Change In Plans

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This short post is about the strange sensation of watching the great financial crisis of 2008 from far away.

For the last three weeks I have been reading the New York Times and Yahoo Finance feverishly on my BlackBerry.

It has been strange to watch the drama/trauma of the meltdown through this five-square-inch lens of abstraction, while surrounded by foreign places and people who are unaware and/or indifferent. Yesterday’s failed bailout and equity-market implosion did not seem to register with the holidaymakers and boat crews of Fethiye, Turkey.

We were living in South Africa as the Internet bubble (inflated and) burst, and I felt as though I watched it all through a Bloomberg terminal and calls to business-school friends. It would clearly have been a more visceral experience if we had continued to live in Palo Alto.

On September 11, 2001, We were on vacation with friends in Italy. We were overjoyed with our one-year-old son, and we had just found out we were pregnant (with the baby that we lost several months later). We watched the coverage of the 9/11 attacks on Italian television, and tried to imagine what our friends and neighbors in Manhattan were going through.

The current financial crisis is quite different, of course, from both other eventss. That said, once again it feels as though we are watching history through an unusual medium, rather than being there, where we should be. We are emotionally and geographically detached.

I am definitely glad that we accepted a low-ball bid, and sold our house in New Jersey in June. We would have otherwise gotten creamed, I think.

This short post is about boarding the gulet, which is the sailboat we will be living on for the next week.

We arrived in Gocek in the early afternoon. Gocek is a ridiculously prosperous little harbor town on Turkey’s Southeast coast, favored by Prince Charles and by Turkey’s President Ozal.

Turkey started a nine-day holiday period on Saturday (celebrating the end of Ramadan), so the town was jammed with people getting on their boats. The shelves of the town’s huge supermarket were picked almost bare from provisioning holidaymakers.

Somewhat suddenly (no introductions, no orientation, no “safety briefing” or waiver signing), we got onto a rubber dinghy and motored out to the gulet. The gulet is 77 feet long, and about 25 feet wide at midships. It has two masts, four big cabins, and big sitting areas on the fore and aft decks.

We have a crew of three: Shahin, the captain; Nevraz, the 20-year-old chef; and Loqmin, the 30-year-old steward who does everything else. Loqmin speaks excellent English, and seems to love kids.

We motored out of Gocek harbor, and cruised for about 45 minutes. We anchored on the windward side of Gocek Island at about 4pm, and started trying out all of the boat’s amenities. In the course of about three hours, some combination of Zola, Tallulah, India and I swam in the sea, went kayaking, went snorkeling, tried out the spear gun, and went windsurfing (me alone, and ineptly).

Exhausted, we sat on the foredeck and watched the sun set. Loqmin served us a great dinner of fresh fish (very fresh, I think), salad dressed with pomegranate juice, and garlic dressed with a little bit of broccoli.

After dinner we lay on the foredeck and looked at the stars. Both kids fell asleep immediately, and India and I had a pretty intense conversation about “what happens when the fantasyland of the trip ends, and we return to some semblance of real life.” Maybe there is no better place for a conversation like that.

The crew raised the anchor and started the engines at 6:30 this morning. Zola slept through it all. We are motoring down to Dalyan, to swim and look at ancient ruins. The sunrise and scenery are spectacular. Zola convinced the crew to let him plug in his iPod, so our maritime idyll is accompanied musically by Guns & Roses at 95 decibels.

The boat seems good thus far.

This short post is about our afternoon in Ephesus, Turkey.
Ephesus is an amazing historical site, and a “must see” destination for anyone visiting Turkey.

We had a long travel day on Friday: waking up early in Uchisar, Cappadocia, driving an hour to Kayseri, flying 90 minutes to Istanbul, laying over for 90 minutes, flying 45 minutes to Izmir (on Turkey’s west coast), and driving an hour to Ephesus.

We spent a few hours in the late afternoon in Ephesus, which has an extraordinary (and extraordinarily well preserved and presented) history.

Ephesus was settled by Hittites in about 1100 BC, and was ruled, variously, by Lycians, Lydians, Alexander the Great, and the Romans. Throughout, it was renowned as a multilingual, multicultural, multireligious, highly tolerant city. Apparently the “live and let live” ethos was driven by mercantile success and pursuit of great creature comforts.

The Greeks built the magnificent Temple of Artemis (one of the 7 wonders of the world). Artemis was the goddess of fertility. The statues of her with bull testicles all over her chest sort of make sense from a “Go Fertility!” perspective, but definitely look unusual.

The Romans made Ephesus the capital of Asia Minor, and built a great (12,000 scroll) library there. The fully excavated and reconstructed Roman merchants’ houses were remarkable: beautiful floor mosaics and frescoes.

We stood on the stage in the restored 25,000-seat outdoor theater. This was the same spot that the Greek tragedies were first performed, where Christians were fed to lions, and where gladiators fought to the death. It was also the same spot where St. Paul (the St. Paul) preached to a standing-room-only crowd of Ephesians. The story goes that a silversmith named Demetrios shouted Paul down, and turned the crowd against him, arguing that Christianity would be bad for business. Paul fled the stage and put himself in the protective custody of Roman soldiers before the crowd could tear him to pieces.

St. John the Theologian brought the Virgin Mary to Ephesus as she fled Roman persecution. She is believed to have died there of natural causes.

Ephesus was amazing. The care and scholarship of the Turks (with help) in excavating the city brings the history to life. We sat on the communal seats of a 2000-year-old public latrine (which freaked out our 8-year-old son). We walked the “stacks” of the ancient library, and read the inscriptions to the provincial governor, and to the emperors.

Our guide, Levent, was excellent overall. He was truly in his element in Ephesus, however, and captivated all four of us for as he explained and dramatized what we were seeing.

Caught up in the spirit of the moment, I picked and ate an olive from an ancient-looking tree. I found out that unprocessed olives are inedibly bitter - duh!

We were also fortunate that Ephesus was relatively deserted while we were there. Apparently, on days when multiple cruise ships pull in, as many as 11,000 visitors pile through the site. That would have changed the ambience a little.

After spending the night in a beachside hotel in nearby Kusadasi, we left the following morning for the four-hour drive down to Gocek (pronounced “GOO-chek”) to meet our boat and say goodbye to Levent.

This post is about some of the funny things that have happened in the last week or so. My writing skills are definitely challenged by trying to convey humor, so we will see how this goes.

1- The Museum Hotel in Cappadocia is a warren of 35 cave rooms, carved into the hillside, and connected by tunnels. The owner has a couple of small dogs who seem to have the run of the place. Tallulah became friendly with a small black spaniel, who was in and out of our cave/room all the time.

One afternoon, Zola and I came to our room, and found India and Lu trying to persuade the little dog to “go home.” I pointed out (helpfully) that the dog lived at the hotel, so he was already home, and asked why they didn’t just kick the dog out and close the door.

India explained that they needed to follow the dog to where he sleeps, because he had stolen something from Lu, and we needed to retrieve it. It turns out that the dog had swiped Tallulah’s favorite panties, the purple ones with Jasmine’s picture, and had been carrying them around in his mouth. Tallulah had been chasing him through the tunnels and public spaces, shouting “Give me back my panties, dog!”.

2- India and Lu asked the young woman at the bar to help in the pantie search. After a lot of discussion and gesturing (the bartender spoke zero English), it seemed that all was understood, and that the bartender would lead them to the thief’s lair.

Surprisingly, the bartender walked only a few paces, grabbed her cell phone, and then picked up Lu and put her on a stool. Then the bartender (like at least 20 other adults in Turkey) snapped a few photos of our daughter, tousled her hair, and gave her a kiss. Turkish adults seem to love Tallulah.

3- Last night, at Levent’s recommendation, we left our hotel and walked to dinner at a chicken restaurant in Kusadasi. The dinner was simple (chicken shish kebab, chicken wings, chicken stew, etc.) but very good. The best was the sesame flat bread that was cooked in an open-flame pizza oven, a process which the kids and I watched for a while. Throughout the dinner, the restaurant’s owner, an intense bird-like man in his 60s, waited on us very attentively.

For dessert, India ordered pistachio baklava, which came in a huge four-inch by four-inch block. When we finished eating it, and the owner came to our table for the hundredth time to check on us, I said, “The baklava was very good. Thank you, it was really excellent.”

The owner leaned over to me, raised his hand to his mouth, and winked. , In a heavily accented conspiratorial whisper he said,”Baklava ees Toorkish Viagra!”

More on Ephesus and the Turkish coast later.

This short post is about Turkey. We have been here for just over a week (although it has been so intense that it feels much longer), and I am starting to reach some preliminary conclusions about the place.

Turkey is a fascinating country, and will be an economic powerhouse over the next few decades. Some background that I didn’t know before we got here:

• Greater Istanbul has about 15 million residents. It is the 4th-largest city in the world, and the largest city in Europe. Its population has grown tenfold (!) in the last 30 years, with Turks migrating in from all over the country.
• Turkey has about 75 million residents (plus a few million more living in Germany and elsewhere), and per-capita GDP of just under $10,000. This means that Turkey has roughly the 15th biggest economy in the world.
• Two thirds of the Turkish population is under the age of 34. As a group, Turkish people are young, well educated, hard working, and ambitious.
• Foreign direct investment in Turkey has increased more than tenfold (to $22 billion) in the last ten years. There is a huge amount of infrastructure and manufacturing capacity just coming on stream

Barring the unforeseen, this basic fact pattern suggests that Turkey’s economy should grow rapidly for an extended period. If the EU grants Turkey membership (which it should), that growth will happen faster and lead to greater heights.

The story of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s secular god, is also interesting. The breadth of change that Ataturk personally drove to modernize Turkey and to create a nation state in the 1920s and 1930s is staggering. For example: he required people to have surnames for the first time, he changed the alphabet from Arabic script to Latin (basically inventing written Turkish in the process), he forced a strict separation of church and state, he mandated primary education for girls and boys up to 8th grade, he developed the modern industrial infrastructure. The list of his accomplishments is amazing, and could only have been done by someone with his “father of the nation” credibility, earned on the battlefield.

The most interesting thing to me is the mechanisms that Ataturk put in place to make sure that “Kemalism” would replace Islam permanently as Turkey’s organizing set of beliefs. Most important, he charged the Turkish military with the solemn responsibility of keeping fundamentalist Islam out of power, and with staying true to the secular, Western-oriented, “Kemalist” principles. In the 70 years since Ataturk died, the military has taken this responsibility seriously, and has acted on it on multiple occasions.

Turkey has its share of challenges and its slightly repressive edge to be sure. It has not resolved its Kurdish separatist problem, and because of that still has a spotty human-rights record. The threat of fundamentalism is real, and creates an ongoing tension between religious citizens and the military. All of the recent growth has stretched Istanbul’s inrastructure to the breaking point. Turkey is in a rough neighborhood: it is bordered by Syria, Iran, Iraq and Armenia (plus 3 other countries of greater or lesser stability). Turkey and Armenia have had a closed border and very frosty relations for a long time.

All of this said, Turkey seems to really have its act together, and continues to build a strong, free, secular, nation state. Fascinating place.

This short post is about leaving Istanbul, flying to the center of Turkey, and driving west into the Cappadocia region.

Yesterday, India and the kids spent a last day of sightseeing in Istanbul. They went to the 500-year old Rumeli Castle at the north end of the Bosphorus (built in 4 months by Sultan Mehmet II, as part of his strategy to conquer Constantinople). The castle’s walls run 300-400 feet up a steep hillside, with stairs cut directly into the walls. The lack of railings gave India some pause, but apparently both kids climbed all the way up, and no one fell off the side.

They also went to the Dolmabahce Palace, which was the administrative center of the Ottoman Empire for most of the period from 1850-1922. The Palace has the largest chandelier in the world, and also the largest collections of Bohemian and Baccarat crystal (including a crystal banister). Because it is absolutely symmetrical, there are two of every item of furniture. The palace cost 35 tons of gold to build (which is about $900 million right now), and essentially bankrupted the Empire. Whoops. Dolmabahce is now mostly thought of as the place where Ataturk, the secular god of modern Turkey, died in 1938. Every day at 9:05am (the time Ataturk died), everyone in the palace stops and thinks about him. The kids were blown away at the opulence.

For the first time on our trip, I have been working for the last two days. I am on the board of a Turkish company, and we had the opening of a new factory (close to the Bulgarian border), and a board meeting in Istanbul. It felt strange to be away from India and the kids all day for two full days. It is amazing how quickly we adapt to “new normal.” Obviously, a few months ago, it would have been normal to be away completely for five days in a row. Being gone for only two days, and “home” in the evenings, would have been a special occasion.

We regrouped at the airport in the late afternoon, and boarded a 60-minute flight for Kayseri. Further evidence that the Turkish lira (YTL) is overvalued: a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses which cost $120 in Nashville was priced at YTL 426 in the airport. That is $352 at current exchange rates.

Because we were flying at sundown, Turkish Airlines served a special Ramadan “break fast” meal with hot soup, a sandwich, and baklava. There was even the traditional dried date and water. My seatmate said, “If I were flying on airplanes, I would wish that every day were Ramadan.”

We landed in Kayseri, which is a prosperous industrial city of a million people. It has been continuously inhabited for the last 3,000 years: the Romans called it Caesaria. We drove west along the Silk Road for an hour, up into the mountains, toward a small town called Nevsehir. Along the way, we passed a huge roadside inn, called the Yellow Caravansery, which has been welcoming travelers since 1250 AD.

We are staying in a place called the Museum Hotel, which is carved into the soft rock of a Cappadocian hillside. There were a number of caves which people have lived in for centuries, and by linking those together, hollowing out some additional caves, and building only a little, the owners have created a spectacular boutique hotel. I will have India add some photos, which would be much better than any description I can write. It is unlike any place I have stayed before.

This morning, we woke up (in our comfortable cave), and looked out at 20 hot air balloons floating up the valley and over our heads. We may do this tomorrow. As I write, Zola is having his hair cut by a Fez-wearing “traditional Muslim barber,” whose chair sits on a terrace, overlooking the mountains and the valley floor 500 feet below.

Cappadocia is very, very popular with visitors to Turkey, and from what we have seen this is entirely reasonable. After haircut and school we are going off to hike and explore the rocks and caves and ancient sites.

This short post describes what we have been up to over the last four days in Istanbul. Overall, we have found Istanbul to be an outstanding place to visit. The history is fascinating, the scenery and climate are great, and the people and culture are engaging. The language, of course, is impossible, but we are doing our best.

Over the weekend we saw many of the major Istanbul sights:

• The Grand Bazaar - a huge covered market in the old part of the city. Apparently it is the oldest continuously operated place of commerce in the world. Now it is about one third tourists and two thirds local people buying things they need.
• The Haghia Sophia - an ancient, huge cathedral which was converted into a mosque and then converted into a secular museum (good compromise). I found out that it is pronounced “I-uh so-FEE-uh.” The cathedral was built by the Emperor Justinian, starting in 532, designed as “an earthly mirror of the heavens”. It was finished in 537 AD, which was extraordinarily quick work, given how massive it is. 900 years later (!), the Moslems controlled Istanbul, and the building was converted into a mosque (minarets added, vestibule indicating location of Mecca, etc.). 500 years after that, Ataturk declared that it should be a museum, which probably prevented a lot of squabbling. Walking the marble floors, which are grooved with 1500 years of foot traffic, looking at thousand-year old mosaics, and thinking about the people who have worshipped there was truly inspirational. Haghia Sophia is a special building.
• Basilica Cistern - a huge underground water tank, also built by Justinian in 532 AD. The reservoir measures 165 meters by 65 meters, and is 8 meters high. It’s arches are supported by 336 stone columns. We drank coffee and hot chocolate at the small underground cafe, listening to the water dripping around us, and imagining the lives of the workers who built the cisterns 1500 years ago.
• Sultanahmet Mosque (Blue Mosque) - with its 6 minarets, and beautiful tile and stained glass, built in the early 17th century. It is still used for worship, so the building was packed with Moslems coming in for sundown prayers.
• Galata Bridge - crossing the “Golden Horn” into the old part of Istanbul on foot, seeing hundreds of fishermen, and being tempted by the cafes and fish restaurants on the bridge’s lower level.

We have been able to walk and take the tram (which was fun on its own) pretty much everywhere.

Yesterday, we took an hour-long boat trip on the Bosphorus. It left from a little square just north of our hotel, with a picturesque old mosque next to the ferry dock. We motored up the European side, toward the Black Sea, and down the Asian side, looking at the houses and fishermen on the banks. We also saw dozens of huge jellyfish in the water.

This evening, we walked the length of Istiklal (Independence) Street, along a ridge in the Beyoglu district, from Taksim Square. The street is a mile-long pedestrian boulevard, lined with cafes, shops, backgammon parlors, and 19th-century apartments. We finally found an English-language version of the last Harry Potter book (at Robinson Crusoe, great bookstore). We also bought him an official Fenerbahce soccer jersey, which they customized with “zola 9″ on the back.

We had dinner at a restaurant, Leb-i-Derya, on the 6th floor of an Istiklal hotel. The windows looked out on the Bosphorus, on the Asian side of Istanbul, and down to the old city. The view was spectacular.

Overall, everyone in the family is giving Istanbul two thumbs up. It is not cheap (the Turkish lira feels overvalued by 30-50%), but maybe more on that later. Tomorrow we leave for Cappadoccia, and then for a week of sailing ont he Turkish coast.