Gazoo from Penn-Seal-Vahnya

So we made our way back into Mordor this morning, armed with four pink folders and a letter from the Bilkent rector. With any luck the Eye of Sauron would be gazing elsewhere and we could escape unscathed with our Precious residency permits.

Lizzie was up at 5:00, and out the door shortly thereafter, but such simple tactics don't work against necromantic bureaucracies. For every minute earlier you arrive at the Emniyet Müdürlüğü, the line is just that much longer. Fridays are the worst.

I again arrived later with the girls. We had a minor scare when our taxi driver took us way out of the way, in the wrong direction. When I reiterated our destination, he assured me this was the faster way. I didn't bother telling him the rate we ended up paying was way more than we'd paid the two previous times, but whatever, we got there.

When we found Lizzie she had already presented the letter and paid her application fee.

So far, so good. Step two of four was in the books.

The crowds were pushier today, more desperate. When we finally muscled our way to the counter, the chair was empty. The Man we had to see was nowhere to be found. I told the girls we'd just have to wait a little while and they gave me that wonderful preteen look that says "your word is worth nothing to me now."

People kept pushing, trying to dislodge us from our pole position. At one point, I felt pretty sure I was getting pick pocketed. Fortunately, I'd moved everything of value to my front pockets. In time, The Man appeared. The Man was in no hurry, and I didn't blame him. Honestly.

Lizzie explained that this was our third straight day of this. The Man couldn't care less.

He looked through my pink folder first. Lizzie's was already in the system somewhere. Every ten minutes or so a secretary would scurry through the room, carrying twenty pink folders, for deposit in some other wing of the building that I can only assume rivals in size the secret government depot at the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark. He asked Lizzie a bunch of questions. She answered as best she could.

The Man said something was missing.

The Man said I had no proof of financial means.

Lizzie indicated our bank statement, with a healthy cash balance, thanks to a timely infusion from another grant Lizzie had earned. She said she was here on a Fulbright, which covered our housing, which came with a stipend.

The Man said, this is in English. And it's not enough money.

The Man said, I don't know what a Fulbright is. And your folder isn't here to prove it.

The Man said, in any case, that's your money. Where is his money? 

My eyes started twitching. Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man" started looping through my head.

Lizzie and I have been married for eighteen years. We've had one, joint bank account that entire time. Hell, we had a shared bank account before we were married. Everything we have ever earned has been shared equally, and spent frugally. There is no her money, or my money. It is all our money.

The Man started talking about coming back another day, after getting our bank statement translated and notarized. Lizzie said, it's just a number. Look at the number. The Man said, it's not enough.

Lizzie took out her phone to call the Fulbright Office. In the meantime, the man flipped through my passport, which expires in November 2015. Technically, your passport has to be valid for six months beyond the date you leave a foreign country. It's a weird rule, but it's supposed to keep people from becoming undocumented wards of the state if their departure is delayed. We leave in June. Technically, my passport was a problem.

I braced myself for the worst. This was the end of the line.

Instead, The Man said, Pennsylvania. Only he pronounced it like Bela Lugosi saying Transylvania.

Penn-Seal-Vahnya.

He said it like it was the name of his first girlfriend. Like it conjured a sense memory of a long forgotten delicacy lovingly made--just for him--by his dead grandmother.

He was reading where I was born. He said it again. Penn-Seal-Vahnya. Suddenly I pictured The Man lying on a blanket under the fall foliage at Valley Forge. I pictured him sinking his teeth into his first cheesesteak. Running the steps of the art museum. Hell, I don't know, hugging Elmo at Sesame Place.

I have no idea what made him say it that way but from that moment forward The Man was playing on our team. The Ambassadors of Enmity had traded him to the Ambassadors of Compassion and for once a Philly fan had made out on the deal.

Sure, it still took a lengthy, haranguing phone call from our contact at the Fulbright Office. Sure, Lizzie will have to go back down there on Monday, for the fourth goddamn day in a row, with another letter from the Fulbright vouching for our financial health, and pay an exorbitant sum to initiate our application, but at least we have a stamped little piece a paper that says: A) They've seen the girls and won't have to again, and B) We started our application within the required 30 days.

My older brother Dan has a little guardian angel he has always called Kazoo. Origin myths in our family often amount to nothing more than someone saying something strangely or incorrectly one time (ask me some time about Spiegel, the Grimleys, Bvandals, or the Bears in the Woods). Kazoo has come through for us countless times. Yesterday, we discovered together that all this time he actually meant The Great Gazoo, that little green guy from the Flintstones. In any case, Dan emailed me to say he was sending Gazoo over to help. Gazoo from Penn-Seal-Vahnya.

Well, he got here, brother. He got here just in time.

The Emni-Not-Yet Blues

We are extras in the movie adaptation of a José Saramago novel, as directed by Terry Gilliam, starring the Marx Brothers. There are subtitles running across the bottom of the screen, but don't ask us what they mean.

We woke the girls well before dawn yesterday morning to begin what will hopefully be our hardest day in Turkey--the presentation and processing of our residency application. You have 30 days to do this or risk deportation, and due to delays on certain documents from the Fulbright Commission, we were attempting this on day 27. Our liaison at the Fulbright Commission had advised us to arrive at 7:45 at the Emniyet Müdürlüğü, a kind of DMV, police station, and immigration building all bundled into one. Roll that combination around in your head a moment, toss in about five hundred confused and scared fellow immigrants from all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and imagine what kind of FUBAR operation we were about confront.

The girls now call it Mordor.

We decided to play it safe and get there well ahead of the appointed time, but stepping out of the cab we found a line already wrapping around the building and only getting longer as new arrivals with a less Euclidean understanding of the word "line" slipped into whatever spaces ahead of us our fellow applicants were silly enough to leave unfilled.

This first line was only to get a number and it didn't start moving for nearly another hour. By then the girls were already exhausted and demoralized and our day(s) in hell had only just begun.

Once inside, after a security check, the line cutting continued until, maybe two hours after arrival, we finally reached the little deli-style kiosk that was dispensing them. 

Our number was 418.

My one previous experience with this process was in a much smaller municipality and it took them all day to process a handful of applications. If we didn't see someone today, we would just have to start all over again tomorrow, with a new line to get a new number. 

The existential terror I felt is difficult to overstate.

Fortunately, we had a helper of sorts with us from the Fulbright Office. She arrived late, but at least she arrived. I say "of sorts" because she was savvy enough to demand a lower "family" number for us (217), for processing in a different set of lines, but not savvy enough to keep us from missing that number's passing through the system while we sat in an overcrowded cafe. When we got back to the office, they were on number 225.

So then we were given a new number: 246. As frustrating as it was to miss our number (and anyone who knows me understands I was going postal by that point) we knew only twenty one cases stood between us and success. Or so we thought. It took another two hours for us to see someone, who then told us, no you cannot apply in the family line. Lizzie (as the Research Applicant) must apply first, and then the rest of us could apply as a family. Not only that, but we must have four separate application packets, not one. 

Lizzie had painstakingly prepared our packet weeks in advance. It contained our passports, passport photos, original birth certificates, an original marriage certificate, FBI background checks on both of us, health forms for the girls, proof and explanation of health insurance, bank statements, a letter of invitation from the chair of the archaeology department at Bilkent (corrected and printed three times), a letter from the Fulbright office, etc., etc., etc. All of which we had to get translated into Turkish (at modest expense) and then notarized (at obscene, are-you-effing-kidding-me expense).

So then we were back to our original number: 418. At this point they were somewhere in the mid 200s. So while we waited, Lizzie got into another line for the one copy machine in the building. 

All this time the girls were absolute champions. Sure they complained, and asked what on earth was taking so long, but at least they weren't crying, like the two dozen babies in attendance, or racing around the overcrowded space and cranking up the overall annoyance factor for everyone. Instead they lay on the floor and read their books, or played games on my tablet.

Right about the time Lizzie finished copying our documents and assembling them into their special pink folders, the lights went out in the building. This meant get out, it's time to leave. The whole operation shuts down for an hour long lunch break.

The number stood at 305. Odds of seeing anyone were long, but not outside the realm of possibility.

The one silver lining in this entire experience was the opportunity to meet and spend a day with Hafez Modirzadeh. Hafez is a professor of music and ethnomusicology at San Francisco State. Born in the U.S., with Persian heritage, he's also one hell of a saxophonist, has been on the jazz and world music scenes and playing around the world for years, and knew Chet Baker personally. Hafez is here in Ankara on a Fulbright to study with an aging master musician (whose name I never caught) at Başkent University. Hafez was in the same boat as us.

Hafez was so indomitably positive, friendly, charming, and funny that he turned an unbearable, interminable situation into a cosmic joke. The universe was just having a laugh, and it would take care of us in time. I loved this idea. I wanted to believe in this idea. Just wait until you hear the punchline.

After lunch, the minutes seemed to stretch a little longer and everyone's spirits dipped. It took forever for one number to change on the counter, the place was still completely packed. Babies were still crying, women were now crying, men were pacing, whole families arguing and spread helter skelter. Every available window had dozens of people around it, pleading pitifully, demanding an audience. Professional greasers were everywhere, trying to exert their influence on behalf on the poor, deluded people who had hired them thinking they'd bought special treatment. Once thing was certain. I would lose my mind working in that place for a single hour.

With fifteen minutes left before closing time, we still had eight numbers to go. We were never going to make it. But wait a second, the numbers jumped! Some people ahead of us had bailed. We were going to get our audience after all. At exactly 4:00 (closing time), I kid you not, our number finally came up. Lizzie raced to the window with the Fulbright helper. He looked at our documents for a long while. And then he delivered a verdict: You must pay this amount at that payment office around the corner. 

But what the hell did that mean, you might ask? 

It turns out, the entire rigamarole... nearly nine hours of waiting, was simply to get a figure and a piece of paper that said we owed said amount to START the process. Not only would we have to come back tomorrow--the payment office was already closed--but after Lizzie paid for her application, we'd have to go show proof of that payment and then we could start applying as a family.

Just wait. It gets worse.

Before we left the Emniyet, our Fulbright helper had the good sense to insist someone behind the window check over our documents and decree that they were in order. She was going on vacation and wouldn't be around to help us finish the process. The head guy behind the window did so, and said everything was kosher. 

This morning Lizzie woke up even earlier and arrived alone at the Emni-Not-Yet a good 40 minutes earlier than we had yesterday. The line was even longer, but fortunately she didn't need a number. She just had to go pay. The girls and I came later. I successfully directed the taxi driver where we needed to go (in truth I handed him a piece of paper on which Lizzie had written the instructions). When we made it through security and found Lizzie, she was in tears and screaming into her cell phone. 

Never a good sign.

Turns out one of our documents wasn't sufficient. Instead of a letter from the chair of the archaeology department, we needed a letter from the university rector. 

Three separate people had checked and signed off on our application: a Fulbright program officer, our helper, and the guy behind the window. 

It's a thirty minute cab ride to the Emniyet. The girls have now missed two days of school. We've only completed step one in a process with at least four more steps. We have only one work day left to do it.

Please wish us luck.

Frazzle fried in Kızılay

Time has already begun to quicken with the pulse of daily habit. Nearly two weeks since my last entry, with little to note but the hours spent working on the novel. Last Friday brought something new but unwelcome in the form of our first sick day. Callie had thrown up at school and needed to be retrieved just twenty minutes after Lizzie dropped her off with the taxi. This necessitated a return trip in another taxi after catching a bus home. Poor thing was down with a stomach bug, but after hearing a few teachers and fellow students talk about the "polluted" tap water mentioned on the news, she was convinced an errant sip of it had done her in. Bottled water from here on out, I guess.

She was feeling better on Saturday, and Lizzie was itching for an excursion, so we decided to brave the big bad city again in search of an elusive brand of recorder specified as requisite by their music teachers and, if time remained, more robust sneakers specified as requisite by their gym teacher. (Chuck Taylors don't cut it evidently. Are all private schools so picky with their supplies? Their art teacher demanded certain brands as well.)

We took a bus to Kızılay, a shopping district, and walked many blocks down crowded streets, pausing now and then to locate our position on the map. The first two music stores we found were dead ends, but the third delivered the goods. (Across the street, a heavily doctored actual size poster of Taylor Swift looked down on us with beatific approval.) We were elated enough by our own success to stop at a cafe and celebrate with milkshakes and smoothies, but fate had other things in mind.

A table in the back offered good shade and we took it despite the tarp hanging nearby and the workmen beyond it doing god knows what. Puffs of plaster rained down on my neck, but scooting in seemed to solve the problem and we set about scouring the menu for our rewards.

No sooner had we made our selections when a loud explosion sizzled over our heads and a corner of the building burst into flames. A workman had errantly touched a metal pole to a live wire and caused an electrical fire that quickly threatened to engulf our side of the building. Amazingly, almost no one else reacted with any degree of alarm. The workmen kept slapping wet plastic on the fire, which only succeeded in turning the flame a chemical blue. Finally a waiter arrived with a fire extinguisher and ended the crisis. 

We moved across the restaurant, evidently still alone in our concern, and sat down again to order. Alas it was not to be. The fire and/or explosion had killed the power to the building and they could no longer offer us milkshakes or smoothies. Might we want some tea?

If only that was the last disappointment of the day, we might have retained the trust of our children. Hours later, after braving sketchy, subterranean shops with grey market knock offs and a subway station that looked like an outtake from World War Z, we finally acquired the necessary footwear. Surely another celebration was in order, right? Surely we must reward the children (and ourselves) for their endurance. So off we went by foot to the mythical Beer Garden, tales of which had been tickling our imaginations and teasing our palettes ever since our arrival. Besides, they supposedly had legitimate cheeseburgers which are as rare in this country as window screens and good beer. Speaking of which, there was little to be had at Ye Olde Beer Garden. Sure, they had bottles of Miller, and Corona, and Becks, Heineken, and Carlsberg. They even had a Guinness, but all of them were so overpriced it would have required a total rewiring of my brain to order one, and none of them (barring perhaps Guinness) are any better than Efes (the national swill) anyway, so we ordered two giant mugs of that, along with a double cheeseburger for me and three singles for the ladies. 

Alas, Lizzie forgot to specify "just meat and cheese"—a normally automatic qualifier drilled into our brains with countless, desperate reminders from the kids. No one remembered this time though, at least not until said cheeseburgers arrived encased in an inextricable coating of mayo, pickles, lettuce, mustard and tomato. The look of abject horror and hopelessness that fell across Callie's face was enough to drive any man to drink and drink I did. And drank some more.

(Dis)Orientation

Before the impressions fade, a quick accounting of other memorable events since our arrival:

Ella locked herself in the bathroom at the first grocery store we found and shut down the entire operation as first the lone check-out girl, and then an assistant manager, and finally the big bossman was summoned to help extract her. I failed my father test that day and yelled at her for causing a scene, but soon realized it was my own embarrassment I was reacting to and apologized. For her part, Ella took it in stride and never got upset until I yelled.

Later that day, in an act of startling metaphoric appropriateness, I unknowingly blew every fuse in our apartment by plugging in an American power bar with a suitable adapter, in the hopes of lessening the number of additional adapters we would need. We had just filled our fridge with groceries of course. Three calls to the housing office finally produced a friendly electrician who patiently and diligently tested each outlet and fuse until he found the offending equipment. He threw me a nettled look but I apologized as best I could and he seemed to accept it.

Beyond that we are still struggling to acquire an internet connection and the proper IDs needed to initiate a whole host of other critical processes.The clock is ticking on our residence permits and there is so much left to do.

Our frustration reached a fever pitch at the middle school orientation yesterday, when we realized we hadn't been informed about a slew of events, options, schedules, requirements, books and other school supplies. This was doubly surprising given the cost of the place, and its alleged reputation. We have no experience with private schools, and no other option here, but it's kind of ironic our daughters had to move all the way to Turkey to experience elitism.

We also discovered the Bilkent shuttle bus would fail to get the girls to school on time. Looks like we'll have to catch a cab every morning. The only other option was an expensive private bus service with security guards. This is probably standard operating procedure at private schools everywhere but seemed ridiculous and unnecessary to us. Still, we worried that the girls would miss out on an opportunity to make friends and get labeled the poor outsiders and so we eventually capitulated to paying through the nose.

I have seen my wife tackle bureaucracies at the highest and lowest levels in this country, most often in their own tongue, but even she was stymied by the byzantine requirements and registration process of this stupid bus service and the rude young woman who served as its face. (Who is your emergency contact in a country where you know virtually no one, and certainly no one capable of helping in an emergency?) We finally managed to complete the multiple forms necessary but they somehow disappeared while the woman was dealing with other parents.

"Where are they?" Lizzie asked, and was shown absolute disdain, as if she was an idiot instead of a PhD and not competent enough to keep track of four pieces of paper. She began to panic because her phone had died by that point and it held all the information needed to redo the forms. She asked again, "Where are they, they were just here?" and looked to me, as if I might know. Only when it became clear that we weren't going anywhere did this woman go retrieve them from the trash, where she had "mistakenly" thrown them. I can understand being tired and frazzled by a long day dealing with clueless parents, but this was clearly an intentional act—this woman was definitely an ambassador of enmity. She then asked for nonrefundable payment, up front, for the entire year. We produced four different credit cards and she refused to take them all. 

The Turks have a way of saying no that involves throwing their heads back in apparent scorn and making an tongue click against the roof of the mouth and although I know better I've always found it to be one of the more offensive gestures I've seen. When this ill-mannered young thing showered Lizzie and our lowly credit cards with several such responses it was I could do not to fire back with some offensive gestures of my own. Overcome by my own helplessness, I stalked away before I made the situation worse. This turned out to be impossible. In the end, we took the taxi option and saved ourselves a significant bundle of cash in the process.

In truth, this bus fiasco was only the last in a day of chaos that made the car line at the Ankara airport look like a Japanese train station. But I'll refrain from "going there" and end this here.

A Room with a View

09/01/14: Lojman 79, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

Gazing out the generous, great-room window of our ninth floor apartment, in one of the two tallest buildings atop this university hill site, I see a land of layers and contrasts. Military helicopters and the occasional fighter jet shatter the vast expanse of blue otherwise populated by a parade of lazy, well-fed clouds, troublesome pigeons, and brief invasions of acrobatic swallows. 

In the middle ground, abstracted and romanticized by distance and soft focus, sprawls the modern city with its bands of right angles stacked and overlapping in cubist contrast to the bare brown hills that rise above them and rim the scene with hints of the ancient hinterlands beyond.

In the foreground and directly below our window crouch an unfortunate regiment of single-story factories, fronted and commanded by a furniture company. Two mass graves of cut logs lie disrespectfully displayed to the abutting crowds of pine trees mourning their fallen brethren from beyond a barb wire fence. As if to drive home the allusion, several times an hour, a smokestack beside these log piles belches a five-minute measure of black smoke that rises like a ominous signal fire into the sky. I am thankful for how quickly this stain on the horizon dissipates, thankful for the nearly constant breeze that banishes it westward, so very thankful for this wind that rushes into any open window or balcony door to cool my overheated core. I spent an inordinate percentage of my first days here trying to devise methods and systems to prop and secure these windows and doors in such a manner that they will allow entry to this welcome air without getting slammed shut on its equally imprudent exit. My kingdom for a simple, Western window, screened and sashed for my convenience. Unfortunately, the ubiquitous use of concrete and plaster in the building and framing here make traditional wood windows unlikely if not impossible and screens a lavish afterthought.

But at least there's the view. I've never been as cognizant of the air over my head, as awed by cloud formations. The vast majority of the photos I've taken so far are of the view through our apartment window, hence the title of this blog. If nothing else, I'll leave this place a sky gazer.

 

 

Sofia?

Our trip was mostly uneventful and fairly painless, in light of the red-eye timing and great distance covered. Not that I managed much sleep during the Atlantic Ocean leg, but we found enough space to stretch out a bit and relax during a six-hour layover in Munich. The seats around us gradually filled in, first for a flight to Sofia and then our own to Ankara. Many others took the opportunity to steal some sleep as well. One doughy Bulgarian gent in particular (I guessed his nationality from his features and apparent destination) fell so deeply asleep that he missed all four announcements for his flight. Thinking back to the kindness of our head-scarved check-in agent at Dulles, who mercifully ignored both the weight and number of our bags, I felt a desire to extend such empathy and begin our family adventure on a good karmic footing. On the other hand, I envied and respected his ability to lose consciousness in such a noisy and unnatural environment. I couldn't be certain this was his flight—maybe, like us, he was waiting for the next, or some other. In the end, hearing the final boarding announcement, and its included call for one final passenger, I took a chance and gently placed a hand upon his knee.

He was slow to wake but quick to register alarm. "Sofia?" I asked, hooking a thumb over my shoulder. He scanned the empty gate for a second and popped up like a game show contestant named from the audience. Sprinting to the closing door, he had no chance to thank me, so the smirking gate agent did so in his stead.

An hour or so earlier, I had asked Callie to pull in her feet as she lay across two seats, so that this fellow had enough room to properly relax. He heard my fatherly admonishment and raised a hand to say "No worries." I mirrored the gesture to say "No bother," and he smiled a little smile that seemed to say (in my ever reflexive monologue), "Perhaps these Americans aren't so ugly after all."

I like to think of this fellow seated on the plane, jangled nerves of the narrowly averted misfortune cooling into deep relief and perhaps the peerless balm of going home, and I picture him smiling that same little smile and mentally thanking his nameless Samaritan. No doubt I overthought the entire encounter. Anyone who knows me will say I do it all the time. But that doesn't change or undermine the fact that we are all ambassadors every moment of our lives and the only borders of substance between enmity and compassion.

A Supplication

08/27/14  Dulles Airport, Washington, D.C.

About an hour before boarding, en route to Ankara, a family of four sit lost in thoughts of new beginnings. Alternately excited, nervous, bored. Like all humans, each utterly unknowable and intimately familiar. Facing a year abroad, in a land on the verge of reversion, they are moving both forward and backward in time—mirror images, slightly askew. They are also twins in fact and twins in purpose; the girls to expand and grow, the parents to write and shepherd, protect and liberate. Lofty goals for a capital city, landlocked by provincialism and petty  bureaucracies,  not to mention a leader with aims at crypto fascism. They will exist and operate both outside and within these perimeters, as undercover tourists and conspicuous agents of human exceptionalism.

Sing gods, and sail them home.

A Disclaimer

Before we left for our year in Turkey (a result of my wife landing a Fulbright Grant to further her archaeological research) I was asked by a few friends whether I planned to keep a blog of the experience. At the time, my unspoken answer was always no, for a whole host of reasons. First and foremost, I'm here to work on a novel and need to keep my distractions to a minimum, especially those that might sap my willingness to sit for one moment more in this uncomfortable chair and stare at this computer screen. On the one hand, I know damn well that every writer of every stripe is now expected to build an online presence and market themselves ad nauseum. On the other, I've always found blogs to be terribly self-indulgent (especially my own) and in any case, a travel blog would only tangentially relate to my novel in progress or the other books and stories I've published. I already keep a private travel journal—always have. Why make it public?

 Another thing holding me back was my abominable track record. I've started at least four other blogs in the past. Two have already been voluntarily expunged from the public record: a scatterbrained place to store what limited DIY knowledge I have acquired just being the cheap, foolhardy bastard that I am, and a passably enjoyable channeling of my daughters' thoughts on the twenty days we spent travelling Western Turkey and living in an excavation house in 2011. (My ever-respectful wife, and the whole reason we were there in the first place, asked me to delete the latter for fear it might supplant more serious, less irreverent websites about said excavation in Google searches. I only discovered after the fact that I could, at least in theory, hide a blog from Google's all-seeing eyes.)

The other two are still out there, flapping in the wind. What We Fear began as Thirty Days of Night(mares)—a self-indulgent account of my self-indulgent experiment in October of 2008 to watch thirty horror films in thirty days, with breathless updates on my sanity and abbreviated reviews of each. I meant it to be finite (and facetious) from the outset, but briefly resurrected it three years later as a general consideration of all the many things that frighten people. At its peak, I think it had four subscribers. That well ran dry, or I lost the energy to lift the bucket, and I abandoned it. Imagine my surprise when I logged into its user panel just yesterday and discovered it had over 7,000 unique visitors. A paltry number, as these things go, but enough to make me wonder whether I had underestimated the blog, if not as a marketing tool then as the perfect place to indulge my self-indulgence.

My one current "blog" is the only thing besides my children, my wife, my fiction, my homebrew, my old diesel pickup, my garden, and my work shed that gets any attention from me these days. And it falls at the very end of that list. Nonetheless, the growing collection of oddities and curiosities that I curate at Wondercabinet.net continues to plug along, pulling in between 1000 and 2000 unique visitors every month. Earlier this year it attracted a record 14,000 visitors in one day, thanks to a chance mention on reddit. (Are you listening agents? Are you counting those ducats?) Compared to Grumpy Cat or the million other memes-of-the-week that number is still absolute peanuts, but hey it's a start, right? I think the reason Wondercabinet has succeeded, at least on a modest level, while the others have failed is that it isn't a blog at all. Not in the usual sense. Its author is more or less invisible and the content does all the talking. Twisted, often creepy content, yes, but at least it's something beyond one person's internal monologue.

All of which is a long winded disclaimer and non-explanation for why I decided to go ahead and do another Turkey blog after all. What changed my mind? I'm not sure, exactly. Maybe I need something that isn't so weighted down with lofty expectations. Maybe I just want to share our experiences with family and friends. Sometimes thing really are that simple.

The following entries will be transcribed more less verbatim from my travel journal. They will likely be sporadic. They will certainly be purple and over earnest. My style leans that way anyway, but positively falls head first into a vat of overheated purple goo when I stop editing and let myself go. You've been warned. Abandon snark all ye who enter here.