During Christmas vacation, Mike, Mary and I met up to spend a week together in Sri Lanka. It’s the first time the three of us have traveled together on our own, and it was an enjoyable and educational experience. As always, there were many valuable items of information gathered and lessons learned, which I will record here (in no particular order of importance) for future reference:

1. All you really need for a week in Sri Lanka is a pair of shorts, your contact lenses, and a rainjacket. The rest can be procured upon arrival for a reasonable fee ($4 swimming trunks, toothbrush) or borrowed from a sibling (reading material, towels). This fact comes in handy when Air Arabia fails to procure or deliver your luggage.

2. Planning ahead a bit (greatly facilitated by the acquisition of a lonely planet or other such guidebook, which seem to be unavailable in situ) saves one from getting trapped in a network of creepy guesthouses run by characters from HP Lovecraft stories (wasn’t the Mountains of Madness set somewhere on the subcontinent)? En route to the tea country we were tricked into booking at the RISING LION aka ‘Shining Jewel in the Peak of the Mountain’. Among the methods of torture we were subjected to at this chilling place were: tacky and heartless Christmas “cheer”, damp sheets in unheated rooms (the tea country is COLD in December!), a high-pitched wailing (vampire bats?) that accompanied our internet usage (for which our wallets were subsequently drained), and weak, insipid tea (in the heart of the TEA COUNTRY).

3. If you travel by train in Sri Lanka, make sure to alert some friendly fellow travelers of your destination, so that they can prevent you from going an hour past your stop. On the other hand, staying on the train longer means more opportunities to snack on tasty fried shrimp cookies and cups of hot sweet caffeinated “COPY-WOPY-LOPY”.

4. If you travel by bus, don’t wait for the bus to stop to get on, or you’ll be very lucky to get a seat. If you are CLERGY this does not apply.

5. The blind oracle at the foot of Adam’s peak, despite his wealth of information, is not all-knowing! Some information he does not consider essential: most of the lights on the way up are not working, making a torch necessary; the route is infested with tiny leeches that suck your blood and then burst inside your shoes.

Live and learn! Check out all the great pictures Mike and Mary took!

Categories: Mike, Alex, Mary
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Hello, it’s me again!

I imagine it’s the same for most people: vacations always seem much shorter than they should given 1) the laws of physics and 2) the stack of work on the desk when it’s all over. Days blur (did I have the lamb shank Monday or Tuesday?), mornings disappear and nights are filled with sounds of the ocean, ‘doksan-dokuz’ and… snoring.

I’m sure you’ve guessed from the way this post started, however, that our recent Bayram (’festival’ in Turkish, I’m told) getaway definitely bucked the trend (what does that mean, anyway?)! Well, at least for me…

Without boring you with details (although any of us, and some of us more than others, would be happy to provide them over an Efes or three), we six-to-ten assorted vacation-goers, depending on if you count Jeremy, Ruzgar, James and/or Sayed, enjoyed ourselves on the Mediterranean coast between Kaş and Antalya, dancing to Aretha Franklin and visiting Cengiz the carpet dealer, and back in Istanbul, searching Kadiköy for the perfect olive (which was never found, by the way).

Despite the contagious vomiting, a broken camera, the flight-ticket-eating-wastebasket, the ghost ferry ship, a decided lack of ‘knowledge’ or ‘information’ about the sunken ruins of Atlantis and my failure to procure any of the ‘essential’ things on my shopping list, I think we all had a great time!

As always, check out the photos!

Categories: Mike, Tom, Alex, Mary
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As some of you know, I returned in the past few days from three weeks in Sri Lanka, where I was joined by the always-available Clint and the heretofore little-known ‘Sylvestre’ (not the cat, the French astrophysicist).

While the destination changed from Australia (where Sylvestre currently lives) to Sri Lanka a few weeks before our departure (due to Australia being cold and Sri Lanka being not cold), the goal of the trip remained the same: to surf (err.. try to surf).

We are happy to report that we succeeded! Not only did we spend two weeks ’surfing’ in Arugam Bay (due east of Colombo), but we also visited all/most of the Culturally Important Places (Kandy, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruva, Yala, Sigiriya) AND didn’t kill anyone driving around (besides knocking a motorcyclist over and backing into a few things..).

As you can see from the photos, we surfed, ate, toured, safaried, and… that’s about it. All the surfing photos were taken over two days towards the end of our trip when the swell was disappearing (and they were taken at one of the smaller points). Believe me or not, up to you!

Oh and then we ate again.

Categories: Mike
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Tom and I took a break from work this past Sunday to pay a visit to a stunning exhibit of Anatolian carpets and Dagestani embroidery at the Sabanci Museum on the shores of the Bosphorus. After a breakfast of Turkish village-style eggs and bread with fresh cream and honey to fortify us, we spend a couple of hours marveling at some amazingly preserved and rare works of art. To me, these textiles really represent the acme of artistic achievement by their respective cultures - while a building like the Suleimaniye mosque obviously represents an incredible architectural and engineering achievement, these carpets are just as extraordinary in that they synthesize hundreds of years of traditional artistry and craftwork into a single unique item. And while the work that went into these carpets was not of the back-breaking kind, I imagine that in its way it demands just as much of the crafter. Compare the millions of miniscule knots that make up these carpets with the tens or hundreds of thousands of blocks of stone that make a mosque, and both boggle the mind. As for the embroideries from Dagestan (an isolated mountainous region of the North Caucasus just north of Azerbaijan), it amazed me how animist symbolism, Chinese designs, Egyptian Coptic crosses, Celtic symbols, Persian flower designs, and representations of the local landscape and flora and fauna could all be incorporated without any hint of incongruity into the art of a people known for jealously protecting their local traditions not only from foreigners, but from the next village. You really have to view the entire collection to appreciate how the same aesthetic sensibility permeates every piece, regardless of where its particular design elements originated. The quality of the colors, mostly produced using natural dyes, is also stunning. There are about 90 photos of the carpets and 60 of the embroideries in the gallery, so check them out!

Categories: Alex
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Okay, so I don’t actually know if it’s called ‘The Taimani Fort’, but it’s in the Taimani neighborhood of Kabul and it’s not the Kolola Pushta fort, which is the only one I know the name of.

Anyway, the hike up involved a pack of wild dogs, some baksheesh-seeking soldiers ‘guarding’ the ammunition depot in the fort, the usual set of staring young Afghan men (boys is probably a better term, even if they were in their 20s), and craters that looked suspiciously like exploded land mines (if you were a Fort Manager, wouldn’t you heavily mine the hill on top of which your fort full of weapons is located?).

I took some photos of the town below. The day was rather hazy/smoggy, but none of the kids playing football seemed to mind!

Categories: Mike
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When I was last in Istanbul, Alex gave me a partial hunk of parmigiano straight from Italy, which I took home with me and deposited straight in the fridge - I was afraid that if I started nibbling at it, it would soon be gone. In fact, I have even had pasta with bolognese sauce - twice! - and refrained from using it as the pasta was decidedly substandard and not worth ‘wasting’ the cheese on.

Given such a sad state of cheese in Kabul that would drive me to such madness, you can imagine the look on my face when, while stopping in the JAM SUPERSTORE with Roberta and Lisa, I spied a huge wheel of some kind of extremely tasty looking cheese deep in the corner of the refrigerator. As I’m sure the others can attest to, the look turned from incredulity to happiness to bewilderment to anxiety to - it’s true! - despair. How could this be possible? It couldn’t be! There’s no way such a magical wheel of cheese could appear in the JAM SUPERSTORE (which, sorry to say, is quite a misnomer) and still be edible.

I took the single magic cheese out an inspected it. It claimed it was a pecorino straight from Marrubiu, Sardinia, Italy (population 4,962 and elevation 7m above sea level). It also told me it was good until May 28, 2007 and that it should be ‘conservare al fresco’ed, which I am quite sure it was not. I took it to the shopkeeper and proceeded to ask him how much he wanted for it. A very confused look crossed his face, but he quickly recovered and came up with a price of 700 Afghanis - USD$14. With Roberta egging me on, I decided the remote possibility that the cheese was still good was definitely worth fourteen dollars.

We rushed to the guest house (immediately across the street) and proceeded to hack through the two centimeters of rind, find some mustard and crackers, and give it a try. IT WAS GREAT. And, there’s so much of it that it should continue to be great for weeks, if not months (at least until May 28, when the magic runs out). So, the moral of the story: don’t give up hope!

Categories: Mike
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Spring may be on the way, but Winter still hasn’t quite given up in Istanbul and continues to throw halfhearted punches now and again. Itching to get out of the city, some friends and I planned a day trip to the local rock climbing area of Ballikayalar (”Honey Rocks”), hoping that Winter didn’t have any killer knockout punches in store, and basically ignoring the weather forecasts that advertised a 60% chance of precipitation. So it was with a bit of trepidation that we found ourselves driving the 50km to the crags in a snowstorm after a promisingly sunny morning picking up our rental car in downtown Istanbul. Luckily, the snow stopped about 30 minutes after we arrived, and the rocks were for the most part still dry. After first setting up a toprope on a 5.13 (I guess our optimism knew no bounds that day) we moved around the corner of the cliff on the advice of some climbers there that we knew from the local gym in town and found some 5.7 - 5.9 stuff to lead and toprope. The routes were just short enough to reach the anchor and lower off before our hands were totally frozen in the 35 degree temps! It was my first time climbing in the area, and all in all a great experience!

Categories: Alex
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Continuing the recent trend of Tauras family members joining gyms initiated by Mike, we went up the hill to the alumni club gym last week and signed up for a 1 year family membership that lets us use the gym itself as well as the tennis and squash courts. The facility is quite new and well-equipped, if not terribly spacious. Today Tommy and I went in for our first workout. While Tommy used the treadmill and did some back exercises, I attempted a Workout of the Day (WOD) from Crossfit.com. This one was called ‘Angie’ and prescribed a generous dose of body-weight exercises: 100 pullups, 100 pushups, 100 situps and 100 squats. It took me over half an hour to do the pullups. I tried to employ the ‘kipping’ technique illustrated here but couldn’t really get the hang of it. It’s going to take a little more practice I guess. On the way out, we picked up a schedule of group exercise classes for Mary to check out. Tommy might also check out a Pilates class! We are gonna be one fit bunch of Yabancilar (aka gringos)! Oh and the place has a nice hot sauna - guaranteed to keep us going to the gym after our new year’s resolutions start to wane…

Categories: Alex
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Literally ‘taking out the goat’ (buzkashī: buz “goat” + kashi “taking out”), Buzkashi is a popular game in Central Asia involving powerful horses; a goat (or calf) carcass; whips/knives; a circular chalked goal where the carcass is to be dropped; considerable prize money; politics and bribery; and crowds scrambling from the charging horde of crazed riders.

This was my first time watching a game, and it was quite fun. I managed to take a few interesting photos (a few over my shoulder as I was trying to escape). Luckily I didn’t get hurt, but one of our party got clotheslined by the goat carcass, stepped on by one of the horses and dragged a few meters. Yikes. Luckily other than bruising she is fine; I have new respect for northern Europeans!

Categories: Mike
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Unfortunately I haven’t had any time to really take photos (yet!), but I did take these from my guesthouse’s balcony. Click on the photo to access a bigger version and to see others. The one on the top was taken using a 300mm (450mm in 35mm equivalency) telephoto lens and the one below is a stitched panoramic shot from three photos. More to come!

Categories: Mike
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