Dear reader: it has been over a month since my last blog and I have been stalling. After coming back from Thanksgiving and a whirlwind week back in the states, I landed back in Istanbul with a nasty case of bronchitis and the holiday season ahead of me.
Christmas morning saw Eli and I breakfasting along the Bosphorus waters with a group of fellow expats searching for a square meal on our requisite one day off and New Years found us venturing a bit farther north up the Bosphorus towards the entrance to the Black Sea to stay with another Cincinnati expat, Mattie, who lives up that way.
The highlights of my time with my guests included midnight tango dancing in a back alley hideaway, fresh seafood on the coast of the Black Sea, visiting a hamam (traditional Turkish bath) and finally putting on my tourist cap to check out the Hagia Sophia.
The hamam Eli and I visited was an older hamam in one of the more conservative neighborhoods called Uskudar. We went with my friend Meara and two of our Turkish female friends, neither of whom had ever been to a hamam before, I need to mention, making it a new experience for all of us.
The process consisted of stripping down to our underwear/bathing suit bottoms, wandering around in a wrap, bathing in a huge open marble room with 20 other laughing, large and jolly older Turkish women and being laid down on a huge marble slab along with 2 other women to be pummeled, sanded, scrubbed and then sent to the sauna to sweat out any residuals. Two hours after entering the 15th century hamam building, we stumbled out into the cool, moist Uskudar air refreshed and ready for tea and dinner plans later in the evening.
Amidst the excitement of the holidays, I have to admit that the return of yet another year’s Christmas and then New Years reminded me of how much has happened in the last year, and during this trip around the world.
New Years day I went back to my first blog from January 1st, 2009, written from the L.A. airport as I was just setting off from Kentucky into the unknown of the world in New Zealand and beyond.
***********************
January 1st, 2009:
In the end, the reason for this trip at its core is self shock therapy. By shocking myself into becoming engaged in my own life, I hope to change the trajectory of my existence for the better. A choose-your-own-adventure on a grander scale.
Will I make it? Am I a scrapper? Do I deserve the things I’ve been handed in my life? Do any of us? How scared am I, really? How far am I willing to go, in spite of my fear?
And, most importantly, how will my life impact those around me?
Well, I thought to myself, reading over my musing from one year previous, life has changed. I am still not quite ready nor able to express everything that has happened in the last year – the things I have witnessed – the beautiful, the strange and the ugly – have yet to sort themselves out in my mind, but the after-shocks are there, and flashbacks are common.
While walking along in the early morning rain to catch my bus, I am suddenly confronted with the clouds parting to show me the magnificent face of Mount Cook in Southern New Zealand, or the crowd of older gentlemen shuffling along in front of me parts to reveal the brown leathery behinds of two Nepalese rhinoceros running away into the bushes as the elephant I am riding chases them.
Time is a strange mistress. I exist here in this moment, and yet I exist also in my memories and the moments that have already passed. In this way, when I think of my friends or my family, I am also with them.
In the end, these memories sometimes seem more real than the current situation and I have to jostle myself out of my daydreams when I realize that a student is asking me a question, or the bell is ringing to stop lesson planning and teach the next class.
When I was home for Thanksgiving, one of our family friends, Marvin, sat down with me and told me how much my blog has meant to him over the last year. Although we are still prying stories out of him about his younger and (much) wilder days hobnobbing on the Vegas circuit, Marvin doesn’t travel much anymore and was excited to hear what I have learned in my travels. He told me that he felt as though he was able to travel with me during this year.
I was happy to hear that he had connected with my journey and that he had gained knowledge and happiness from my musings… and yet I wasn’t sure how to answer his question about what I have learned from my travels. In truth, seeing so much in the world leaves one both over-stuffed and insatiable at the same time.
Perhaps this will only get worse with age, I thought to myself as I stumbled over my words to answer his question…
Sufficed to say that I feel blessed. And, although I do not yet know what comes next, the self shock therapy worked! I believe, even more than ever before, that life is, indeed, a choose-your-own-adventure. And that the most important thing is not to make choices based solely on fear.
How I will be able to impact those around me has yet to be seen. But I made it around. I am a scrapper and I am afraid, but I am also braver than I ever thought I was.
