Change In Plans

This short post relates some of the funny things that have happened while we have been travelling. As noted before, I don’t know how funny they will be in the retelling (particularly in my retelling), but they made us laugh at the time.

1- We have been following the U.S. Presidential campaign reasonably closely, but only through the internet. We did see a replay of the Vice Presidential debate, with Turkish sub-titles, on the boat on our last night in Turkey. India also managed to play the Tina Fey Saturday Night Live impressions of Sarah Palin on YouTube for us (although not in Turkey, where access to YouTube has been blocked by the government).

Somehow, in all of this, the expression “I can see Russia from my house!” has crept into the family dialogue. For example: “Zola, why haven’t you done your schoolwork yet?” “Because I can see Russia from my house.” It is particularly funny when the three-year old says it.

One of our favorite Zola moments was when we were staying at the Ciragan Palace in Istanbul, looking out over the Bosphorus Straits. He woke up one morning and told us, apropos of nothing, “Sarah Palin says she can see Russia from her house. So what?. I can see Asia from my bed!”

2- Our dinner at Donna Rosa restaurant in Monteprusto, Italy was nearly perfect. The restaurant is run by a family, with Donna Rosa and her daughter in the open kitchen, the father and another daughter waiting tables. Three funny things happened during our dinner.

First, we struck up a conversation with a lovely couple on their honeymoon. The new wife, in her mid-thirties, was very interested in our children, and she and India really hit it off. 30 minutes after they left, the waitress answered a phone call, and then summoned India to the phone. We assumed the worst: parents sick, hotel burned down, who knows? The new bride actually had called the restaurant from her hotel, gave India her address and phone number, and invited us to stay with them in London.

Second, there was a large and vivacious American tour guide sitting with a small group of his high-end clients at the table next to us. It was clear that the guide brings all of his groups to Donna Rosa, and that he has a very friendly relationship with the family. Donna Rosa sent our table a small starter, and the tour guide made a humorous show of wanting the starters for himself. After Zola went to the kitchen and talked to Donna Rosa and her daughter, they sent us a small plate of meatballs, and the tour guide made a humorous show of trying to intercept the waitress and get the meatballs. The kids scarfed down the small plate, so she sent a big plate (this was all before we ordered), and the tour guide made a bigger show of chasing the waitress with his fork, asking for meatballs. Tallulah leaned over to me, and said in a triumphant voice: “That big fatman wants our food, but we are NOT giving it to him.”

Third, after his trip to the kitchen, Zola was emboldened to order a ravioli appetizer, even though it had spinach in it (breaking new culinary ground for a very picky eater). He told the waitress: “I would like to order he ravioli, but only half an order of ravioli. That way, if I like it, I can get you to bring me the other half of the order later on.”

3- We have never spanked either of our kids, but when we were in Positano, Zola found a box of matches and lit one by himself in the bedroom, while we were all in the sitting room. This required a reaction which was different in kind from anything he had seen before, and would be memorable, so I put him over my knee and actually spanked him (not very hard) for the first, and I hope only, time in his life.

This was not funny, and was sort of traumatic for all of us. Zola crying, Tallulah crying, India and me upset.

The next evening, Tallulah and I were cozy in bed, reading a story. She interrupted me and said in a soft voice:

“Dad? Remember when you spanked Zola?”

“Of course, sweetheart, it was yesterday.”

“Dad, when you spanked him it was … very … it was so … it was …”

“I know, Lu, it was very scary and awful for all of us. I just wanted him and you to know that…”

“No Dad. What I mean is that when you spanked him it was … so … it was so … nice!”

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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 something funny that Lu said on our second or third night in Spain.

I was carrying her on my shoulders , on our way back from a late dinner in Madrid. Conspiratorially (or as conspiratorial as a 3-year old can be), she whispered in my ear:

“Daddy, I don’t like Spain.”

“Why not, angel?” I asked.

“Because it is full of Spanish peoples”

“But Lu, it is their country, and we are just visitors here.”

“But Daddy, they all keep speaking Spanish!!”

Several days later, and apparently after great reflection, she told me:

“I like Spanish people now.”

This is progress, I think.

This short post is about losing my corporate e-mail account, a small (but symbolically important) step in our change in plans.

Friday was the last business day in August, and the last day that I was attached to a corporate e-mail account. I knew the day was coming when I would go “off the grid,” but I had anticipated that it would be August 31st, so I was taken a little by surprise.

In the universal scheme of things, this is a trivial change, and one that I was intellectually (and practically) prepared for. Emotionally, however, it created one of those “are we crazy?” moments.

Both times that I have changed jobs in the e-mail era, I have immediately started working in another institutional environment. Everything transitioned seamlessly, and my little, medium-tech bubble of telecommunications was barely disturbed.

In this transition period, however, there is no institution on the other side. There is no new IT department waiting with open arms and a new blackberry. It is just India and me, and two kids, and a personal Verizon account.

Again, from any practical perspective this is a trivial and anticipated change, and warrants zero sympathy, even from myself. It does represent the severing of another cord, however, a cord which connected us (umbilically? restrictively? both?) to a different life. I suppose I should feel liberated, but instead I feel at some risk of getting lost.

My new e-mail address, for what it’s worth, is my permanent one:

pbaird@alumni.stanfordgsb.org

All of us are sort of collaborating as we write the psots on this blog. That said, Zola’s voice (and India’s photos) come through more clearly on his travel blog, which can be found at:

http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/zolab/1/1217357520/tpod.html

It is a little difficult to navigate the travelopd site, but if you have found these posts at all interesting, you may find his to be better written, more visual, and more interesting. Enjoy.

All of us are sort of collaborating as we write the psots on this blog. That said, Zola’s voice (and India’s photos) come through more clearly on his travel blog, which can be found at:

http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/zolab/1/1217357520/tpod.html

It is a little difficult to navigate the travelopd site, but if you have found these posts at all interesting, you may find his to be better written, more visual, and more interesting. Enjoy.

After narrowly averting another comic error (”Sorry, sir, the 7:30pm train is sold out, you will need to stay on the 9:30pm train”) because other passengers didn’t show up, we made it back to Madrid in time for dinner. We ate at an amazing outdoor restaurant on the roof of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. It was impossibly elegant, and India and I were certain that at any moment the maitre’d would come over and say “There has been some mistake, we do not allow in Americans and their grubby, travel-weary children.” But no one seemed to mind (much), the kids behaved miraculously well, and we had a lovely dinner. The moon even rose over Madrid while we ate.

Capping the comedy of errors: as we walked home, Zola was playing a game he had invented called “kick my Croc shoe high in the air and chase it down the sidewalk.” He was good about being safe near cross streets, but could not otherwise be deterred. 50 yards from the hotel, he fell behind us for several seconds. When I walked back to check on him, he pointed to a balcony about 20 feet off the ground, and explained that his Croc had landed there, and was probably gone forever.

He limped the rest of the way to the hotel, and we all went to bed. We leave for Mallorca early tomorrow morning. I hope we have another pair of shoes for him.