Salad days

Greetıngs,

The Turkısh keyboard takes a bit of gettıng used to because the small "i" is really a vertical line. Internet access is sporadic - no recent podcasts for the moment - as I dance around eating salad, cheese, fresh bread, salmon, olives and assorted Middle Eastern delights all washed down wıth sparkling mineral water (soda)...settling into the ebb and flow of the place, people, attitudes and all the variables.

"Where are all people?" I yelled at the top of my pitiful voice rasping fragments of sky standing along the street filled wıth emptiness. Well, for starters, there were business people knotted with ties, hiding behind shades, stern faced women dragging kids around for the summer in the heavy direct heat and flamıng red haired - nose pierced gothic counter intuitive punk rockers hanging out on corners, but, like you know, where are all the coagulating, broiling, endless MASSES...?

Peace. 

Ankara

Once upon a time there was this traveler and he left China after three years. He’d taught English in Sichuan and Fujian. He loved writing, travel and teaching.

It was Time to leave because he’d completed all the work there he was supposed to do. He was ready to move on. He needed to make love along life’s road and give birth to new inspirations. Simple, immediate and direct.

Before leaving the Middle Kingdom he had a “going away - give it all away” party. He gifted 30 books and 40 DVDs to his English major students at a university in Fujian.

“Don Quixote, The Garden of Secrets, If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller, The Poetics of Space, Journey to The Center of the Night, Nomad, The Stream of Life, The Book of Imaginary Beings,” among others listed on his Amazon book list. He knew the students would enjoy and share world literature.

He gifted 20 plants to Chinese teachers whose destiny was established long ago. Plants he had nurtured through wind, rain, sun and lightning flashes along eastern green mountains before, during and after sunrise.

After putting 2,650 miles on a Warrior bike he sold it to a tall business teacher from Holland where the land is flat and filled with windmills and tulips. The teacher would return to China after a summer holiday and needed it for his Chinese girlfriend. Spin them wheels.

Then, the traveller went to Xiamen and got on a plane to Hong Kong. He wandered around the huge gleaming airport looking at stuff and absorbing new dialects.

In a dream about flying to Istanbul he looked out a narrow plastic window and saw a brilliant severed slice of orange and red sun inside blue and white clouds on a horizon.

He closed his eyes and dreamed he landed in Ankara where he would live, teach and explore.

A woman named G met him at the airport. Blond, positive, 40’s and from Australia. While they zoomed into the hilly capital on a brilliant sunny Mediterranean day past red tiled roofed stacked apartments and brown block styled buildings from 1930 he regained his sense of perspective in a new land as she regaled him with information. He heard it all and forgot most of it because he was tired from all the dreaming.

She took him to a fine 5th floor apartment where he met a young part-time female teacher, an artist from Capetown, South Africa, named A, who'd return home in August with her husband, a film maker.

The flat had a fine balcony displaying the sky, clouds, western hills, amazing sunsets and bird shadowed wings. Blue jays, sparrows, pigeons, starlings.

The space received red, white and pink roses and delicious plants to give it color and life.

Peace.