Break starts tomorrow for the dual holidays of Eid al-Adha and Turkey Day USA. Since we're all going to be spread across the Middle East this Thursday, we went ahead and celebrated Thanksgiving last weekend instead (some photos courtesy of Susan).
Tonight, I'm packing and cleaning up again. Travel plans for the next 5 days: Oman.
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Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Weekend in Dubai -- Photos
Enclosed, please find much delayed photos from Dubai, weekend of November 6-7.
We booked our tickets via Flydubai, a new budget airline that just started flights into and out of Dubai this year.
Dubai airport
Taking the new metro for a spin
It was a HOT day -- memories of Doha back in September all over again
Etisalat Tower 2
Sunset at the beach
Dinner at a beachside Italian restaurant
Night lights -- on the right is the view of a city from Barasti, one of the big-name bars in town
A Chihuly sculpture! (@ the Atlantis Hotel)
Ocean-themed Atlantis deco
More of the Atlantis
The Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower) and Burj Al Arab (Tower of the Arabs) -- maybe we'll get closer some other time.
Mall of the Emirates, where there were Christmas decorations. Not expecting those.
Ski Dubai, the infamous indoor ski slope
Yeah, you wouldn't know there's a crisis just from looking around here
Our last hours, spent at the beach -- good weekend.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
"We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident"
Last night, we took a midnight drive into the desert for a chance to catch the Leonids at their peak intensity. It wasn't altogether without its hiccups -- the air smelled kind of weird, I got sand in my clothes and hair, I had too much catch-up work to ever justify staying up so late, and try as we did, we almost but never totally escaped all light pollution around the horizon.
Not that any of it mattered -- it hardly seems to, whenever something like the night sky makes you feel really infinitesimally small in the universe. It's a crazy thing to think about: these meteor showers are just space dust and debris, little remnants of a comet trail dating back to 1400s. For over five centuries, this whole stream of rocks has been whirling around the sun, left behind at a time when the printing press on Earth was the technological bombshell of its day. Back then, Copernicus wasn't even born yet, much less Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and everyone else who made it possible to even predict these showers from year to year, and here I am teaching to premeds, in mere weeks, what took them entire lifetimes to accomplish. Every shooting star in the sky was a piece of cosmic litter that had been sitting in our solar system for generations upon generations, through every terrible and amazing thing we've done in a species in all that time, only to burn up this very year in the fragile atmosphere of our tiny planet.
It boggles the mind. Anyway, hopefully someone else also looked up for a night and wished for something nice.
Not that any of it mattered -- it hardly seems to, whenever something like the night sky makes you feel really infinitesimally small in the universe. It's a crazy thing to think about: these meteor showers are just space dust and debris, little remnants of a comet trail dating back to 1400s. For over five centuries, this whole stream of rocks has been whirling around the sun, left behind at a time when the printing press on Earth was the technological bombshell of its day. Back then, Copernicus wasn't even born yet, much less Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and everyone else who made it possible to even predict these showers from year to year, and here I am teaching to premeds, in mere weeks, what took them entire lifetimes to accomplish. Every shooting star in the sky was a piece of cosmic litter that had been sitting in our solar system for generations upon generations, through every terrible and amazing thing we've done in a species in all that time, only to burn up this very year in the fragile atmosphere of our tiny planet.
It boggles the mind. Anyway, hopefully someone else also looked up for a night and wished for something nice.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
I don't have a coffee problem -- why, who told you that?
Turkish coffee is my new addiction relaxing beverage of choice. It's nothing super special or exotic -- just normal coffee beans ground extra fine and prepared a certain way -- but I'd never tried it until coming here. Ever since getting a Turkish coffee pot over the first Eid break, I've been making a cup or four to wake myself up every weekend, getting better and better at it with each pass (not that it's hard, but I just had no idea what I was doing when I started).
My trusty and somewhat overpriced coffee pot, courtesy of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.
The pot is filled with enough cold water for the desired amount of coffee. This one can make about 6 cups: a cup of Turkish coffee is conventionally about the size (and strength) of an espresso shot.
The coffee grounds get thrown in on top of the water, about a heaping teaspoonful for each cup to be made. Coffee beans for Turkish coffee are all but ground down to a powder. The idea is to boil them directly in the water, instead of letting them sit in a filter. I don't stir them in, I just let them dissolve into the water on their own. The coffee I use also has some cardamom in it.
Then I heat the water, but as slowly as possible. On this setting, it takes about 20-30 minutes to bring the pot to a boil.
I add a couple teaspoons of sugar, again without stirring.
Eventually the coffee comes to a boil. The pot comes off the stove right when it boils and then sits for a bit while the dregs settle. Then -- pour, drink, and leave the leftover grounds at the bottom of the coffee cup. On days when there's enough time, this stuff beats out machine-brewed coffee by far.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Retro-blogging IstanBulgaria Part 7: Lost and Found in Translation
From Monday, Sept 21, 2009
It would be masochistically interesting to see how we'd get by without Aleks, who's been expertly handling our interactions with almost anyone here. Very few of the people we've met speak English. Since Aleks speaks Russian -- the closest any of us can get to Bulgarian -- he's basically taken over all of our communication with ticket offices, taxi drivers, random passersby, and the like. It helps that most of the older generation who grew up during the Soviet era are familiar with Russian (English and Western European languages are becoming common only among the younger generation, we're told).
Here's the thing I wasn't prepared for: the language barrier isn't just verbal. Head nodding and shaking, for "yes" and "no," are entirely reversed here. As we've found out, nodding means "no," while shaking your head side-to-side means "yes." Bulgaria is apparently one of the only places in the world that does this. We initially saw this firsthand at the bus station (pictured), when the ticket lady was answering a question about buses to Rila or Dupnitsa for the following day. She answered "da, da, da," but at the same time shook her head vigorously. The disconnect was really jarring, the first time I saw it. Later, I asked a woman at an electronics store if she sold CompactFlash memory cards (for my camera), and she nodded her head as if to say yes, but closed her eyes and solemnly repeated "ne, no, no." The younger the person, the more conscious they tend to be of this around foreigners. I asked the man at another electronics store -- probably in his mid-20s -- the same question. He said "no" and started to nod, but then saw my confused face, stopped midway on the downswing, and quickly began shaking his head to the side.
No worries, though. Occasionally, the language thing gets pretty funny, too (to us, at least). Several of the bus companies like to announce new bus routes on the signs above their ticket booths, and "new" in Bulgarian translates to "novo." In the Cyrillic alphabet, though, the Latin "N" looks like "H," while the Latin "V" looks like "B." So to us English-speakers, the signs look like they're advertising "HOBO!!!"
It would be masochistically interesting to see how we'd get by without Aleks, who's been expertly handling our interactions with almost anyone here. Very few of the people we've met speak English. Since Aleks speaks Russian -- the closest any of us can get to Bulgarian -- he's basically taken over all of our communication with ticket offices, taxi drivers, random passersby, and the like. It helps that most of the older generation who grew up during the Soviet era are familiar with Russian (English and Western European languages are becoming common only among the younger generation, we're told).
Here's the thing I wasn't prepared for: the language barrier isn't just verbal. Head nodding and shaking, for "yes" and "no," are entirely reversed here. As we've found out, nodding means "no," while shaking your head side-to-side means "yes." Bulgaria is apparently one of the only places in the world that does this. We initially saw this firsthand at the bus station (pictured), when the ticket lady was answering a question about buses to Rila or Dupnitsa for the following day. She answered "da, da, da," but at the same time shook her head vigorously. The disconnect was really jarring, the first time I saw it. Later, I asked a woman at an electronics store if she sold CompactFlash memory cards (for my camera), and she nodded her head as if to say yes, but closed her eyes and solemnly repeated "ne, no, no." The younger the person, the more conscious they tend to be of this around foreigners. I asked the man at another electronics store -- probably in his mid-20s -- the same question. He said "no" and started to nod, but then saw my confused face, stopped midway on the downswing, and quickly began shaking his head to the side.
No worries, though. Occasionally, the language thing gets pretty funny, too (to us, at least). Several of the bus companies like to announce new bus routes on the signs above their ticket booths, and "new" in Bulgarian translates to "novo." In the Cyrillic alphabet, though, the Latin "N" looks like "H," while the Latin "V" looks like "B." So to us English-speakers, the signs look like they're advertising "HOBO!!!"
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Retro-blogging IstanBulgaria Part 6: Bulgaria or Bust
From Monday, Sept 21, 2009
View Istanbul to Sofia in a larger map
I am super groggy and bleary-eyed. This bus has been rolling along for some 9 hours, maybe, and for the first time during the ride, there's real sunlight streaming in through the windows. We're on the road from Istanbul, Turkey to Sofia, Bulgaria. It's not quite 8 AM, and it's about 12 degrees C outside. The seven of us have become just four: on the bus are Adam, Aleks, Jakob, and me. We're now officially in Bulgaria, after a brief customs stop at the border and night of oft-broken sleep.
I share Jakob's amazement from last night: we're actually in Bulgaria. It wasn't a certainty that we'd arrive here, since we weren't able to book our way here in advance. The bus will be arriving on schedule in a few hours, but the day before, we were seriously unsure about whether we'd even be able to make it out of Turkey in the first place. We had originally planned to take an overnight Istanbul-Sofia train in a sleeper car, so yesterday, we all -- still as 7 -- made our way to the Istanbul train station (the reddish building pictured) for tickets. When we got there, a makeshift sign on the ticket booth informed us that all international trains were cancelled until October, on account of the recent flooding in Turkey. This was followed by brief frustration and resignation to staying in Istanbul the whole trip -- Istanbul's great, so it wasn't a terrible prospect, admittedly -- until the ticket man informed us that buses to Bulgaria were still running. Since it was the guys who had planned on going while the girls never intended to go, we split up by gender and went separate ways for the time being. Us guys trammed our way to the bus station (Otogar), and bought ourselves each a 50-lira ticket.
Then, after we got our tickets and had ourselves a cheap doner lunch, we were missing the girls a bit, so we met up again to hang out for a few more hours, be it near the Grand Bazaar, in Sultanahmet, or down along the river. Dinner was at Hamdi's, a reasonably cheap restaurant with a gorgeous view of the Bosphorous and delicious food. Post-nightfall, we walked into the entrance another historical mosque to wander beneath its towering dome and minarets. We explored for a bit, then parted ways with the girls there in midst of the courtyard. Tres cinematique. We'll see them again in a few days.
For now, goodbye Turkey. Sofia, here we come.
View Istanbul to Sofia in a larger map
I am super groggy and bleary-eyed. This bus has been rolling along for some 9 hours, maybe, and for the first time during the ride, there's real sunlight streaming in through the windows. We're on the road from Istanbul, Turkey to Sofia, Bulgaria. It's not quite 8 AM, and it's about 12 degrees C outside. The seven of us have become just four: on the bus are Adam, Aleks, Jakob, and me. We're now officially in Bulgaria, after a brief customs stop at the border and night of oft-broken sleep.
I share Jakob's amazement from last night: we're actually in Bulgaria. It wasn't a certainty that we'd arrive here, since we weren't able to book our way here in advance. The bus will be arriving on schedule in a few hours, but the day before, we were seriously unsure about whether we'd even be able to make it out of Turkey in the first place. We had originally planned to take an overnight Istanbul-Sofia train in a sleeper car, so yesterday, we all -- still as 7 -- made our way to the Istanbul train station (the reddish building pictured) for tickets. When we got there, a makeshift sign on the ticket booth informed us that all international trains were cancelled until October, on account of the recent flooding in Turkey. This was followed by brief frustration and resignation to staying in Istanbul the whole trip -- Istanbul's great, so it wasn't a terrible prospect, admittedly -- until the ticket man informed us that buses to Bulgaria were still running. Since it was the guys who had planned on going while the girls never intended to go, we split up by gender and went separate ways for the time being. Us guys trammed our way to the bus station (Otogar), and bought ourselves each a 50-lira ticket.Then, after we got our tickets and had ourselves a cheap doner lunch, we were missing the girls a bit, so we met up again to hang out for a few more hours, be it near the Grand Bazaar, in Sultanahmet, or down along the river. Dinner was at Hamdi's, a reasonably cheap restaurant with a gorgeous view of the Bosphorous and delicious food. Post-nightfall, we walked into the entrance another historical mosque to wander beneath its towering dome and minarets. We explored for a bit, then parted ways with the girls there in midst of the courtyard. Tres cinematique. We'll see them again in a few days.
For now, goodbye Turkey. Sofia, here we come.
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