Diyarbakir, local style.

[A Kurdish waterpark - note the mosque and ramshackle stone huts on the hills behind the olympic size pool]

After a quiet morning of work and sleeping in late, Jon and I got a phone call. It was Mehmet, and he was sending a car for us to meet him in a garden outside of the city, now. As I scrambled to change from my pajamas and put in my contacts, Jon said offhandedly, “from here on out, we’re not in control of our own lives.” He wasn’t joking.

The taxi Mehmet sent took us some 15 minutes outside of the city, to what turned out to be a waterpark and series of covered gardens frequented mostly by Diyarbakir locals. We were met by Mehmet, a delegation of Kurdish men, and another Mehmet (who in personality, size and importance I can only call Big Mehmet). Big Mehmet owned the waterpark and the hotel we had visited yesterday. He summarily introduced himself, told us he loved America, and took us for a tour of the grounds, which included an orchard, a small zoo and a giant swimming pool with waterslides. Then, we took a spot on a covered bench where a manmade waterfall trickled water over our feet to cool us down and Big Mehmet ordered food to be brought over.

The chai started rolling, albeit a lot faster than our conversation. My Turkish being nonexistent, it was difficult for me to take part, and I’ll be honest, I’m still getting used to men not meeting my eyes for much of the time. So far, nothing’s stopped me from going where the men go and everyone has been exceedingly friendly, but little things, like when I ask a question and men address Jon instead, or men declining from shaking my hand (an Islamic taboo) are unsettling. Suffice it to say, with the language barrier and my uncertain position in these groups of men, I’ve been getting used to awkward silences.

After a few hours in the shade of Big Mehmet’s gardens, we returned to town to meet up with Jon’s friends in town. With the family’s two teenage boys, we wandered to some of Diyarbakir’s more famous sites, including the Ulu Camii mosque and a church hidden in the winding streets of the neighborhoods that was built in 300 AD.

On the way back from the church we stopped in a candy shop where they were making hard sugar candies from scratch. We watched as they took a 25 kilo blob of melted sugar and sesame seeds and stretched it into sweet seedy goodness in front of our eyes. They passed us some candy – still warm – to munch on as we left.

Then, on to the family home where I was about to eat the largest meal of my life. Jon’s honorary Turkish mom had cooked up a feast, with dolmades, stuffed peppers, a tomato and meat stew to be eaten with homemade bread, salad and cherries in cold juice. Then baklava, cherries, apricots, watermelon, candy and more chai! Always more chai. I might turn into one of those tiny glasses of chai soon. Jon’s Turkish mom was incredible – each time we finished something she would pile more food onto our plates before we had a chance to say no and agitate until we cleared it. I felt her disappointment and my own as after two helpings of stew, three stuffed peppers, two stuffed eggplants, and two handfuls of bread, I had to push my plate away in defeat.

As we left, she gave me a scarf covered in sequins and told me that she had never had a daughter, so every time I was in Diyarbakir I could come to her house and I would be hers for however long I stayed. We left with a promise to return on our way back from Iraq, in some two and a half months.

Tomorrow we will officially cross into Iraq. I’m no longer nervous, just very very curious to see what this new city and culture will hold.

A day in Diyarbakir

As the plane touched down in Diyarbakir on Sunday, I was a little nervous. I was officially entering the most conservative area I’ve ever been in, and my normal obsession with properly observing social mores was thrown into overdrive in a culture that I knew nothing about. I was almost the only woman on the plane without a headscarf.

Once we made it into the city, however, my worries began to ease. Diyarbakir is one of the largest cities in Turkey and although Southeast Turkey is more conservative than the rest of the country, I saw plenty of women dressed just like me.

My worries eased, I began to concentrate on taking in this new city. Jon and I checked into Hotel Birkent, a clean but fairly bare bones operation with a toilet that requires one foot to be in the shower in order to sit on it properly. Once we settled in and got ourselves a hearty Kurdish breakfast (the saltiest cheese I’ve ever tasted, intense yogurt, cucumbers, tomatoes, an egg, bread and of course, chai) Jon and I hit the city so he could show me a few highlights.

First, the bazaar, where I picked up a headscarf to explore the mosques. The shopkeepers took every opportunity to lament to us that U.S. had beat Turkey the night before in the world cup.
Then, knowing me so well, Jon took me to the cheese market – the Kurds, it turns out, are as besotted with cheese as I am, and there’s a whole market dedicated to these aged delights. One of their most popular cheeses, a tangy crumbly kind that’s often found with platters of mezze, is buried under the ground for a year to age properly. I was enthralled with the giant blobs of cheese just sitting on the table waiting to be gobbled up – the cheese sellers couldn’t miss my absolute delight, and kept giving us pieces to try. Along with the cheese (it just kept getting better) were olives and honey, straight off farms outside the city.



Then, on to the Otel Büyük Kervansaray, a resting spot built for pilgrims traveling along the silk road in the 1500s that is still being used as a hotel today. While we wandered the grounds, a man who worked there noticed us and began to talk with us. His English was surprisingly good, because he has worked with the U.S. army for a while and has since operated a souvenir shop and tours of the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and southeast Turkey. He invited us into his shop for tea and later we agreed to meet for more chai after dinner.


Our final stop was a climb of Diyarbakir’s city walls, which are the second largest in the world, after the great wall of china and date back to the Byzantine era. From our vantage point at the top of the walls, we could see a river and ancient bridge that cut through endless fields of farmland.

[Inside the walls, we found an art show and teahouse]

Diyarbakir has subtle delights for tourists. It isn’t old in the way that I know old – not the old of western Europe, the kind of old that has been lovingly restored then put to some twee use. This city has been lived in – roughly, robustly, continually – since before Christ was born and people just don’t think twice about it. Men still gather just outside the mosque, one of the oldest in turkey, to tell stories with each other. Through a cobbled alley, a townhouse built and rebuilt over hundreds of years serves up chai and Kurdish dishes on large cushions in a big courtyard. And in the bazaar, cobblers and blacksmiths work alongside spice shops filled with huge burlap bags of herbs I couldn’t name.


[Jon and an old friend, the proprietor of this hidden wonder of a restaurant, with my first taste of Sac Tava – my taste buds rejoiced!]

Outside the city walls, the city is more modern, with street after street of soviet style six-story pastel apartment buildings. Down the main street outside of town is a long row of chaihanas, or tea shops, where men meet and play backgammon. We ended the night there with our new friend Mehmet and Jon’s old friends from the city, drinking endless cups of chai and smoking apple flavored hookah.

Istanbul: The first encounter

As I said before, I arrived in Istanbul five days ago. As we drove into the city for the first time just before midnight, the dozens of minarets from mosques on the hills around the Bosporus were thrown into high relief against the night sky. I couldn’t help pressing my nose against the taxi window like a child.

Our hostel turned out to be a clean and nondescript townhouse just off of Taksim Square. Taksim, and the long street that runs from it, Istiklal Caddesi, make up the heart of “new” Istanbul – where thousands of people pile into the streets at all times of day and night to shop, eat and drink until their livers scream.

Sensory overload is inevitable when walking down this street. The hordes of people, motorbikes, trolleys and taxis that are all in a hurry to go somewhere; the smells of roasting chestnuts, kebab and spices I couldn’t identify… and oh, the sounds! Honking horns, violins, traditional Turkish songs and pop music, the speakers from the tops of minarets calling Muslims around the city to prayer, all mixed together at once. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced.

I’d like to think I’m a seasoned enough traveler to not grin like a child or stare openly, but it seems I’ve been doing a lot of that here. The diversity of things to look at makes me gawk, and for the first time in a very long time, I can’t understand a thing that’s going on language-wise, which makes things more confusing and a lot of fun. Luckily, Jon speaks enough Turkish to help us both get by, so I'm content for once to stick out like a sore thumb and just let this new world soak in.

In the four days that we spent in Istanbul, I saw none of the important sights that everyone sees. We’ll have time enough on our return trip on the way home. This time around, we slept late and just wandered, through the late afternoon and into the night, through the streets that curl around this side of the city.

[Jon looking like a badass while smoking a hookah at the beanbag bar under the bridge that he once described to me was his "favorite place in the whole world."]

If our time here had a theme, it was perhaps seeing cityscapes from all directions. Rooftops have more importance here than anywhere else I’ve been, and any apartment building or business could be hiding an amazing terrace just five or six floors above.

Jon took me to 5.kat, a beautiful rooftop restaurant and bar with a leafy terrace that offered some of the best views I’ve seen, perhaps ever. As we ate, the bridge across the Bosporus, strung with lights, changed color every few minutes. The next day we decided to make a night of poking through Taksim’s incredible array of pubs and bars. Each building has five or six bars or restaurants that take up individual floors, and if you make it to the roof of any of these (no mean feat once you’ve got a bit of a buzz on those small windy stairs!) you’ll be treated to a living diorama of the city. Rooftops nearby and restaurants with retractable roofs are lit like dollhouses so that you can look out across the sky and see people dancing, drinking, kissing and smoking. From each of our perches we watched the other rooftops to pick our next haunt. And so we hopped from roof to roof, finally ending up, flip flops and all, at arguably the most popular of Istanbul’s clubs, 360.

There were other things we discovered too – back alleys stuffed with antique shops, “French Street”, a narrow and steep passage of Parisian cafes with cobblestones and lights imported from Paris… All the tiny things - you know how I love tiny things - like tiny chairs that men sit on and drink tiny cups of Chai from. Oh, and perhaps only a discovery for me – ice cream so thick it was actually chewy!

[Pictures of a Chaihana with teeny tiny chairs and grown men sitting on them! Note my delight.]

When we packed up our things at 4am this morning, I didn’t want to go. But since I know I’ll be back in just a couple of short months, it made it easier to speed over the Bosporus once more, as Istanbul’s skyline twinkled across the water.

Night in Istanbul

I arrived in Turkey five days ago.

Before I start, I will acknowledge the fact that the first half of this long journey I’ve been on during the past few months went wholly undocumented on this blog. South Africa was a whirlwind that I’m still processing, and our intense work hours left me little time to stop and think about what I saw and learned. Hopefully as I settle into a routine I’ll be able to take some time to put to words some thoughts and feelings I have about that sweeping, beautiful country.

For just a taste of what I saw, I'll cheat a little and add this slideshow made by Jon and posted on his own blog:


South Africa - Images by Jon Vidar

But for now, I will write from the beginning of this new trip, which starts in Istanbul.