The Truth About Procrastination

I know you’re all waiting breathlessly for my upcoming posts (*insert self-deprecating laugh*).  And I do have 15+ half-written posts in the queue.

But, I’ve realized something the last couple days.  As much as I enjoy writing this blog and sharing our wonderful travels with you, sometimes trying to get out blog posts on time can get to be sort of a chore.  Most blog posts take approximately 2-3 hours to prepare from beginning to end.  It could probably take less time if I were less of a perfectionist, but that’s something I’m working on (self-improvement also takes a rather long time).  I don’t want to lose that joy I have in crafting these blog posts.  I write and photograph because I truly love to do these things and I’d hate for that love to become tarnished by rote.  I’d hate for the blog posts you spend your time reading to be something I didn’t spend quality time on myself. 

Besides our traveling, I do spend a lot of time working on other ongoing personal projects.  It’s the curse of someone with too many interests/hobbies and too little time/energy.  My mom said I should pare my interests down a bit but I haven’t yet succeeded because, well, everything is just so interesting.  However, I’m having a bit of a work/life balance issue (yes, this seems to be a recurring theme in my life) which is rather hilarious because I don’t work.  Well, I work, but for fun and for free (so far…)  So if I’m to have any semblance of rest & vacation on this trip, I need to release my death-grip on my 30-item to-do list, and relax a bit. 

Anyways, this post is a long convoluted apology if blog posts start coming even slower than they already are and I end up even further behind.  I get so irritated when other blogs constantly apologize for long delays, but here I am doing the exact same thing.  I promise I won’t bombard you with apologies.  If you ever get impatient with me, please refer back to this post, because my reasons will probably be the same for the rest of our trip.

Stay tuned though. Those 15+ blog posts will appear eventually.

Merry Christmas!

And unto us a lamb is born. 

Though there are still a bunch of upcoming posts on Turkey, I wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas from the wonderful country of Israel.  It’s special for me to be here on this particular occasion, the culmination of a dream. 

There’s lots of things that can be said for Christmas.  It’s strange not be celebrating with other family members.  I miss the warmth and cheer that comes of being with the people that love us most, the familiar traditions we enact each year.  However, to walk in the place where Jesus walked, the reason for the season, I feel a sense of awe settle upon me. 

And I think, why?  Why must we fight amongst ourselves?  Why are there divisions between people? We are all the same in a sense.  We love.  We love our families, our land, our culture, our beliefs in the same way around the world.  There’s a particularly poignant scene in the mini-series, Band of Brothers, where a German commander bids farewell to his troops and an American soldier translates for his compatriots.  The words spoken could’ve been said by either side.  Yes, there are bad people who make evil choices.  But, the majority of us are the same, no matter what side we’re on.  I hope you’ll excuse my rambling, but in this holiday season, in a land so splintered by faith and so traumatized in history, in all our travels and the different people we’ve met, I can’t help but think how easily we could achieve world peace if only we’d sit down and just talk with an open mind like the disparate travellers who gather around a common table in a guesthouse in Istanbul and breakfast together.

A very merry Christmas to you.  I wish many blessings upon you and your loved ones in this special time of year.   

Tour Day 5: Pamukkale, Hieropolis, and Ephesus

We started bright and early this day.  We had a lot of sights to see and little natural daylight in the late autumn. 

Pamukkale

Over an innumerable amount of years, calcium deposits left behind from the flowing water have created an otherworldly landscape of puffy white walls and dreamy terraces.  While it looks soft, to walk on it can be rather uncomfortable, the tender skin of my feet protesting the tiny ridges everywhere, rough as sandpaper.  The water, lukewarm, runs one way half the year, and then is redirected the other half in order to keep both sides of the cliffs a beautiful white instead of a withering green-black color. A true natural wonder.

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Tour Day 4: Thyatira, Sardis, Laodicea, and Philadelphia

On this day, we went on a marathon of ancient sites, hitting four cities in rapid succession.  Though it seems like it would be overwhelming, there’s actually not much left of these four sites, so it became a matter of driving, then hopping off for a half-hour to an hour look before climbing back into the van. 

Thyatira

18 “To the angel of the church in Thyatira write:

These are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. 19 I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first.

20 Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. 21 I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. 22 So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. 23 I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.

24 Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan’s so-called deep secrets, ‘I will not impose any other burden on you, 25 except to hold on to what you have until I come.’ 26 To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations— 27 that one ‘will rule them with an iron scepter and will dash them to pieces like pottery’[b]—just as I have received authority from my Father. 28 I will also give that one the morning star. 29 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

~Revelation 2:18-29

Located smack-dab in the middle of a residential area of the modern city of Akhisar, the ruins of Thyatira are still a mess of scattered artifacts. It’s difficult for them to expand the dig too much since residential apartments rise up all around the area, satellite dishes vying for space.  However, you can still see the outlines of walls and even an old baptism font. 

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Tour Day 3: Pergamon Asclepium & Culture Day

Pergamon Asclepium

We headed back to Pergamon, this time in the lower city where the Asclepium was located.  The Asclepium is a hospital (named for the God of healing, Asclepius), taking advantage of natural springs deemed holy by the Romans.  In fact, Galen, who eventually became the personal physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, worked here among a supposedly impressive library of medical texts. 

The most ironic thing about this hospital, however, is that no one truly sick (or poor or heavily pregnant) was allowed over the threshold.  Since the hospital was also deemed holy, therefore no death could happen within its confines.  So, this hospital probably had the highest survival rate ever.  Those who could afford it, though, could enjoy different therapies such as mud treatments and acoustic water treatments (making it sound more like a spa than a hospital).  We actually drank from a spring that still gushes water.  It tasted cold and delicious.  Of course, we waited for Oktay to go first, just to ensure we wouldn’t die immediately afterwards. 

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Reflections on the 3rd Month

I can’t believe it’s been 3 months already!  As you may have seen from my earlier post, Travel Time, time is a bit skewed for me.  3 months seem to have gone by in a flash, but at the same time, we’ve settled into the rhythm of travel so it seems as if we’ve been traveling forever.  Istanbul has been great fun but it means I’ve again fallen a bit behind in posts.  I should be able to catch up a bit over the next few days since we’ve a couple days of rest scheduled over the next week.  Here are a few more reflections I’ve had in the last month. 

Traveling isn’t all WOW moment

Perhaps I’ve conveyed exactly that sentiment in my own blog, because, frankly, if I wrote EVERYTHING we did on a day-to-day basis, it would end up as the most boring blog ever.  Even when Rick and I discuss our own reminisces, it’s much more interesting to discuss the crazy time I fell in a Bangkok canal or standing on the Great Wall of China than the day we spent sleeping and typing on the computer or the story of me sewing up holes in our clothes.  But that’s what happens during a large chunk of our trip because a long-term trip isn’t the same as our two-week honeymoon or a week-long cruise.  We need times of rest and time to work and we can’t wait to go home in order to do so.  It has to be built into our trip. 

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Tour Day 1 & 2: Istanbul Day Tour, Smyrna & Pergamon’s Acropolis

After a long sleepless train ride with a baby who could reach inhuman levels of crying for extended periods of time, getting ripped off by our cab driver in Ulaanbaatar, and a brief freak-out thinking our travel plans in Turkey had fallen through, we were picked up by a representative from TravelShop Turkey and ferried to our hotel in Istanbul at the beginning of our 7 Churches of Revelation tour. 

What you must understand is that the Book of Revelation is one of my favorite books in the Bible and I geeked out when I realized that the 7 churches mentioned by John were ALL in Turkey.  I KNEW I had to see the cities, especially Ephesus because not only is it a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it also contains the remains of the Temple of Artemis, one of the 7 ancient wonders of the world (another of my must-see-before-I-die list).  At the beginning of the trip, I was confident in my ability to plan out a do-it-yourself route.  By now, lesson learned, sometimes it’s worth it to pay a little more to save a LOT of work.  So, we booked a tour instead. 

Our first full day, however, we enjoyed a walking tour of Istanbul.  I won’t go into detail now because I’m planning on dedicating a TON of posts to the wonders Istanbul offers.  So, we’ll get right into the thick of things with Smyrna & Pergamon. 

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Happy Thanksgiving!

While this is a holiday only celebrated in the States, Rick and I have a lot to be thankful for this year.  So much has happened in this past year to lead us to this point.  We are blessed with supportive families, hilarious and awesome friends, new opportunities and accomplishments, the health and energy to walk miles each day, and an ever-strengthening relationship with each other.  We’ve enjoyed amazing experiences and overcome some very sticky situations without harm.  I don’t think we can ask for anything more. 

And while we didn’t have turkey with all the trimmings, we enjoyed a delicious bowl of goat-head soup each, all spicy garlicky soup and tender melt-in-your-mouth meat, followed by splitting a kunefe, a yummy cheesy syrupy dessert. 

Happy Thanksgiving to you and all your loved ones!

Mongolian Cowboys: 3 Weeks at Anak Ranch

It’s nice to be able have the space and time to think.  I used to have a relatively long commute and while I don’t miss that commute at all, I do miss the drifting of my mind while on the train or stuck in traffic on my way to work.  I used to do my best thinking then, my hands moving automatically on the steering wheel, half my mind on the intricacies of driving and the other half on weaving stories or planning projects. Travelling is different, a mix of "let’s go here and see this" mingled with "all right, what’s next?"  It’s always go time.  Here at Anak Ranch, there’s just time.  We spent most of our days working our way through novels by H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, and Cory Doctorow; or writing blog posts (as you can see, I’m practically caught up) or sleeping. 

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Travel Time

The day I moved into my dorm at UC Irvine, I began a period of restlessness.  The longest I lived anywhere in the 10 years since that fateful day was 3 and a half years with Rick in our Santa Ana apartment.  Now, on this trip, that restlessness has only intensified.  I recently commented to Rick, while standing in the middle of the Mongolian steppes, hip-high grasses rustling in the wind, blue sky arching overhead in a perfect dome, "You know, three weeks seem like forever now to me.  Every three weeks, I think we should move on now.  What are we going to do when we settle back wherever we end up?  How will we feel after 3 months?  Or 3 years?"

I’ve heard that people who spend their whole lives travelling, who make a profession or a lifestyle out of never staying put, they forget how to settle down.  They don’t know how to find peace in one place anymore.  And I used to think I could never reach that point.  But, now, I can empathize.  Because, long-term travelling seems to operate on a different sort of time scale.  It’s simultaneously faster and slower, a strange sideways sort of feeling.  Faster, because there is so much to do, and it’s always a surprise when night creeps upon us signaling that another day has ended.  There’s no regular rhythm as there is with work or school, no reason to mark each day except making sure we end up at the airport on the day our ticket states.  So, the days pass in a blur, no Mondays to complain of, or Saturdays to look forward to.  It’s just a day like any other.  And it’s a little sad, to lose that sense of anticipation or that feeling of satisfaction in completing another week.  Yet, each day is fully savored, the way a good dish of food is savored, slowly, eyes squinted in enjoyment, scent filling up my skull, taste bursting along every tastebud, the sensation of warmth sliding along my throat.  In this way, each day passes slower, because we are more aware of each moment.  It’s not something to push through to get one day closer to the weekend or some special event.  It’s an event unto itself. 

After a certain amount of time, we have enough of one flavor and start craving anew.  We want to see a different sort of culture or people or food, and our feet start getting antsy.  There’s so much to see out there, so much to experience.  Sometimes, I become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of THINGS in this world to experience and am startled by how few years I have left in my life (a ridiculous thing to say for someone of my still relatively-tender age, I know).  So, yes, I know how easy it would be for me to think, "One more thing to see.  One more thing to do," and never stop travelling my whole entire life.  I haven’t reached that point.  I don’t know if I ever will.  But, I now understand why others dedicate their lives wholly to traveling the world.