Learning to act right (29)… I did see something, really!!

Learning to act right (29)… I did see something, really!!
Torrey Orton
Aug. 23, 2012

How close are the nuts to cracking?

Six weeks ago I wrote: "I did not see anything I could swear to in a court of law" about a missing, believed to be stolen, cross out front of the Fertility Control Clinic.


A few days ago the following happened on the same stage: The police were called for an act of mine deemed assaultive by two of the regular Saturday HoGPIs. I had held up in the view of them and their associates the front of THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIANMAGAZINE August 04-05, 2012. The cover story was a self-outing by a Catholic priest of his married status while an active pastor. Its title was: "Sins of the Father - Why this Catholic priest got married – and kept it secret from his flock".


While holding it up, I also mentioned that there was another front page story in TheAGE that day of yet another unreported sex abuse by priests in the 1990's. This presentation took about 10 seconds, twice. Once to show it to a group of 3 HoGPIs gathered at one end of their prescribed protest ground and the second time to the lone male at the other end of their ground. He said something at the time about calling the police, and he did so, but did not specify what prompted the call. He was more than his usual angry self at my perceived disrespect for their enterprise.


A two officer divvy van showed up from the nearest station about 30 minutes later. One male, one female in their early thirties. The woman conducted the formal discussion with the complainants and then came over to see me, which was the moment I discovered I was the object of their complaint. I acknowledged having the allegedly offensive magazine and that I raised it in front of them, along with a remark about the morning's front page revelations in TheAGE of 18/08/12 about priestly misbehaviour with children. Such news seems to me germane, since the HoGPIs are claiming an absolute high moral ground for their objection to abortion. For me, their ground loses some altitude in the light of the Church's failing, so I have been making this point regularly over months, but not so effectively it seems.


Their reported complaint was that I had provoked them by raising matters that were not germane to their self-appointed task of "helping" patients at the FCC. Hence, I had assaulted the complainants. Of course, it is a bit of a wonder that something un-germane should have been so provoking, but then I quibble. I offered not to do it again. I was not commanded not to, nor formally cautioned against doing so. The door is open to argue that it is germane, and that might well be worth doing sometime if we have some cheap legal service with which to pursue the issue and make the total behaviour of the Church germane to this part of their suite of offers to the local world!!?


One side effect, so I'm told, has been to have my image raised in the FCC security community for having lived down a "we'll call the police" threat from the HoGPIs. Didn't even know I was lifting my profile. Since I didn't know what I was doing, I can hardly claim any honour for it. Maybe effectiveness is more important than intentions. It's often unclear how many things come to be.











 

Travel funnies 2012 (6) – Istanbul items

Travel funnies 2012 (6) –
Istanbul items
Torrey Orton
Aug. 22, 2012


One background thing of note
Istanbul was a much better event than I had ever considered it could be. My expectations were discoloured by my resistance to new major cultural differences, mixed with a sense that I already have enough such differences well-lodged in various parts of my being. This is not new for me in relation to travel options going back years. My China world started this way 35 years ago. The only really foreign place I ever spontaneously chose to live in was France 40 years ago, and of them all (visited and inhabited) it's the most unfinished for me, so it's always on the annual travel list.



Shoe shine guy
On the afternoon of our last day we were returning to the digs we had occupied for five nights to do a quick shower and final pack. At the top of the hill we climbed to the hotel we started passing a shoeshine stand – a guy a bit younger than us perched on a small stool purpose-built for the height requirements of shining a shoe on his polish box foot step – and he offered his services for the third or so time in our five days in the area. He was certainly right that my walking boots were more dust than polish and more scuffed than smooth. Jane and I did a quick visual negotiation and I agreed. The polish was the best I've ever had, commercial or self-applied. Along the way he talked about his present life, numbers of children and grandchildren, enquired after ours, and went back to the life of a lifetime polisher…not at all good that day; nil clients until us.


Back to the box. It was an art work in its own right – each polish container topped with a well buffed brass mini-minaret and set in a wood-framed tray. The whole box was carefully oiled, modelling the service on offer.


The melodious muezzin
On our last day about 1:15pm during lunch at Pandeli in the far southeast corner of the Spice Market the call to prayer broke out with penetrating power from the nearest minaret (all projected with full volume loudspeakers) in the finest of the 10 or so such events we'd heard in five days…a tuneful and peaceful rendition of a routine most locals would know, of which the most we could pick up was the "God is great" punctuations for completed phrases… but the guy could sing a chant in tune and in time. Plato was right – music is the voice of the gods, or was it the demons?


Magna chartas at Asa Sofya
This grande dame of churches was taken into the Moslem fold somewhat after the conquering of Constantinople in the mid 1400's. She had already been in service 700+ years by then. Her conversion was simple. Declared Moslem it in the name of Allah, add some minarets and de-decorate and counter-decorate a bit. Now a museum, its history is all on view. Apart from some mosaics defaced and partly reconstructed, there was a stunningly large series of what would pass for billboards if they were promoting local fabrics or eats rather than the Koranic phrases they contained - massively larger than the same kind of verbals to be found in the purpose-built, much younger Blue Mosque just across the plaza.


Touts with taste
More than once I had the almost joyous experience of seriously competent salesmen of fabrics or edibles or visits to parts well known or post card representations of what I'd missed or seen but not noticed should be signalled to others. Many of these guys (a pretty men-only scene, the streets of Istanbul) had perfect first moves which personalised unintrusively what we all knew was a commercial dance. For example, the café owner who remarked, "Nice shoes", as we padded by his establishment around dinner time, directing my attention to their aged colouring (NOT the boots of the polishing encounter above!). There followed a three or four step natter about the virtues of shoe aging which tailed off into a pleasant reiteration of his unspoken introduction to dinner services and untroubled acknowledgement of our not being quite at the dining time ourselves. A really striking characteristic of the tourist area touts wherever we went…just plain competent and human(e). A case of an unexpected personal truth as the medium of relationship building


Afternoon at the baths
The baths we visited were 500 years old give or take a few decades. The marble floors were smooth and slightly carved out from the passage of feet all those years, much as the portals of the Aya Sofya and Blue Mosque were …smoothly rutted like an old unmade road on clay based soils, with something like the same danger of slip-sliding around when wet. I'd never had a Turkish bath experience and wouldn't have on my own initiative. Like most things I do under some duress (that is, because I can't be bothered otherwise), I find interesting and enjoyable. Such it was with this. The heat was dense and carried in all the media supporting our presence – floors, walls, humidity… Relief was startling. Water at 20 degrees is a slight slap in an ambience of 40+C and 95% humidity. I'll be looking for its equivalent in Oz, but preliminary searches are not encouraging.


Driving in alleys – everyone's cutting it fine
About the only scary thing in the whole Istanbul experience started and finished our time here – driving. Taxis are chauffeured with a manic intensity ramped up by two entwined factors: drivers' need for speed and proximity of collision opportunities. Around the central tourist parts where we mostly were, streets mostly dated from a horse-drawn era. Mostly one way and mostly bordered on one side with parked cars and 3 foot wide footpaths and packed with wandering masses of other cars and pedestrians, a fluxing tapestry of moving metal and bodies, the latter flowing in all directions across the roads with a minimalist approach, from our Melbourne viewpoint, to personal safety.


You know that experience in Melbourne of people who step off a curb to the edge of traffic and start moving into the space which hasn't yet actually appeared in the traffic, failing which they will be scrunched by the same actuality? Well, Istanbul was that multiplied geometrically. I'm sure locals learn to judge where the pedestrians are going by those slight twitches of preparation for movement. They take a lifetime to learn to the same level of unconscious competence as the pedestrians, usually by early pedestrian experiences of their own. Remember learning to look left first when you are used to looking right? That's the level of the challenge.


Being on the starting edge of that trajectory was not entertaining. For us here, it's usually a simple 90 degree crossing of our direction of movement. There it's a 360 degree potential. The people we could see, and those who hadn't yet appeared in view, could go in any direction at any time and come from any direction at any time. Or, so it seemed. I haven't done the Istanbul road accident stats research yet to see if our apprehension in the act of travel was warranted, for our sake or others'.



 

Travel funnies 2012 (5) – Cat City, Jetonsmatik and such…

Travel funnies 2012 (5) –
Cat City, Jetonsmatik and such…
Torrey Orton
Aug.1, 2012

 
One thing of note – Istanbul is cat city

 
Just outside our hotel – the slightly overstated Ottoman Imperial at the side wall of the Hagia Sophia mosque/church – a squad of local cats of various ages from 4 months to indeterminate, but nothing looking over 5 years, hangs out. They are not alone in feeling they own the place, have no fear of humans or anything else and no obvious reason to. Their only possible natural enemy, us, are at worst indifferent and best vigorously supportive, running feeding campaigns on the mosque enclosure wall tops or from concerned local eateries around town. There's only been three dogs in sight and they were moving on thru the square between the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia at a moderate pace. Cats, on the other hand, snooze pretty much anywhere including a stool almost obstructing the passage of mosque visitors ambling into the Blue Mosque yesterday. And given a small chance they'll schmooze up to passers-by, when awake and feeling needy, with normal head-butting moves. Cat heaven or haven?


Background note: my understanding is that dogs are conceived as impure in Islam, hence the cat heaven milieu in Istanbul, perhaps! Google says: there's a history of cats in Istanbul. Even Obama scratched one on the Hagia Sophia pathways a year ago. That I would discourage, but then I'm probably an emerging animal disease vector kook…And, on the other hand, cats have a more promising history in Islam. Google "Aya Sophia Cats" for a sample of who we saw daily, including the mosque enclosure feeding grounds. We saw at least three dead ringers for members of our historical cat menagerie. Now that's genetic constancy for ya.


Jetonsmatik
There's a quite well done tram network which joins the tourist centre of town with neighbouring touristy areas. It looks a bit French, an impression amplified yesterday on the other touristy side of the water (the Golden Horn) as we were gearing up for a return from an arvo at a Sufi "Whirling Dervishes" event. There in the access path to the tram stop was a large cabinet boldly labelled Jetonsmatik, which clanged my French bell with authority. A jeton is a token. So, our hosts have a token-mediated payment system, as did NYC for years in its massively less salubrious subway system
.
However, as you've been expecting, there's a hitch. The jeton cost is Turkish Lira 2 for a ride to anywhere on the line. TL come in 1 and 2 TL denominations. But, the TL2 jeton can only be bought with TL1 coins. As I was trying to follow the obvious path of using my TL2 coins unsuccessfully a guy came along and said clearly "Nyet" when I held it up helplessly. Thank gods for other foreigners. They often have an intuitive understanding of gaps locals can never perceive.


"620 kgs gods"
A nice language twist. The Danes are just a few breaths away from English in many ways, and here's one. Looking at the guidelines for usage on the door of our hotel lift in Copenhagen I noted daily the limit of 8 persons but not the alternative 620kgs gods limit until the last day of 5. I'm still wondering about the weight of gods given the known weight of a soul (21 grams isn't it?). Or, how many gods does it take to make a good? Or goods to make a god? Eight guys or girls my size would sink the thing, being neither gods nor goods.
Stop it!