Hotel Roulette
For cost-cutting reasons, we have been asked to relocate from The Marmara Taksim to The Marmara Pera. Pera’s a great place; I don’t know if we were officially there a few days ago, but we were very close.
It’s a very nice hotel, but I’m not too excited to move from one hotel to another. But, this seems to be what we have to do.
I’ve been on total media silence for the past two days, as I have not yet watched the Super Bowl. We saw the Steelers score their first field goal last night and promptly fell asleep.
Can you believe an iPod Nano 8GB costs $85 more here (tax included in both prices) than in America? So if anybody comes here to see us you are hereby requested to (1) bring a suitcase filled with stuff I need you to smuggle in for me, and (2) use that now-empty suitcase to bring home all the cool non-electronic stuff you’ll get here on the cheap.
I am now the proud owner of a bağlama, which is a seven-stringed guitar/lute type thing. Kristin now has two different types of Turkish flutes (one with a reed and one without). We’re going to learn them as part of our cultural immersion. There is a district of music stores just down the road from Pera and Şişhane (a spanking new Metro stop), on a street called Galip Dede (Victorious Ancestor/Grandfather, for fellow literal language translation nuts).
The bağlama is set up kind of like a 12-string guitar, but with only three string groupings (2-2-3). The strings are different weights, so you tune them to octaves of each other within the same groupings. Which means you can pretty much slide around on one string and get a really awesome Middle Eastern vibe out of the instrument, even not knowing anything about how to play technically. It doesn’t seem too hard to play. I was getting the basic idea in the music store, and our salseman is a professional player who gives lessons. There are also books and VCDs.
We are also invited to dinner sometime with him and his fiancee. This is an awesome country, by the way.
Folk instruments are one of those things that are really cheap here. Like, we had a salesman tell us the really high quality professional-grade bağlamalar with great wood and mother-of-pearl inlays are like 300 TL ($188). I got an instrument of middling-high quality for 200 TL ($125). And, I mean, this thing is like the size of a 3⁄4 size guitar, only with a smaller but much deeper gourd-like resonance chamber. We’ll post pictures of our loot sometime shortly. I figure the point where “gourd” comes in, it becomes hard to visualize.
Anyway, it should be obvious by the length of this mail that things are much slower now at work. I have a lot of forward-looking work to do, but the emergencies have calmed down considerably.
I’m a little under the weather today (biraz hastayım, a little sick I am) from sinus stuff. I think being at a latitude similar to Boston with weather more like the average of London and Houston, jetting between the fourth floor of a deep hole (work), the 26th floor of a high rise (apartment) and the 16th floor of a hotel, with pressurized subways in between, has taken its toll, as I’ve had these troubles twice now already.
But, things are good and we might be getting close to moving to the apartment, even if we are just camping out.