He walks! He stalks!

06.08.08 0809 We spent a day at the offices of and then a day at a site of TEMA, which stands for something like reforestation and protection of natural habitats, but in Turkish and with way more words. The people of this NGO were super nice, and we were never at a want of either simit or cay as we sat around a long conference table as the rain poured down outside.

I sat next to a boy who I swear was from Canada, or at least Minnesota, but he said that he was born and bred in Chicago. He’s out and around practicing investigative journalism, and he got involved with this group, the largest environmental NGO in Turkey, because some huge rakı company was polluting this river with disgusting ewwy gooey stuff that does not belong in rivers. Sometimes, I wish that people who pollute could have the same thing dumped into their place of living, but most people’s places of living are dumps of artifacts and useless junk that’s wasting space to make them feel important, so I suppose that I best not incur the negative karma.

I really enjoyed hearing about this organisation, but that was probably mostly because that’s what I want to do with my life--continent hop and NGO/micro-finance it up. I like to see people doing what they know is right--what drives them to rise in the morning and smile all night long.

We drove west to a big lake that supplies drinking water who knows how to the city. It had once drained into the Mediterranean, but a dam or embankment thingy had been built at the teeny mouth to stop this, which pretty much killed all the fish after making the lake freshwater. We drove around it and walked around one area, seeing a really old tavern hotel thingy, because the silk road moseyed right on through there. I imagined caravans of men in all manner of dress, the animals in the middle of the floor, their faces warming next to the fires whose smoke ran in pipes under the silk road bridge, keeping it from freezing in the winter (or keeping enemies from knowing that there was a settlement there, depending on whom you ask). I heard their tongues like I was sitting at Babel*, and I could smell their meat and some spices as a scent that filled the room. As always, Atatürk was there.

Back in Istanbul, we went to the Deniz Muzesi (Sea Museum) down by the water, which was pretty interesting, but the one room that had all the wax bodies in uniforms over the ages reminded me that I am DEFINITELY still creeped out by dummies since reading R. L. Stine’s Goosebump’s book The Talking Dummy when I was in second grade. Daddy’s sense of humour didn’t help to make Slappy any less of a threat.

*That’s not even a well-fabricated story, people who thought that they were hearing god, because even when people speak two languages that are not mutually intelligible, they can still communicate. The biggest problem in an attempt to build a tower that reaches heaven with a whole bunch of people who don’t speak the same language would not be the language barrier, but the fact that heaven doesn’t exist, silly.