October 12

(in which our heroes stay in a garden full of cats)

Minor scheduling awryage... our Destined Museum for the morning will not open until 10am, despite differing published opening tim es of 9 or 9:30am. Alp: "Sometimes, things don't work well in Turkey."

The Replacement First Museum was the Karatay Madrasah, which has some very nice tile work; Alp says that the ring of tiles around the upper dome have Arabic (?) characters which are meant to be hard to read, to assist in meditation. I can say that the patterns are very mesmerizing. There's a sarcophagus (?) there, for one of the early Sufi philosophers... their tradition is oddly compelling. You wear the tall hat as a symbol of your own gravestone; then when you die, your sarcophagus has that hat and another head-dress on it.

The Destined Museum was the Mevlana Museum (which we may have been calling the Mevlevi museum -L) the mausoleum of Rumi, who began the whirling dervishes. It's both a museum, and a shrine of sorts. Alp says that using it as a shrine (where you come and pray for the intercession of a saint-equivalent) doesn't make sense because the Sufi tradition doesn't actually have saints. (There are lots of sarcophagi for Sufi philosophers there; but we think none of them expected to be around to appel to afterwards.)

"After I die, I am only useful to the cedar trees."

Nonetheless, a center for worship is being built across the street to allow people to pray in peace.

The Mevlevi museum has some very nice individual treasures - Korans, other religious texts, prayer rugs, and so on. The displays are cool, but I don't feel like they taught me much about Sufism. Most of that is from Alp.

There is calligraphic Arabic everywhere, very lovely, but no pictures allowed inside.

Then, bus ride to Antalya. On the way, Alp fielded some questions via sticky-note. One was on "The Kurdish Problem". More to say about that than I want to say here. But as always, Alp was honest, as far as I could ask for, and conscious of his own biases. The "Armenian" question awaits. It will be the hardest one of all. I can only imagine how hard it is to stand in front of a bus-load of tourists, talking about this stuff, wondering if they are judging you or your country based on some little thing you say in a language where you are solid, but not expert. My subtle-cues processing says that it's draining, at least.

Alp also mentioned that speaking English all day is tiring (he is better in French than English) and he has to go have a complicated conversation in Turkish to rest up.

Antalya is definitely a tourist haven, and we're now a bit off-season, so it feels a little like the entire town is open just for us. The weather is beautiful; it will probably turn out to still be too warm for our taste tomorrow. October seems to have been a good choice all around.

Found a litter of young kittens, plus mom, in a jewelry shop. The hotel garden seems to be populated by a bunch of young cats, possibly all siblings, who are using the garden as their practice ring for hunting. This city is great!

The young cats are temporarily named Richard (the larger orange + white), Geoffrey (the sneakier dark one), John and other John (the two younger orange + white overly pouncy ones), but there was another orange cat around who wasn't playing.