Bram Stoker's Laïcité

OK, I admit it, I've been neglecting my blog a little bit... but it's all good now, cos I feel myself slipping into blog mode and have decided to pleasure you all with a decent post.

First of all a bit of a round-up of what I've been up to in the last few weeks. To begin with I had a ball of a time in Istanbul. It's a great city and the Istanbulonians are a swell bunch of folks. I didn't do too many of the 'touristy' things but I generally relaxed and soaked up the vibes of this ancient city... Istanbul (and indeed Turkey) has a mad history, having been consistantly shagged around between the Greeks, Romans and Ottomans... It has been named Byzantine and Constantinople before its current nomenclature and has seen sieges and world wars bloody the Bosphorous.

I met a Turkish guy on his holidays and he accompanied me from Istanbul to Izmir, Turkey's second biggest city where we spent a few days walking around and soaking in the rays, before heading on to Ephesus, mentioned in a previous post.

From Ephesus I got a bus to Fethiye on the Mediterranean and hopped into a Gulet (or large sailing boat) which made it's way along the coast for four days to the town of Olympus. The cruise was great craic altogether. There were about fourteen of us (Yanks, Aussies and Wops) and we generally lazed around in the sun all day waiting for the bell to ring so that we could gorge ourselves on the very tasty chow that our chef prepared. In the evenings we played cards and had a few beers and then slept up on deck under the manically shooting stars of the northern Med. One night we went to a bar on the shore and danced our little hearts out (or 'got low' as the yanks say). I sweat so much that I had to go for a dip every half hour to cool down. Apart from all that madness the days were spent cruising along and stopping in inlets and at beaches every now and then for a pre- or post-chow swim.

After that I spent a few days in Olympos trekking around the variety of greco-roman ruins that the town is known for. Yesterday I left the coast and headed inland to Cappadocia, an area of central anatolia known for it's caves. Basically what happened was that a volcano shagged out a load of ash a quadrillion years ago, which then compacted to become a soft stone. This stone was part eroded by water and created these mad constructions which the locals saw fit to hollow out and live in. So my abode here is a little cave which remains cool all day and all night... it's sooper dooper altogether.

Anyway, so I'm gonna jump on another bus tomorrow evening and make my way to the northern coast of Turkey at the Black Sea. This will take me out of the gringo loop that most tourists follow (Istanbul, Aegean, Mediterranean, Ankara and back to Istanbul) and should be interesting. The area is close to Georgia and I was thinking of popping in and getting blown up by the Rooski's but I decided against it...

The buses here in Turkey are pretty good. They are generally used as the main mode of transport between cities. They are spacious, well air conditioned, cheap, fast and the roads are good. The trip to Trabzon is about 15 hours so I'll hop on tomorrow evening around sevenish and sleep on the bus arriving refreshed and ready to rock and roll in Trabzon the next day. I also save myself a hostel this way (Ain't I just the bestest!).

An interesting thing about Turkey is the absolute veneration of this guy, Ataturk. Every single shop you go into has a picture of him hanging up on the wall. If you see a statue, you don't even have to look to see who it might be of, it's always Ataturk. His mug adorns the Turkish flag everywhere. He is absolutely adored by the Turks, who essentially consider him their father (Ataturk means father of the Turks).

He was a general in World War I and was Turkey's first president upon the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the war. He was pretty visionary; He set up the Turkish state as it is today, made it secular, changed the script from arabic to latin and led the country through the reform necessary for a new republic after the loss of the war and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The turks are supremely proud of what they achieved after their fall from greatness and this pride manifests itself in profound veneration, bordering on a personality cult.

I think he looks a little bit like Count Dracula, but I don't tell the Turks that cos they wouldn't be happy at all. (They're super nationalist, last week I wanted to buy a towel with the Turkish flag on it and the prospect of me drying my infidel nether-regions with their beloved drapeau nearly caused the shopkeeper to beat seven shades of shi'ite out of me). Waddayathink? The prince of darkness or what?

I read that Ahmadinejad, that wily Iranian president, visited Turkey to have a chinwag with Ergodan, the Turkish PM. (The Turks are eager to act as interlocuteurs between the Iranians and the US over ye ol' nuclear issue...). It's standard practice for dignitaries visiting Ankara to visit the mauseleum of Dracula... sorry Ataturk... and 'they' say that Ahmadinejad did not visit Ankara, but instead went to Istanbul, in order to not have to visit the 'shrine to secularism' that is Ataturk's mauseleum, an ideology that the Iranian mullahs might not be too favourable of. See article here.

That's all for today... I hope you're all behaving yourselves...

Ur man in Turkey... C.

PS. For all those French who think that they invented secularism, you're wrong!

PPS. Saw a camel today... or maybe a dromedary... well, it was camel like anyway