his son from selling their veggies on the street: no business permit; health and cleanliness standards that someone in a white coat would be willing to quibble about; disturbing the peace with all that hollering.

Then there's the moving traffic violation of his son enjoying the morning sun in the back of the truck... Not to mention the crime of selling tomatoes for so absurdly cheap: At today's exchange with the American dollar, that's 32 cents a pound for fresh, farm-picked tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes. Beat that Monsanto.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I hope you all are having/had a great day! Chris and I really enjoyed ours!

My first Christmas abroad was remarkably like being home! I made cookies last night, woke up this morning and went over to our friend Nesta's house. She had cooked a feast for us! We had pork (a beautiful, beautiful thing, forbidden pork...) that she had gotten when she was in Greece, potatoes, candied carrots, fried mushrooms, apricot dumplings, with gravy all over it. Absolutely divine! For dessert (it's not Christmas without dessert!), she made us a New Zealand special dessert, which is basically a homemade marshmellow cake, baked until it's crispy on the outside, but still marshmellow-y and soft on the inside. Smother it in whipped cream and put some kiwi on top, and you're set! The rest of the afternoon was spent in a food coma. Absolutely wonderful.

Tomorrow we're meeting one of our new friends. I was in Starbucks the other day, heard English being spoken, and almost got whiplash when I tried to see who it was. I introduced myself, and found out that he is from South Carolina, is here doing logistics for the military, and his wife is visiting him for the holidays. Since she likes shopping as much as I do from the sounds of it, I suggested we meet up sometime soon. :) Later we will go to our friends' Roxana and Ata's house for a Christmas party. It's strange that it is beginning to feel like Christmas only now. I have another week to enjoy it though, since in Turkey, Christmas is celebrated as New Year, complete with the "New Year tree," "New Year Santa," and gifts. So I kind of get Christmas twice. I love this tradition. (And Chris loves Turkey because he doesn't have to deal with any Christmas!)

I have managed to get Chris' cold. I'm not going to complain too much though, since, as he pointed out, I've avoided being sick for many months when he has been nothing but sick. It's just a cold, and I'm sure with all the great American medicine that he brought back I'll be fine soon. We're going to have to invest in gallons of Nyquil though...

So tomorrow it's back to work for us, although a short day. It's been a wonderful day for us, and we do hope you all have enjoyed it as well. Miss you and we are thinking of all of you, especially today.

A Balmy December Day

It is 8pm on December 20. It is also a pleasant 66 degrees (19 Celsius). There are certainly SOME advantages to living in Izmir.

It's My Birthday!....

and I'm sick. This sucks.

On the up side, there's a T-storm going on, and I love storms. And I never get them on my birthday in MI.

Thanks, everyone, who emailed and Facebooked me birthday wishes! I smiled at each one!

Quick Note- I PROMISE

For those of you that I promised videos, they're all ready to go, Chris just needs to compress them because I talked way too much on them and they're too long.

For those of you that I promised a video of our apartment (mostly the same people), I've been lazy and haven't done it yet. I'll do it when the house is clean (i.e. sometime in the next 3 months).

Be patient.

Pictures from Munich, Germany

Ok, this is Barb, posting as Chris. He's a slacker and I want the pictures up. (Actually, he's being productive and I'm avoiding doing housework. :D Our usual MO )

Munich

Dachau

Castles

Dachau

It's hard for me to post a blog entry about Dachau, which is why it's last. Most of our blog is light-hearted and upbeat (intentionally, trust me) and yet I can't make light of this experience. I'll try not to make it too depressing, but it's not going to be a Hallmark card. And I really mean it when I say not to look at the pictures if you're in any kind of sad or depressed mood.

Most of you know that all through university, I was fascinated by genocide and the circumstances in which they occur, as well as the mindset of both the perpetrators and the victims, as well as the response of the international community. Almost all aspects of it fascinate me, and I took all of the classes that GVSU offered on the subject. One of my greatest regrets of my university years was not being able to take a trip with a professor of the subject to Poland and Germany and see the sights myself. This trip to Dachau helped lessen that regret, since it was one of the places on the itinerary for that trip.

One of the first things that struck me about Dachau was its proximity to Munich. It is actually able to be reached by city train, and not at the last stop either. Of the four zones radiating from the center of the city, it is in the second-nearest one. A five minute bus ride from the train station and we were there! In my imagination these camps were always far away from civilization, tending to be in the middle of nowhere and easily hidden from the public. This cannot be said about Dachau.

Another aspect is the size. I didn't know it before, but Dachau actually had several dozen sub-camps of various size near to the main camp. Although we toured only a part of the main camp (the remainder, which is huge, by the way), there would have been many other smaller versions scattered nearby as sub-camps.

We chose to do a tour, and we agreed later that it was a great idea. Our tour guide's area of study and expertise was in Munich and the surrounding area from the years 1918-1950, which fit perfectly into the time of the Dachau Concentration Camp. He taught me more in the first ten minutes that I had ever dreamed possible. For example, the idea of concentration camps was to consolidate the power of the Nazi party. After Hitler became Chancellor and began to feel solidly in power, high Nazi officials were actually shutting camps down, seeing them as unnecessary since they had done their jobs and power was solidly in the Nazi's hands. However, Himmler, who lived in Munich, saw the economic potential of these prisoners. Appealing to Hitler's obsession with architecture, he suggested that the camp at Dachau be used to supply Hitler with materials for building (while at the same time Himmler became rich on the profits). Hitler was convinced, and put Himmler in charge of the operation, which quickly spread to other areas. Our guide explained to us that the sites of work camps were all chosen for their proximity to quarries, mines, and other areas of natural resources or manufacturing. Because Dachau was the first of this kind of camp, later camps, such as Auschwitz, are based on the Dachau model that Theodor Eicke developed.

Also of interest was the early history of the camp. It opened March 22, 1933 near abandoned manufacturing plants under the rule of the Bavarian police, who actually had a pretty amicable relationship with the prisoners. By April 10, the SS had taken over and within two days began terrorizing the prisoners. The SS actually had a training school adjacent to the camp. Although some of the recruits were already hard-core Nazis, most of the new recruits were there because of other incentives. For example, many poor local boys joined because they went from not having enough money for shoes to having a Hugo Boss uniform issued to them, three meals a day, and a warm place to sleep. For others, it was the realization that they could become an officer much more quickly if they were an SS official. Promotion to officer positions through the army was difficult, but much easier for SS officials. It was details like this that made our guide stand out from what we had expected of a tour (the same boring information that any well-read person probably already knows).

Probably the most difficult area for me was the "new" crematorium. (Picking a most difficult area is not easy in Dachau.) There was an older crematorium that wasn't big enough, so the SS had priests build another, larger building. What was surprising to me is that it was not used too much, since most of the workers either died from being worked to death or were shot or hanged, not gassed and then cremated. All prisoners who died, no matter the manner in which they did, were supposed to be cremated. As death numbers rose, the need for a larger crematorium became greater. What made this difficult was that this is the original building. Not long after the war ended, there was a movement to tear down the building and get rid of it. Former prisoners put forth a great effort to save it for future generations and as a memorial. Fortunately, they were successful. However, it is very difficult and extremely wrenching to walk through the path that countless prisoners did in their final moments. It's impossible not to think about what they may have been thinking and what their executioners were thinking at each stage. The rooms seem to close in on you, and I really was relieved to get outside and feel that I could breathe again. I've never experienced anything like that before, and while it was disturbing, I also firmly believe that if everyone visited a camp like this, genocide would no longer be allowed to happen in this world.

I don't have much else to say. It was a deeply moving and important trip that we took. I do need to thank Chris, however, for being interested enough to inform me that Dachau was so close to Munich and to suggest that we go. What a great husband. And for anyone who is interested in more information, I have a book of text and photo documentation of the camp from 1933-1945, the twelve years that it was in use (the longest of any camp).