The pain of packing...the details of departure...the joy of journey

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Each entry of this trip to Turkey will be headed with haiku. I love connecting tissue, a common thread, a simple but thoughtful theme, and the challenge of poetry. But why start blogging a week before the adventure begins? The details of departure are exhausting...the mail, the bills, the luggage, the luggage tags, the newspapers, the prescriptions, the dog, the garden, the cell phone international plan, the volunteer responsibilities put on hold, and the right shoes...It's not easy packing light for three weeks and knowing that your feet will be appropriately shod for the Grand Bazaar, a night on the town in Istanbul, the decks of the gulet, or a hike to the baths of Cleopatra. Chartreuse Toms will be perfect for the gulet!

Detail only starts with packing. It includes context: In the past 8 months I've read My Name is Red (well almost...hope to finish on the plane) and listened to The Silent House and The Museum of Innocence on tape (Orhan Pamuk), sloughed through Jason Goodwin's Lords of the Horizon and thoroughly enjoyed all of his mysteries in which the "detective" is a 19th century eunuch in Istanbul. My husband and I enrolled in a 10 week Humanities Seminar at the University of Arizona entitled "Anatolia: Cradle of Civilization" for which the textbook was Richard Stoneman's A Traveller's History of Turkey. I watched and very nearly fell into a trance by over 2 hours of the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia(Fortunately, my eldest son told me that "slow cinema" is making a comeback!). Three Monkeys is on its way from Netflix and I've gathered a selection of guidebooks from the public library. I can even articulate the basic difference between a Suni and a Shia so...it would seem that I'm ready for departure.

I've also added a photo of my garden since it will have frozen by the time I return!

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