Yes and it wouldn't move even tho I kept spitting on it

Twenty 8 and Nothing Happened Today

When I was fifteen I killed 8
5 were heretics, their listless hermeneutics dripping from careless tongues
2 were lovers, self-traitors for an ideal they didn't want to understand
The last a king, drunk not on power, but from an obsession with static reality

I didn't start digging til I was seventeen
A good thing too: I reached the other side before I was 18
People didn't mind much
Kings and lovers, who even believed in such things anymore?
And heretics hung by a tenuous thread as it was.

When I finished I walked and I walked,
Hoping to bypass the awkwardness.
But 22 tripped me up, chortling, wheezing.
I fell cyclically til upright once more.

I would have kept going but twenty five was fed up
Who was next on the list I didn't even know about?
Stalling. Stalling. Stalling.
Not the simplest thing, driving manual.

With the heretics gone, so too dogma
With the lovers gone, so too hatred
With the king gone, so too dissent.

A few of my favorite things

False acropolis's and turtles now hissing
Snakes as thick as my forearm when it's lifting
Open air displays of odd ancient things
This is the great stuff that happened to me....ing?

Ok, enough rhyme. I was going to complain about the museum director that stood me up today, but actually I'm bored with it all. So instead, I will talk about the wonder of last night.

Imagine me, a Russian girl from the Ural mountains (how fitting is that, born on the border of Europe and Asia, in Turkey, crossroads of two continents), and a half Turkish, half Italian Iranian citizen, in a bar that plays mostly hip hop. Now picture five or six jubilant Turkish guys, fairly young, dancing all over the place because...they work there. Hooters inverted!

Suddenly, to encourage customer participation, they start country line dancing to...Ne-Yo. And--I know this will be hard to fathom, American homophobes--other Turkish men join in! There are seriously no girls at this point, and no one cares.

I'm failing to convey the nigh-surreality of the whole thing. Keep in mind that all of these guys hail from the break-dancing school of dance, and most are pretty good. Some are even legit. But things got really absurb when the high school tourist girls joined in, with their awkward motions (juxtaposed to the smooth vivacity of their hosts) and complete ignorance of anything resembling cool. "Yes, we're having fun. Right?" They're puzzled smiles informed me.

To kick it up that last notch, MTV was on the tv's behind the mayhem on the dance floor. The Wild Boys were in Thailand, wiping elephant's bums and encouraging Wee Man (the midget) to Muy Thai fight the local boys. Then Celebrity Death Match came on. Again, this was only interesting because it provided a backdrop to what I will never forget. For at least five days.

Good luck with finals

Despite the fact that I haven't had to take an exam for approaching 3 years now, as long as I call myself a student people will always assume I have finals at the end of the "semester."

So right now I'm doing the "heart" of my research abroad (that is, research that I can't do in America). This means surveying landscapes and studying inscriptions. The second part is pretty official and regulated by the government and boring. The first part is...well let's just say I'm making it up as I go along. Things to consider:

• No road map exists that isn't misleading, usually by leaving off roads and villages, often more significant than what is on the map.
• Sign posts, especially for archaeological sites, are inversely proportional to the distance away from your destination. In other words, when you start out, you think it will be easy because there are frequent signs. But as you get closer, there are none, including at intersections, and heaven forbid there be one at the actual site itself!
• Even better, the villagers NEVER know where archaeology is. So if you ask them, 100% of the time they will point you in the wrong direction or at least, give you the wrong distance you have to travel. Today, I went bouncing back and forth between two villages because each thought the site was in the other. Finally, I used my eyes and found the acropolis above one of them (which meant the "site" was under the modern town. Done and done)

In conclusion, if somebody updates the Blue Guide to Turkey, they win a form of my subservience of their choice. I'd do it but I can't afford the gas...

Rock slides don't have to hurt, but today they did

Wow, it's been way too long since my last post. Especially since I need to do an Istanbul post AND a Greek Easter post. But first...

A picturless entry: I decided today that I hated my legs. But in the way that one decides something that's a fact waiting to be discovered. I don't will to despise my legs, I just do things that punish them....for who knows what. Case(s) in point. Yesterday, I ascended (and then descended) about 800m, possibly more, of steep, loose rocks. This equated to over ten collisions with my shins and ankles. If a man smacks his shins on a rock in the middle of a forest alone, is it funny?

Today, they thought they were safe. Four hours in a car chasing after the figments of a Turkish Road Map's imagination, and not so much as a scratch. But upon reaching a hill shrouded in nettles, and quickly discovering that these plants encased the ruins of an (unexcavated) ancient city, I quickly set to work reminding my legs why shorts and traipsing in the wilderness are a combination on par with peanut butter and a milkless existence.

One day I'll explain this all to my grandchildren in the form of a story designed to make them glad they're not old.

Eating Jordan

In between my two slices of Syrian border experience was the sandwich filling of my life. In addition to the obvious gorging of felafel, hummus, and baklava (not pictured)...

Natalie totally focused on her next bite, while I get hummus all over my camera

...I took a gastronomical voyage to the mystical land of Yemen...

My smile was even bigger. N.B. The large flat bread looks like a giant circular rubber just before being baked. Just in case King Kong wanted to be safe...

Of course no trip to the Middle East would have been complete without a Lebanese feast or some late night lamb shawarma, both of which were so good that the photos transcended my camera. Outside of actually EATING, we made a quick stop at spice paradise,




...before doing some bazaaring. In the photo below, the man is telling Natalie that this whale outfit is the right size for her because anything tighter would be improper. I totally agreed.

The only negative experience was when we got harrassed by this guy trying to sell us a hookah. Although he wouldn't leave us alone, I could tell he was one of the coolest people in the world and was pretty much the most Arab looking man ever, if a little more stylish. He also had an excellent voice.



What else? Oh yeah, there was this place I went to for an entire day. Something about Indiana Jones or something?



Worst thing about Petra: the 18 million tourists (mostly America and French shuffle board players), with overpriced camel rides that don't take you anywhere as a close second

3 Best things about Petra:

1. Views, duh
2. Freedom: you can climb all over the place...no matter what all the bedouin want is for you to buy a rock
3. Being asked by a Jordanian school girl: "American or Arab?" I answered her by burning an American flag.

On a side note, I've officially received four applications, which is both exciting and pathetic. In the words of GOB, "C'MON!"

Living on the Edge...of Syria

Sometimes the most well-laid out plans are the worst ideas when travelling. Luckily, I laid my plans out rather shabbily when heading to the Middle East. The result, from my notebook the night it all went down:

"After an unendingly brief night on a bus of muffled snores, randomly illuminated lights, and a chubby Turkish head nuzzled against my shoulder, I got my first taste of the sacred eastern practice of holding tourists' passports needlessly for needlessly long periods of time. And so I headed to the border...

"But this was nothing compared to what lay in store for me upon entering the Middle East proper. Syria makes Greece seem like the most accomodating and efficient place on earth. 6 hours waiting for a fax to come through to approve my visa gave me a chance to observe the punchline to the joke: how many Syrians does it take to screw in a light bulb? Except the light bulb was a passport and the "screwing" was entering information from people's passports into a computer (or maybe it was making American suckers like me wait all day on a deep red bench of agony, in which case, the joke is totally ruined). There were plenty of workers who spoke decent English, but the system insisted on having "Arabic only's" at the "Foreign Visitors" line, while anglophone employees' sole purpose was to hover in the background and approach only after sefveral minutes of mutual misunderstandings.

"Needless to say, after hours of being ignored and uninformed, and nearly taking my passport and going "back" to Turkey, I began to learn that Syria is a land of contrasts, at least when judged by the standards of an arrogant (but trying otherwise) American. When the Fax finally came in, I rushed over to the bank to pay the visa fee, only to be fed rice and pita and tea as a welcome to their country. Of course they also told me to put my money in my "boot" (I'm wearing Asics running shoes), which I must say is a challenge to comfortable walking.

"Yet, or therefore, I was still in a wary mood, and when the border guy (he had no "guard" paraphanalia) offered to help me get to Aleppo, the nearest city, while constantly taking bribes from every one who entered his office, I was expecting the worst (and maybe contemplating some kind of Tazmanian devil antics. maybe). So I felt rather bad, and even a bit racist, when he began asking me if I could help him get an American visa (almost impossible for Syrians) and then got me a free ride with another emblem of hospitality. The driver kept tryint to make conversation tho neither of us knew enough of the other's language to say much (did I also mention he looked German...so much for visual stereotypes), and fed me chips and Syrian red bull (true, he did take his hands off the wheel in the rain to do so). And I'm pretty sure he called me "Sir Jeremy" at least once. I'm still trying to schedule the knighting ceremony....

"I wish I could spend more time here, and at the same time I'm dreading ever having to enter the country again (which I may have to do in a few days!). Oh, and I almost missed my train to Damascus, since apparently Syria has already switched to daylight savings without tell me."

That last paragraph was ominous and dramatically ironic, for upon coming back to the border, I learned a couple valuable lessons, although I only had to wait a couple hours this time.

1. Don't apply to get into Syria at the same time as someone on their birthright trip to Israel, even if they don't have any stamp in their passport saying so.
   

Actually, that's pretty much all I learned. Other great things about Syria:
-The one meal I had was delicious, and I got to watch The Scorpion King while chowing down on it.
-Not only do people ride in the back of pickups, but they stand (Texans are amateurs)
-Seat belts are silly. So are lanes.
-If someone is starting to obstruct your path, you accelerate to beat him to "it"
-Never honk, just flash your lights if an accident is about to happen. Even during the day.

Unfortunately I have no pictures because I was afraid to take them at the border and otherwise it was night time and I was in a haze. But Jordan was very visual, I promise...