trip journal 2

8:28PM, Saturday
my head feels tight, my neck tense, slept for an hour or 2 after the beer. only 60 pgs through Erewhon.

12:35AM, Sunday
more sleep- wandered through the whole of the train- got starred at- the food car is a moving cafe- tired of Butler, on to Rorty- deciding that the Turkish educational system is run by Platonists.-

watched the cutest boy get smacked hard across the face by his baba- i just about to take a picture of him- 4 yrs old but he starred at his father- no hint of tears- the boy instead explained calmly to his father what he had been doing- he had a bottle of orange soda and was dancing with it, entertaining the travelers around him- slapped for insubordination and nothing else.

1:50AM
listening to Of Montreal, "he's just a slutty little flirt...," happy after some Philosophy and Social Hope and hot tea- want to dance in the comfortable aisles of this sleeping train.

4:15AM
Kaseri- we've been through the mountains, Erzincan and Sivas, to Ankara now. K got off here, and so did the Gendarme, the rural army, who rode with us for 2 hrs, pulling through bags, recording ID numbers with a microphone, machine guns slung over their shoulders. my first time for this, but i'm not surprised. i see a machine gun a day in Erzurum and slide through random checkpoints and metal detectors, often with pockets full of change, detectors detecting nothing, or beeping and the guard waving us through.

the irrelevant theatre of power. only slightly more clear in Turkey than in america. they checked none of my bags and these ID numbers, i know through the bureaucratic mess of getting my residence permit, will only be lost and forgotten with millions of others.

the purpose is not detection but the appearance of detection, like taking my shoes off in an american airport, or standing in that ridiculous air-puffer room- the purpose is not to find anything, like i would put something in the sole of my shoe i couldn't put in my pocket, but for me to bow to the theatre of power by inconveniencing myself, disrupting my travel, as if i'm admitting in my silence that yes, you should be doing this, you have every right to, sir, for my protection, i bow to you, happily look at my shoe, take my number, disrupt the order of my clothes, anything else? let's make sure we take every precaution.

halfway through my trip.

6:14AM
i wake up to a vivid, alien scenery, but can't turn the god-damned flash off my camera. i will disable it manually if forced to- i hate, passionately, hate flash- didn't Sony imagine a situation in which one wanted to capture a beautiful scene through a window? what the fuck.



9:08AM
the car is the quietest it has been- folks sprawled out, mouths agape, in all sorts of interesting forms- impossible for me to get more than 2 hrs sleep at a time-

7:50PM
sitting in the restaurant car, this moving, mostly empty cafe- sitting alone, reading, Raki, french fries. i think that is the Marmara sea outside my window, bridges lit up. 2 hrs from Istanbul.

3 scenes in Istanbul

.

the plan

the week of Dec. 8th is Kurban Bayram (Sacrifice Holiday). it follows the story of Abraham, which is about exactly the same in the Qur'an and the Bible. (if you don't know, it happened like this). so for the Bayram they make or find those spiritual meats, and they eat them and give them.

my Bayram means time, travel, and a plan:

• Erzurum to Istanbul by train Dec. 6th and 7th (33hrs and 647 miles- i was asked "what made you decide not to walk?" next time, my friend)
• read Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Buket Uzuner's Istanbullu, Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope
• take pictures, study Turkish, find someone to play chess with
• find a way to a bed, a floor, a couch
  
• meet C. and see his Istanbul
• find used books, used clothes, and Indian food
  
• film cats in the street and old houses
  
• bus ride to Ankara and then Konya Dec. 11 (8-9hrs 365miles)
• read the Qur'an, study Turkish, listen to DemNow
  
• find my way to a bed, couch, floor, bar, pide
  
• watch the dervishes whirl
• eat dinner with another C's parents
• play chess with M
  
• Sunday morning bus ride to Ankara (2-3hrs 138 miles)
  
• read the Masnavi
• Ankara to Erzurum by train (23hrs 447 miles)
• listen to Bob Dylan
  
• read Howard Zinn's People's History, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red
• stretch
  
• teach my Monday night class
• tell you what happened
  

The Phenomenology of Eating Testicles

at home before heading off to Turkey, my dad would call me into the room when he was watching tv: “have you ever seen this guy? he travels the world eating all sorts of strange foods.” the 3 or 4 times i watched, perhaps 3 or 4 different versions of the same show, the travelers ate some form of testicles.

walking down a strip in Istanbul, my friend turned to me and asked if i'd like to eat lamb colon, which made me think of my dad and the travel show fetishism of strange meats.

why is it that travel becomes linked with eating strange foods, especially strange meats? especially in über-choice, globalized u.s. food markets we can probably eat testicle right at home, anytime we want. doubtless i could seek a local butcher in the u.s. serving a variety of strange meaty portions, but i never have.

so why are travel shows so often about eating testicles and why did i commit to eating lamb colon because i was walking down the street in a foreign country? my guess is that the act of eating strange meats becomes sound-bite exoticism. i'll call this the “you'll meet an acquaintance at a bar theory of travel.”

a bar somewhere in northern Illinois:

Acquaintance: “Hey man, i heard you went to Turkey, how was it?”

Me: “Turkey was nuts! they eat lamb colon over there!”

A: “did you try it?”

Me: “Hell Yes I did, and it was Awesome!”

the shock value of the food represents both the foreignness of my travels and my immersion into them. if i travel around Turkey without eating all the strange intestinal and sexual organs available then folks at home will think i haven't engaged with the culture. so i found myself eating lamb colon in Istanbul because it validates my travel experience.

(by the way, the dish is named kokoreç, and the lamb colon is ground up with spices, cooked on a skewer, and then finely chopped with vegetables and placed on submarine sandwich bread. it is really spicy and my Turkish friends say it is healthy and good to eat after a night of drinking.)

kedi

probably the most endearing surprise in my 3 days in Istanbul were the cats. i've heard you can tell a lot about a culture by the way they treat their animals. in chiapas mexico, poverty violated everyone and it wasn't suprising to see an elderly man in the market taking out some frustration by whacking a stray, starving dog with his cane.

in istanbul cats and dogs have few official owners but they have become surrogate pets for tourists and shopkeepers. streetcats find friends who feed them and provide temporary shelter. in alleys restaurant workers happily offer their scraps to waiting cats and dogs who moan in joy over the meals. i walked around practicing "kedi" and wondering if i could find a part-time pet in Erzurum.


kedi and/or crotch shots from tüpbebek on Vimeo.