Exploding Postal Scales

We have stepped off of Mother Earth and landed on a alien planet.  It looks like someone transplanted Bryce Canyon in Southern Utah onto the planet of Tatooine (of Star Wars fame), turning all of the Utah reds into Turkish grays.  Cappadocia, Turkey is a VERY foreign place.  The only connection we have to Earth as we know it are these little calorie bombs known as baklava.

The geologic features of this area are a bit other-worldly. Large towers of rock adorn the landscape and the canyons contain tunnels, caves, and spires of stone.  The guidebook claims that the stone is actually hardened volcanic ash that has eroded over the eons.  People here live largely in homes carved out of the resulting rock.  We were invited into one of these homes.  From the outside the home looked the same as it may have looked 1,000 years ago - a conical tower of stone with a crude wooden door and window carved out of the stone.  But from the inside the floor was covered with wall-to-wall Turkish rugs, and the home was wired and plumbed and sported a big-screen satellite TV.

I just couldn't fathom how an REI Four-Man Half Dome tent could spontaneously combust

Turkey has been a bit of a culture shock in a number of ways, like the 5x/day call to prayer blasted from virtually every mosque and every street corner starting at oh-dark thirty in the morning.  At least I think it is a call to prayer -- that is the claim.  But to me, it sounds like a bluesy country-western ballad sung in another language about a lost job, lost girlfriend and a rusted car on the front lawn.

Probably one of the more difficult to navigate cultural differences as far as day-to-day business is concerned is the lack of western-style supermarkets.  You can't go into a grocery store and buy, say, a loaf of bread and cold cuts.  You can go to the outdoor market and buy flour and a chicken.  So here on the planet of Bryce Canyon/Tatooine, we have had to radically change how we go about fueling our growing mid-sections.

The Turks are extremely friendly.  We have educated the kids over the summer about cultural force-fields.  For example, in Sweden, every person has a non-penetrable force-field around them of, say, a couple of feet.  Nobody will stand or sit closer than two feet from a stranger, and the only breach of the force field is when a person will occasionally reach through and shake your hand.

We warned the kids that as we traveled south in Europe their force-fields would shrink, and that they could expect the locals to not only stand closer to them than they would like, but that they might even get the occasional pinch on the check or pat on the head.  If the force-fields in Italy and Greece are tiny, well, they don't even exist in Turkey.

Jordan in particular has noted that his force-field has metamorphosed into a magnetic field, attracting all manner of unwanted attention. It's as if his novel blond hair and blue eyes are a bright neon sign advertising to strangers, "Torture Me!"  He can expect several pats on the head or pinches of the cheeks on any given day.  Katrina, being a middle-sized girl in a Muslim society, is largely immune to the little pokes and prods, and does her best to protect her little brother by acting as a human shield.

If the unwanted attention was limited to head patting and cheek pinching it would be at least tolerable for Jordan.  Unfortunately there have also been several incidents of being "goosed" from behind, being picked up and held, being ambushed and thrown up in the air, and even being tugged away by the hand and dragged down the street with the words "you are mine now."  Once he had a lollipop pulled right out of his mouth and held far above his head, and yesterday a man offered to barter him in trade for his three Turkish daughters.

This has all been intended in a good-natured way, but the reality is that the daily muggings haven't bridged the culture divide and it has put the poor little guy in tears more than once.

As a result, Jordan wants to start wearing sunglasses and a hat with electric probes to shock people, but mostly he wants to get a T-shirt that says in Turkish, "Don't Touch - Bites."

I, on the other hand, want a T-shirt that says, "No Thank You - I Do Not Need a Carpet." The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Turkey.  The Turkish brand of friendly I am certain is genuine.  But as the old saying goes, if a stranger suddenly wants to be your friend, then they are trying to sell you something.  The Turks are a hard-working people, and as far as I can tell, as honest as they come.  Shops are everywhere, selling anything, but in the tourist areas mostly they sell carpets, a.k.a Turkish rugs.  But, enough already.

You can't walk down the street without being asked to come into a shop.  This usually isn't menacing, but is polite and friendly and a simple "no thank you" suffices.  But it does wear a bit thin as you can forget about the simple pleasure of going for a walk because every 30 seconds you have to refuse a shopkeeper.

The polite yet persistent nature of the shopkeepers has percolated down to the stray cats, which are everywhere.  Turkey does not have a mouse problem.  Every restaurant has its local band of cats that beg for food.  Since the tables are on the street the cats have puuurfect access to kind-hearted diners.  They will quietly look up at you with their big eyes full of eager anticipation.  If you ignore them long enough they will simply start twitching their tail and then reach up and put their front paws on your thigh, or even jump up onto your lap.

I swear there is something in the water.  Not only do the cats and the shopkeepers have in common the inability to take "no" for an answer, you find yourself not wanting to say "no" to them, because, well, they are so courteous and well-behaved.

The Turks may be friendly, but the ones we have spoken to at length are cautious about talking freely about the United States.  They do not wish to offend us by discussing the current state of affairs in the U.S.  If we can get past the cautious phase, most Turks want to express their sincere sympathies about the harsh existence we must endure in the U.S.

One college-age girl we spoke to was proud of her liberal cosmopolitan attitude and told us that she plans to visit the U.S. soon and that she was certain that some parts of the U.S. might in fact be safe, and, by the way, could we please tell her which parts those are?

Of course, who can blame someone who only understands the U.S. from what they see on CNN for thinking that you can't walk down the street without fear of being gunned down?

As for me, I haven't been doing a good job of trying to convince those I come into contact with that Americans aren't all ready to blow up everything that crosses their path.  I am, of course, referring to the exploding postal scale.

I took a fairly large package to the post office in rural Goreme to mail it home to the U.S.  Goreme is a very small town.  When I arrived at the post office I surprised the lone postal clerk, rudely interrupting his crossword puzzle.

We went through the motions of mailing a package, which of course, includes weighing it.  I noted that the scale was a modern-looking digital unit.  I also noted that it needed to be plugged in before the postal clerk could weigh my package.

The clerk plugged in the scale, and then he placed my package on it, noted the weight, and proceeded to fill out a bunch of paperwork, leaving the package sitting on the scale.

After a few minutes, the sound of a gunshot ripped through the silence. The postal clerk gave me a look of abject horror and put his hands up as if he were surrendering to me.  My ears ringing from the blast, I noted that the sound clearly came from the direction of the scale.  Or from the package sitting on top of the scale.  Of course, I was just as stunned as he was.  A few seconds passed that seemed to stretch in a unnatural fashion.  The postal clerk gradually began to realize that the Goreme, Turkey, Post Office was not under siege by this lone American.

He gave a quick nod toward the package sitting on the scale and with the quizzical look, it was clear that he wanted to know just what in the hell I was mailing home. My mind raced as I tried to think of what in the package would have exploded like that, but I just couldn't fathom how an REI Four-Man Half Dome tent could spontaneously combust.  Plus, the package looked perfectly tranquil sitting atop the scale.  So, I just gave him a shrug of the shoulders which of course is universally understood as "beats the heck out of me."

It wasn't long before it was clear that it was in fact the scale that had exploded.  To the casual observer the scale looked perfectly innocent.  But upon closer inspection it was clear that it had weighed its last package.

Later that day September had to go to the same post office to mail yet another package home. She understood perfectly well why I refused to accompany her to the post office, my shame at having blown up the postal scale preventing me from wanting to face the lone postal clerk again.  I told her not to be surprised if she wasn't able to mail anything.

When September presented her package to the postal clerk he pointed to the scale and said "Machine kaput!" and indicated to her, by way of universal sign language of grunting and pointing, to just go up to the market and get the package weighed on the vegetable scale and come back to tell him how much it weighed.  At the market September found a perfectly functioning analog scale, with no explodable parts.

In a few days we will be leaving Turkey for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.  According to exactly one data point that we know of, Dubai has the world's greatest water park, which easily justifies the visit.  After 4 days in Dubai we will be going to Tanzania for two weeks.  I have no idea what we will find in Tanzania, but I have heard accounts of people actually visiting and then living to tell the tale.  So, I suspect we will, too.