Crew Ship Contact Info

Any boats wishing to contact us as possible crew members please be good enough to send an email to either Travis, at travisholtby@gmail.com, or Taylor, at bixbyt@beloit.edu. We are currently bicycling around Bali but will be checking our email every few days and will get back to you as soon as we possibly can. Thanks and look forward to hearing from you!

The Final Post: The Dream

During my first night in Georgia, in an old, drafty hotel, made with dark wood and without electricity, I had a dream. Lying in the dark, as the drizzle tapped on my room’s single pane window, I dreamt that I had returned from my study abroad and was back at my home university. I saw how everything and everyone had moved on without me. I saw my ex-girlfriend treating someone else the way she used to treat me. I saw how new people had been integrated into my old social circle and replaced me. I felt alone, rejected and forgotten, a passing entertainment that was trying to continue living a past that no longer existed and from which everyone had moved on; everyone except me. I felt left behind, no longer a close friend to those I loved, but someone that you invite over to dinner for old times sake, out of courtesy for what that person used to be. A guest who is expected to leave at the end of the night and let his hosts get back to their new, more preferred lives.

I was a dinosaur in Time Square. The only one who had not realized that a meteor had hit the past and that everyone else had moved on into a new and better world into which I no longer fit. Things have changed and they will never again be the same. My absence and subsequent return had made me of passing interest to all but my closest friends, but nothing more.



When the sun came through the window to wake me the next morning, it brought with it a catharsis; I realized that while things have indeed changed, I have the knowledge and ability to adapt to whatever changes have transpired in my absence; the same way that I had adapted to living in a different country. And, just like the transition to Turkey or China or New Zealand, the transition back to America would not always be easy or fun. But in the end, it is not by doing things that are easy or fun that we are able better ourselves or from which we derive true value in our lives, but rather it is in pushing ourselves beyond what is comfortable and routine. In looking at a challenging situation and throwing yourself head first into it, knowing that you will come out a better person on the other side. I realized that the old adage, “Don’t be sorry its over, be happy it happened,” is a very good way to look at life and that, as good as yesterday was, tomorrow has the potential to be even better. With this realization came a feeling of contentment and, after looking around my now sunlit room, I walked to the bathroom and noticed that my hallway light was on.

Travis's rant against Homophobes and the Screaming Drunk at the Monastery

My second night in Armenia I met ‘John’. John was a Peace Corp. volunteer who I had gotten in touch with through Couch Surfing. It was not hard to pick him out as he neither had black hair nor thick beard and he was not wearing a tracksuit. My first thought was that he had to be the best-dressed person I had seen in Armenia. We went to dinner at a quaint but beautifully appointed Georgian restaurant (Armenian food just doesn’t quite compare) then spent the remainder of the day light hours exploring sections of Vandazor that John had never been to and talking about everything from Armenia government corruption to what it was like to be a Peace Corp volunteer.

John is one of the better and more interesting people that I have met on my travels. He grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho on a horse ranch and joined the Peace Corp after college. What made his case, and his choice of Eastern Europe as the location for his two years of volunteer service especially impressive is that John is gay. Now, if either of my readers are ignorant as to what this mean just about anywhere in the world outside of urban centers in Western Europe and America let me enlighten you. Coming out as gay in almost every place I have visited across the world is the equivalent to painting a target on your back and accepting social rejection. It means your family and friends disown you. That there is no place for you in society and thus you become an outcast from it. I don’t want to get carried away but life is usually neither good or easy for those who are brave enough openly admit that they are homosexuals.

For John, being gay in Armenia meant that he would never be able to admit, even his closest friends, the real reason why he did not have a girlfriend and that there was next to no chance he would be able to have any kind of relationship for two years. He described to me one time when the subject of homosexuality came up in a conversation with one his close, well-educated, female, Armenian friends. In this conversation she said she could not understand why a cure had not been found for this disease or why there was not more treatment available for these poor, troubled people. Using most of his considerable self-control, John attempted to explain that it was not in fact a disease or problem but rather a different preference that people are born with. The friend would have none of it and insisted that she had seen studies proving otherwise.

Anyway, John’s experience with these kinds of situations was just one of the topics that we touched on during my first night staying with John.

The next day I was planning to go to two UNESCO World Heritage monasteries in a town about an hour and a half north of Vanadzor and from there continuing hitch hiking up to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. I was pleased when John accepted my invitation to come with me and, after my second pancake breakfast in as many days (god I love Peace Corp volunteers) we headed down to the bus station. On the way we decided to get some donuts from a little spot I had stopped at the day before, just to make sure we had a balanced breakfast.

Unfortunately, this gluttony caused us to miss the bus that we wanted. So, rather than be chumps and wait an hour for the next bus we walked to the edge of town and started hitching. A well-to-do couple and their BMW got us half-way and, just to make sure we got the full socio-economic spectrum of Armenia, our next ride was an old, black Russian Van driven by two friendly guys with an equally friendly hooker in the back. The door hinge was a slide-bolt very similar to the one on my father’s tool shed and took several open-hand punches to knock loose. We sat with the hooker on a couch in the back of the van that slammed into the sides of the van with every turn and, after exhausting the three Armenian words I had learned from my guild book, I sat back and let John entertain our benefactors.

When got to our destination I was confronted with one of the most contrasting scenes that I have ever witnessed; the town we had entered, Alaverdi, was situated on a river in a steep alpine valley, looked down upon by lush mountain peaks and surrounded by grassy steps. The juxtaposition came when we walked along the river towards the center of town and came into view of an old soviet smelting factory that looked as though it had been ripped from the pages of Lord of the Rings. The smoke stack was vomiting unfiltered smoke into the sky that shrouded the entire town in a carcinogenic fog. It was also heartening to see that a half-mile in every direction of the factory the lush alpine forest had turned to de-nuited, brown dirt.

When I commented on this John made me privy to a theory he had been developing wherein he believed that the Soviets had made it a goal to pick the most beautiful and pristine locations they could find in the U.S.S.R and put a factory there. It also turned out that, due to the ridiculously high rate of cancer in Alaverdi, the Peace Corp no longer allowed it volunteers to live or work there. Unfortunately, the other side of the coin was that, as the factory was by far the biggest employer in the town, it would be even worse to close it than it was to leave the monstrosity open. How’s that for the lesser of two evils?

After a few more minutes of gazing at the factory we took a gondola to the upper section of the town and started making our way towards the monastery. As we were walking up a steep, cobbled path we were literally ran into by a group of three older Armenian men. It was easy to smell alcohol on two of the men’s breath, but they seemed alert enough. The third man however was another story, he was wasted drunk, and why not? It was already 11:30am.

They were all very friendly and while I was shaking hand with the man who could barely stand, lets call him Jo, they told us that their home was very close by and they would be honored if we would come and drink some home-made vodka with them. As we politely declined, I loosened my grip on Joes hand in the universal signal that, though the handshake had been good, sadly, it was time to let go. Jo did not seem to get this subtle message, so I upped the ante and began to pull my hand gently away. Jo, realizing what was happening, did not like this and, insisting that we needed to come drink with him and his friends, began physically dragging me down the road.

I was too amused to protest so, with Jo dragging me and John walking closely behind chatting with the two other men, we went down a side road and up some stairs to their home. Though Jo was in no state to entertain, his two friends were the image of hospitality; bringing us bread, butter, cheese, tea and setting up glasses so we all could drink vodka. With John working as translator we chatted about where we were from and what we were doing there. Periodically throughout our conversation Jo would start yelling in slurred Armenian about how we were all brothers as he looked at me malevolently from under bushy, salt and pepper eyebrows. His friends would then try to calm him down, which would result in Jo trying to punch them and then putting his face centimeters from theirs as he bared his brown and gold teeth and hissed at them. After each of these outbursts he would calm down for a while and we would continue our conversation and take a shot of vodka (Jo was downing two for every one we did). After about half and hour we thanked our hosts and asked if we could get a picture with them before we left. They readily agreed so I pulled out the digital camera I had borrowed from my friend Basak for this trip (my camera had gotten some sand in its gears while beach camping). You would have thought I had pulled out the elixir of life by the way Jo lunged out of his chair and grabbed the camera. Apparently the existence of the camera greatly upset him, as he was doing his best to break it in half. I quickly, but with a good amount of effort, pulled the camera away from him before he could accomplish his mission and we got several self-timed shots. After this, Jo, apparently overwhelmed with grief, staggered as fast as he was able out of the house and up the street. Our more sober hosts walked us to the door, apologizing for their friend, and wishing us the best. After slamming my head into the metal frame of their door, John and I assured them it was no problem, thanked them profusely for their hospitality and continued up the road.

As we rounded the next corner in the road we saw Jo staggering in front of us. John moaned and told me that maybe if we don’t move he wouldn’t see us. Unfortunately, even in his inebriated state, Jo’s vision was more evolved than that of a Tyrannosaurus and he spotted us. Resigned, we walked the short distance to the monastery with Jo alternately draping his arm around mine or Johns neck and slurring at us in Armenian. We got the monastery without much incident other than Jo hassling some pretentious-looking German tourists. However, once we got in the monastery we decided that it was high-time to ditch Jo. This, surprisingly, was relatively difficult as he was following us like a remora. After a while, though, we were able to ditch Jo in a corner of the main chapel by pointing a doorway out to him and running away as soon as he entered it.

As we power walked out the main building we heard a dismayed cry echo through the ancient stone halls; Jo realized what had happened. We made it out to the cemetery and after a few minutes were able to get our laughter under control. No sooner had we done this than we heard an agonized, clearly drunken, scream echo out of the church to the cemetery. Looking at each other in disbelief we were once again reduced to fits of giggles. Over the next five minutes we heard three more such screams and after the third we decided that the poor old women, who was selling candles in the main hall where we had left Jo, should not have to deal with this drunkard alone.

The scene that greeted our eyes when we stepped back over the threshold into the main hall was like nothing I had ever seen before and that I hope I will never see again. The women who had been selling candles at a table next to the right wall of the hall was standing up, waving her hands over her head, near tears and yelling. The object of her hysteria the reader can easily guess; Jo. He had stolen the woman’s chair and was leaning back against the wall with it as he eyeballed the old women. Now, this by itself may seem at the least disrespectful, but when you take into account that Jo had managed to remove his shirt and had his hand shoved down the front of his pants, massaging his crotch you can understand our suprise.

It took a moment for John and I to process what was going on, but once we had wrapped our head around the fact that Jo had stolen a pious old woman’s chair and was half naked and trying to pleasure himself in a UNESCO World Heritage monastery we decided he had to leave. Removing Jo from the monastery was not easy and involved John and I bodily grapping his arms and trying, with him resisting every inch of the way, to walk him out of the church while he threatened to kill us. We got him to the main door of the hall at which point he began violently struggling, this led to John and I simultaneously releasing his arms and culminated in his body twisting 180 degrees in the air before finally slamming down on the dirty rock floor. At this point it wasn’t even funny, it was just sad. He got to his feet after a few moments and, as I was the first person he was able to focus his bloodshot eyes on, he decided I was the agent of his torment and took a swing at me. Now, I’m not exactly fast but I think a paraplegic would have been have been able to get out of the way of that punch. Jo’s thwarted attacked resulted in him ending up, once again, face down on the muddy floor of the monastery.

At this point the old women, looking at Jo with utter contempt, told us to leave him and she would go call the police to take care of it. As Jo did not look like he would be moving any time soon, we agreed and left the monastery.

After walking for a few minutes in silence John looked at me and said, “Well that’s never happened to me before.” I had to agree with him, this was a first.

Hitch Hiking Through Eastern Turkey

“Do you believe in Allah?” the lorry driver asks in Turkish, staring at me intently as we bounce along the partially paved road. I am at first a bit taken aback; this is a dramatic shift; our three-minute conversation, up to this point, has centered around how many family members we have and what they do.

“I was raised Christian but now I’m undecided.” Articulating this takes three attempts. My thickly accented Turkish is roughly equivalent to %% mentally challenged second grader and lacks all but the most basic grammar. The best I can do is to throw out nouns and infinitive forms of verbs and hope my listener gets the gist of it.

The lorry driver looks at me severely, “You should, Allah sees what you do and he will judge you.”

This is the first of what will end up being 6 rides that I get that day as I try to make my way across Eastern Turkey from the lake side city of Van to the Kars, a city with around seventy thousand inhabitants located seventy kilometers from the Armenian border.

My second ride dropped me at a gas station and told the attendants to put me on the first truck heading toward Kars. They yelled at the large semi that was pulling out of the parking lot as we were pulling in and told him to stop as they hurried me to it. I hopped in and, smiling, shook the drivers hand, introducing myself and hurriedly going through who I was and what the I was doing there, “Hello, my name Travis, Ankara in, America student, METU (Middle Eastern Technical University, the name of the university where I am studying in Ankara), me school finish (I pantomime wiping off my hands to indicate that I have, in fact, finished my final exams), 10 days travel Turkey, Georgia, Armenia me. Father muscle doctor (I have no idea how to say physical therapist, or muscle for that matter, so I rub the drivers shoulder to indicate exactly what kind of doctor my father is. He looks at me, no doubt wondering what he has gotten himself into and, smiling awkwardly in the way I do when it is easier to just let the point pass than to try to understand it, nods). Mother nurse.”

Now it is his turn. He informs me that he is a Las (an ethnic group from the Black Sea coast of Turkey), he is one of four sons, has 5 sons himself (at this I tell him “good job,” he nods and smiles proudly), and that his parents are long distance truckers who go between Germany, France and Turkey. Our conversation continues for another half hour after which we enter a comfortable silence. As I admire the emerald alpine steps that we are passing through I am also struck at how well immersion helps to learn a language; I learned more Turkish in those eight hours of hitch hiking than I did in 2 months of Turkish class. I must have dozed off at some point because I woke up as we hit a pothole in the road. I groggily notice that my chest is spattered with drool stains; I am not an elegant sleeper. The driver notices this and, laughing, asks how I’m doing. Smiling, I tell him I've never been better.

The Southeast: Terrorists, Biblical ruins and Baklava

The Fellowship
Shashank- an Indian-American student from Berkley who was unquestionably the leader on this trip as his command of the Turkish language was head and shoulders over anyone else in the group.
Eb- One of the other Beloit students in Turkey.
Leonard- A German exchange student studying in Ankara for the semester at a different university.
Anya- A Polish exchange student here for the semester who study’s at the same university as Leonard.
Eric- My lovely flat mate, also a student at Beloit.
Travis- me

The cow could not have been dead for more than a few days. Though the skin looked dried and stretched, the organs that were hanging out of the gaping hole in its chest were still bloated, meaning that either the bacteria had not produced enough gas to pop them or that the wild dogs had not gotten hungry enough yet to start eating the biggest piece of road kill I have ever seen.

The cow’s carcass—lying on the side of the small road that ran parallel to the Tigris river—was a strange juxtaposition to the beautiful scene that was before us: the sun setting across the grassy plain just outside of the city walls of Diyarbakir and the an ancient, stone Roman bridge spanning the Tigris a quarter mile in front of us. Diyarbakir is at the heart of the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey and was once the hoped for capital of Kurdistan—which sadly never came into existence. The other facet of this scene that should have detracted but only seemed to add to it, were the 4 adolescent who had been following and aimlessly hassling us for the last half hour.

This was the second day of our four-day trip around the Southeast of Turkey. We had boarded a long-distance (15 hours to be exact) bus on Thursday evening from Ankara bound for Diyarbakir. Despite the frequent stops along the way, I had managed to spend a few hours semi-consciously lulling my head against my seatmates shoulder in a poor attempt at sleep. By the time the sun had come, I had ceased this futile effort and was taking in the truly breathtaking scenery that was passing outside the bus windows. The mountainous landscape at first bore a striking resemblance to the Southern Alps of New Zealand then promptly shifted to the grassy mountainsides that I could have sworn were from the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. As the hours passed by so to did the scenery, until by about noon, we were out into the grassy plains of the Kurdish homeland.

Before we continue, a bit needs to be said about the Kurds. The Kurds are an ethnic group that are located in several Middle Eastern countries, and in Turkey, they number about 14 million. Physically, there is almost no difference between them and the Turks; the differences lie in their language and culture. Most of the Turkish Kurds are centered in the Southeast of Turkey with Diyarbakir being their informal capital. The contemporary problems between Turks and Kurds stem from when Ataturk created the Turkish Republic. In an effort to unite the country, he tried to overcome the differences between particular ethnic groups through a process of assimilation. This effort included banning the Kurdish language and not recognizing them as separate ethnic group. Naturally, oppression always breeds some resistance. And in the late 1970’s, the Kurdish separatist movement was born—the most famous and infamous face of which is the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party).

The PKK demanded that the Turkey allow them to have an independent state Kurdistan, which naturally, the Turkish government refused. This led to 15 years of fighting through the 1980’s and 1990’s in which around 30,000 people were killed. Though the PKK still exists, the organization lost the majority of its power when its leader, Abdullah öcalan, was caught in Kenya in 1999. After his capture, Ocalan did a 180 in his view on Turkish government, accepting them as the legitimate government and thus, in the views of many Kurds, betraying the movement. So while the PKK still exists, it is specter of its former self. The problem, however, is certainly not yet solved. A fact that was evident by the multiple police check points we had to stop at throughout our trip.

The main goal of this trip was to attend the Kurdish spring festival of Nevruz: an event that was banned until only three years ago, but that for the last three years has brought out about one million people to a field on the outskirts of Diyarbakir. The festival involves a host of concerts, huge fires and inevitably, political riots and tear gas. It sounded like the perfect cultural experience.


Nevruz, however, did not start until the next day so we decided to head over to Mardin for the night. This involved a fairly simple hour and a half minibus ride through the misty rain that delivered us to the base of this ancient city. Mardin is both a gorgeous and surreal city filled with tan stone houses and narrow alleyways that extend down a steep hill from an ancient castle at the hills summit. From the base the hill looking south across the fertile Mesopotamian plane (that in the mist looked remarkably like the ocean) dotted with small farming villages, it is possible to see into the northern border of Syria.

We spend the remainder of that Friday wandering through the back allies of the city trying to walk off the cramps that—unavoidably—occurred after spending an excess of 15 hours on a bus. After a cheap dinner and desert of Turkish ice cream, we returned to our hotel to finish the night playing cards and charades. Unfortunately, as I was feeling a little worse for ware, I turned in early and missed charades and the quote of the trip, which occurred shortly after the game when Leonard was lying, sprawled across one of the beds, bits of potatoes chips littering his chest, and in his slow German accent declared, “My body is a battlefield.”

The next morning after a quick, glutinous breakfast at our hotel (the meal was included with the room and we are college students), we left to finish our wanderings of the city before returning to Diyarbakir for Nevruz. The rain from the previous day had cleared and the hot sun lit up the unreal landscape that only a day before had been shrouded in mist. The affect was stunning and it was only with difficulty that we were able to pull ourselves away from the perch we had found next to the castle wall and board the minibus.

On our return to Diyarbakir, we were devastated to find that the police had seen fit to the end the festival, which usually goes into the early morning until around 4am. Though this was a bit deflating, I have come to realize that when traveling abroad like this, the best thing you can be is flexible; nothing will ever work out quite as you expect, but then that is the beauty of traveling.


We decided that to check out the sights of the city and after wandering to the old Roman bridge and seeing the dead cow, we boarded a minibus to the center of town to find a water pipe bar and dinner. After accomplishing this, we went to a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar filled with Kurdish men chatting and playing cards. Everyone in the bar—and in the entire city for that matter—was incredibly nice and talkative, despite their inability to speak English and our inability to speak adequate Turkish or Kurdish. To finish up the night, we met up with some friends who had also come down for the festival and chilled under the crescent moon up on roof of our hotel; a very cool and memorable way to end the night.

Our journey to Hasankeyf the next day was one of the most beautiful drives I have ever taken. The road to these 14th century ruins that sit precariously on a sheer cliff over the Tigris River winds through a fairy tale landscape of eroded monoliths capped with lush patches of emerald grass and the occasional tree. We spent several hours wandering, dumbstruck, around the hundreds of cave houses. It is difficult to describe how it felt to be in this ancient city surrounded by such incredible scenery, but I felt that were this moment to last for the rest of my life, I could easily die happy.

Upon arriving in Diyarbakir, our fellowship parted ways with Eric and I continuing on our quest and everyone else heading back to Ankara for classes the next day. Though there were several places that Eric and I planned to visit the following day before heading back, the main reason for our divergence as simple: Baklava. The city of Gaziantep is renowned across the world as the birthplace of this delicious, honey-soaked treat and we were going to be damned if we were going to be this close to it and miss it.

However, before we reached this sweet-tooth Mecca we had two more places to visit; Urfa and Harran. Our stay night in Urfa was one to remember simply because of the hotel we stayed in. For $8 a night we got a tiny concrete cell with two beds, no heat (unfortunately the beautiful weather we had had early that day did not persist), no hot water and Eric got a blanket with a stain that looked distinctly like human feces. We were so tired that none of this really mattered and after a mid-night walk around the town and a kebab, we slept like babies. We awoke to heavy rain and after a quick meander around town, we got on a bus to the small town of Harran.

Harran is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on the planet. It is mentioned in the Book of Genesis as the place where Abraham stayed for several years around 1900 B.C. The town is small and only required an hour or two to wonder around, but the feeling of insignificance in the face of such history was striking and once again, the misty rain only served to heighten this sensation. After drifting through the goat pastures surrounding the ruins and taking in beehive houses, we caught the bus back to town and boarded a bus to Gaziantep.

After the watching a Turkish comedy based on the Exorcist, we got of the bus and took a minibus into town to the store that was said to have the best baklava in the world.

It did not disappoint. Both Eric and I had been fasting all day in preparation for this encounter and after a delicious dinner, we had about 3 pounds of baklava that can only be described as orgasmic. It would have been worth the 20 hour round trip from Ankara just for 1 hour in this place. And as if the food were not enough to bring us back, we also had the two coolest waiters in Turkey who chilled with us for most our meal, giving us a cigar and bringing us free coffee and tea.


At the end of our incredible meal, we thanked our host, offering them our email and making our way outside to find a minibus back to the bus station. We asked one of the doormen where we could find the Otogar and were immediately approached by a man who said he would take us there. Past experience made me a bit suspicious and worried that we would have to pay an exorbitant price as we were the only ones riding in this van, but the driver assured me that there would be no money involved. Though I still did not believe him, after that meal I was in no state of mind to resist anything, so we got into the van.

It turned out that the driver’s friend—who had brought us to the van—was an ex-professional soccer player named Mustafa. As we drove, he told us that he was in town to visit family but that he lived in Istanbul. Upon hearing that we tried to go to Nevruz, he told us that he did not trust the Kurds and that they had recently stolen $200,000 from him, but luckily, he had friends in the military and police who were helping him get it back. Eric and I both looked at each other as we could only imagine one of two things that would get you that kind of money and get it stolen. He did not choose to elaborate on what his business was but upon arriving to the bus station gave us his number in Istanbul and told us to call him anytime we were there. It also turned out that he and his friend were just that nice and wanted to help out some travelers and would not except any money for the ride to the bus station. We thanked them, said goodbye and still in shock at how nice everyone in Gaziantep was, I found myself hoping that this would not be the last time I was here.

It was the perfect end to the most intense four days of travel that I have ever had. Unfortunately, the female attendant on the bus back did not see fit to continue this trend. Despite there being about 20 free seats on the bus, she forbid me to sit any where else on the bus beside the seat that was assigned to me and scolded me in Turkish every time I slipped my shoes off. (However, I decided to keep doing it anyway partly because it was much more comfortable, but mostly just to spite her). I did manage to slip into another seat for the last few hours of the bus ride and made myself feel a little better by giving her a dirty look as we de-boarded into the chilly early morning of Ankara.

Olive head

Scene open: (Fade from black)

As the scene opens, we find our two young American protagonists sitting right in the middle of a long-distance Turkish bus. Outside the windows, the suburbs of Istanbul can be seen, as mosques and back-lit signs for Efes beer flash by in the humid night. Our heroes are tired, you can see it in their glazed over eyes; a long weekend in Istanbul has left them happy, satisfied and exhausted.

(Camera pans around behind the two Americans)

We see that their glazed over eyes are glued to the tiny television set located above the bald head of the slightly overweight Turkish man three seats ahead. The television is playing (and has been for the last half hour) an orgy of Turkish music videos depicting men who seem to have given up on buttoning their silky shirts halfway through the song while scantily clad women undulated to a base line that hasn’t changed since the bus attendant put the DVD in.

(Scene fades out into black)

Scene open: Camera fades in on the baggage rack located four feet above Travis’s head (the taller and less topically haired of the Americans).

We see that the oversized North Face backpack that Travis has been using for the last seven years was smashed into the luggage in a precarious position with only a third of the bag actually in the rack. The bus jostles slightly; the bag plummets down, stamping its thirty pounds straight onto Travis’s head. As the camera quickly focuses in on his face, we can see that Travis was dozing with his ipod headphones on and his mouth slightly agape. However, as soon as the bag hits him, he is jarred into semi-consciousness and looks around. It seems to that this embarrassing incident has managed to awake half the bus. Trying to remain cool and surprised that his bag—which is only three times too big for the rack—fell down, he dejectedly pushes the bag under his seat.

(Camera zooms in to see a single tear sliding down his cheek in the light of the fiber-optic lamp)

The large, friendly looking Turkish man who is sitting across Travis leans over and touches him on the shoulder. Travis turns somewhat surprised to see what this gentleman could want. In response to Travis’s questioning eyes, the Turkish man pulls out a large loaf of bread, tearing off a piece for our American champion. (Camera angle switches for and we see Eric—the second American—take his ear buds out and look over inquisitively. “What could be happening?” his blue eyes seems to ask.) Travis smiles and politely declines. But Mustafa (for convenience sake we will give this name to our portly new character) keeps on insisting until Travis accepts the bread and thanks him. However, Mustafa is not finished, he proceeds to hand Travis several tomatoes and a bag of olives as both Travis and Eric giggle and how ridiculously hospitable Turkish people are.

Travis thanks Mustafa in broken Turkish with an accent that would indicate he had recently suffered severe head trauma. Mustafa smiles and begins talking to Travis in Turkish, which surprisingly, Travis and Eric seem to be able to get the gist of. He asks where they are from, what they are doing there, and tells them that they are both exceptionally handsome. Giggling like schoolgirls, the two American demigods except these compliment, but are quickly mystified when Mustafa points at Travis’s head and says zeytin. (Scene cut briefly to show both Americans staring dumbly at the friendly Turk) Though both Eric and Travis know that this means olive they cannot figure out what he means. Eric takes the quick and easy escape route, as he is on the inside seat, putting his earphones back in. A metaphorical light goes on in Travis’s head and he assumes he must be referring—in some way—to the bag that has recently dropped on Travis’s head and assuming it had olives in it. This does not appear to be the case, however, as Mustafa shakes his head and more emphatically points at Travis’s head saying, again, zeytin, then pointing at Eric’s head and saying zeytin yok (no olive).

(Camera angle switches back to close-up of Travis’s face as a look of stunning realization dawns upon it.)

Begin montage: (begin song: Apologize by Onerepublic) A flash of white light fades to reveal Travis at middle school graduation, he bends down to pick up a pen that a pretty girl in front of him dropped. He is startled when he feels her hands separating the hair on the top of his head; a look of horror comes across his face as she asks him why his hair is thinning. (Another flash of white light) We see Travis in front of his bathroom mirror that same night desperately clawing through his hair trying in vain, to prove to himself that the wench at his graduation must have been hallucinating. (Another flash of white light) We see Travis getting a hair cut two years later from Carla, his mother’s hairdresser, as he sadly tries to explain that he wants a haircut that will make him look less balding. He smiles bravely as Carla tells him that its hardly noticeable and that it happens when a young man has too much testosterone, but the audience can see that he doesn’t really buy it. (The montage continues for the proceeding three minutes and ten seconds; awkward scenes about hair loss punctuated by flashes of white light. Through the montage we see the bare spot over Travis’s occipital lobe grow as two hairless driveways work their way up his temples. As the audience watches Travis’s face throughout this process, they also see an interesting progression starting with denial, moving on to shame (the period in which Sam’s Choice generic rogaine was used), then next to self-defacement (in the hope that if he makes fun of it enough other people won’t) working its way up to acceptance and (after person #362 tells Travis he is balding) finally reaching it.

(Final flash to white)

(As white light fades the audience finds themselves back on the long-distance bus careening through the Turkish night with Mustafa and our two American megastars (Eric still hiding beneath his headphones).)

Though the montage of hair loss, it took only half a second to flash through Travis’s mind’s eye (as it seems to do every time someone new tells him this) and, after swallowing the mouthful of bread and olives that Mustafa had so generously given him, he smiles and says, “Evet (yes), zeytin,” and points to his head.

Scene close: (As scene fades to black Lucky Man by The Verve begins fading in and, as the slow fade out ends the last thing the audience sees is Mustafa and his wife helping Travis and Eric get a cab for a reasonable price at 4:00am, then waving them off. The scene ends with Mustafa popping an olive in his mouth as he turns to the camera and winks.

(Full fade)

(Role credits)

How to get an apartment in Turkey

The idea to get an apartment for my time here in Ankara was first planted in my mind by Alice, a fellow Beloit student who had spent all of last year here at METU. She had lived in the dorms for one semester and in an apartment for the second semester and had told me that while the dorms were survivable, living in an apartment in the city was much better; and after two weeks of my roommates alarm going off every five minutes, starting at 7, for two hours I decided that she had to be right.

Though the alarm thing was really annoying it was still a hard decision; living in the dorms would give me a completely different experience than living in an apartment off campus would.
On one hand if I stayed in the dorms I would be able to spend a semester living with three Turkish roommates, whom, other than the alarm thing every morning, I liked quite a bit.
There was the Arda, the guy that slept along the same wall as me who had gotten arrested his first night back on campus by the soldiers in charge of campus security for getting in a fight with a dorm receptionist who would not let him up to girl friends room. Anil, a really nice guy with an extremely, almost manically friendly disposition who spent most of his days watching American T.V shows on his computer and whom I had spent by far the most time with of my roommates. And finally there was the guy with the cell phone alarm whose name I never learned and who spoke a little more English than I spoke Turkish, which meant that we could only communicate on about the level of 3 year olds, but who was always very nice and friendly to me.

By living in the dorms I would also have easy, ready access to the large group of potential Turkish friends that lived in the dorm with me and I would be much closer to all the buildings my classes would be in. Another factor that weighed heavily in favor of choosing the dorm was that it would simply be much easier to stay in the dorms than it would be to got out and find and rent an apartment in a country were I did not speak the language.

On the other hand there were a lot of attributes to getting an apartment in the city. For instance, were we to get an apartment it would mean that Eric and I would each get our own room, have a kitchen to cook in, greater access to the city, a place were we could host people, and we could avoid the midnight curfew at the dorms.

In the end we decided to go with the apartment, thinking that while it may isolate us more from Turkish students on campus, we could fairly easily counter act this by joining clubs and by having a cool place that we could invite people over to. Also, while living in the dorms may be easier I have found that the easiest option is rarely the best. Finally, I had never rented an apartment or lived on my own off campus before so I figured what better place to start than Turkey?

This started an epic endeavor that lasted for three weeks, resulted in 2 put-off trips to Istanbul, countless hours of work from our saint-like host students, an encounter with the incredible bureaucracy that is the Turkish government and involved more upfront cash than I thought I had in my bank account.

To start out we had to find an apartment. This was not as simple as I would have thought as there are no good, free websites to use to find them and to use a real estate agent would mean that we would have to pay about an extra $300 finders fee. So on the advice and with the help of our host students we set to do this the old-fashioned way; pounding the pavement. This involved walking through the residential area of Yuzuncu Yil, an area within walking distance to campus that has cheap apartments, and looking hopefully into the windows of the apartment buildings for signs that said ‘For Rent’ in Turkish.

After about an hour searching in this way I got a call from Eric, who was with the second half of our group (we had split up for efficiency sake) who said he had a found a promising spot. Firat, Merve and I (the other half of the group) found Eric, Orkuan and EB in an 11th floor, 2-bed room, 2-bathroom (one with a shower and one with a squatty potty) apartment with a great view of the city. The current tenet looked like a Turkish version of Jason Statham who had let himself go and dressed in a grey tracksuit and slippers. His name was Murat and after showing us the apartment, which was far nicer than anything I had hoped to find, he made us tea and we started the negotiations.

This method of negotiations was used in just about every interaction we had dealing with the apartment and consisted of our Turkish hosts deftly wrangling the price of whatever we were buying down while Eric and I stared on with our uncomprehending cow-eyes. After the bartering was complete they would usually fill us in on what had happened and ask if the deal they had struck was suitable. To these questions we would usually just nod dumbly and than go back to wondering what we did in a past life to deserve these hosts and how we could be so completely useless we were when it came to this type of task.

We decided to get the apartment, but declined Murat’s obscene offer to sell us all the furnishings for 2000 lira (we ended up getting much better stuff for a little less than half that from some very nice middle aged women who were all engaged and living together until they moved in with their new husbands). However our lucky ran out in that we did not have a co-signer for the apartment, forcing us to pay all four months of rent up-front. With all this arranged and after several days of twice-a-day trips to the ATM to withdraw the maximum amount of cash that we could we arrived on Saturday ready to move into our new apartment. There was only one problem, Murat was still there. Apparently he had understood the contract just fine but had decided that he really wanted to stay another day or two and he hoped it wouldn’t be a problem for us. No, Murat of course not, why would it be? We had only arranged our entire week around this date, signed the contract, dragged 6 of our Turkish out of bed early on a Saturday morning and had promised those lovely women to get their furniture off their hands by the end of today. I'm so sorry that we are disturbing your schedule by being here.

But there was no point in getting upset about it so we told Murat the situation and after some arguing he benevolently agreed to allow us to move our furniture into a corner of the apartment until we actually moved in. So for the next 8 hours we carried all the furniture we had bought from the women down the 10 floors of their apartment building, put it in a truck, drove over to our building, and then carried it up an additional 12 floors to our apartment. This was not quite as bad as it sounds as most of the stuff we had fit in the elevator, but the couch refused to follow this trend so we had to manhandle the thing down all ten flights of stairs and then push and pull the damn thing back up 12 stories. After getting it up to the 8th floor I began telling the couch, in no uncertain terms, exactly what I would do to it were it not an inanimate object while Eric tried to cover up his laughter at my awe-inspiring rage.

Again, words cannot describe the saintliness of our Turkish friends, they worked unceasingly right next to us all 8 hours without a word of complaint. After we had finished, we took our friends out to dinner than went down town to celebrate our success.

In an effort to make this already over-long description a little bit shorter I’ll make a long story shorter by saying that, due to several factors, including another surprise move by Murat to take everything in the apartment down to the mirrors and the light fixtures, and a Turkish super-virus that attacked Eric and I simultaneously, we didn’t end up moving in until Thursday that next week. And while living in the apartment has not been problem free (Eric has had a hilarious time adjusting to the Turkish toilet, we still don’t have internet, most of the drains are clogged, and Eric’s radiator stopped working) we made it in and as I sit here writing this, sipping my tea, looking at our bad-ass view of Ankara, and listening to Dragonforce I think I can safely say that it was well worth it.