Albert Einstein used an analogy to express his idea of relativity. "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity." I'm not sure that brings me much closer to understanding Einstein, but I have a similar concept regarding traveling. Condensed time. Back in my old office job, months could pass before I looked up at a calendar and thought, "Where did the time go?" When I travel for a week or two it seems that every minute is alive and vibrant, as if all the excitement from six months of my regular routine occurs in a matter of days. So much can happen in an afternoon on a bus through the unfamiliar that, after a week of it, it feels as if I have lived a month.
- The Yogurt Man Cometh, by Kevin Revolinski
The above quote does a lot to explain why our time in Turkey ends up feeling like years instead of months. With so many new experiences, sights, sounds and people to take in, each moment is enhanced and a day will go on for what always seems like more than its allotted 24 hours. Part of this is that our lifestyle slows as well - without a car, we walk or use public transportation to get everywhere. This is not so much of a burden as it seems, since we are living in a much more urban and tightly packed environment. The added bonus is that all the things we see along the way are almost always as interesting as the final destination to which we are headed. An example of such symmetry is our excursion last week to the Naval Museum in Besiktas - to which we took a boat :-)
The museum is devoted to the boats of the Turkish Navy from the Ottoman era, in particular, caiques, gondola shaped boats that transferred people around the Bosphorus in that time.
Sometimes manned by 13 or more men, the most ornate ones were reserved for the Sultan and his family. These are fun to look at with all their golden decorations - if you look closely at these you can tell which type of people used each boat - the Sultan's boat would have the coat of arms, his family would have fruit or flowers.
Other rooms in the museum featured artwork with caiques in them, and naval uniforms.
Afterwards, we ran around the courtyard with our friends, climbing the different anchors and being silly. Because that's what we do :-)
All in all, a very pleasant way to wander our afternoon away...
No comments:
Post a Comment