At an extremely efficient five feet six inches, I still like to think of myself as being fairly tall. But I have to admit that there actually are thousands of Americans (well, at least hundreds) who are actually taller (and Luck of Leeper says I usually get one sitting in front of me at a movie theater). One advantage of having hundreds of Americans taller than me is that I usually do not find beds to be too short for me. This is one of the rare places where my feet stick out over the end. I wonder what some of the few hundred whom I have met would do sleeping here. I guess they would just hang their feet.

After breakfast we had a bellboy come up and show us how to flush the toilet. There it a plunger that should come up on its own, but it does work if you pull it up by hand. There was a different desk clerk today and he was more serious. So why was the clerk telling us 7:00 and be strong?

We are back to cloudy, rainy days.

Our first chore of the morning is to get train tickets to Istanbul. (Now why does that still sound dramatic?) We went to a bus stop and could not find the bus we wanted. Evelyn asked a ticket seller and it sounded like Bus 200. There was no bus 200. I pulled out a pad of paper and asked the directions again. He wrote down "200 metre, ilerde ASTI bas." Seeing it written made all the difference. We walked a little way down the street, beyond the current grouping of bus signs and by itself. And there was a bus sign labeled "ilerde ASTI bas." And that was that. I now never travel to any non-English-speaking place without a writing pad. It is better than a phrase book for communicating. (In Japan when I went to restaurants I tried ordering orally only the first day. Once I figured out I could copy the names of dishes from the window displays it took about 95% of the hassle out of ordering.)

We took the bus to the Gar, the rail station. We got sleeper car tickets for the Friday night train to Istanbul. This saves a night of hotel, saves a day of travel, and costs little more than standard train tickets. In this case tickets for two cost 8,500,000TL. That is $17 a person.

The station has a Railway Museum. It is just a small museum of four rooms or so. There is not much English. Basically it is mementos of the railway trade. There are things like ticket stamping machines. There are models of whole trains or of individual cars. There are models of whole railway stations. To one side there is even the private railway coach given by Hitler to Ataturk. Hitler always hoped that Turkey would enter the war on the same side as Germany. Turkey did not make the same mistake twice. Some of the exhibits are hard to understand.

I went out and took a snapshot of the train in the station. I was at some distance but the engineer in the front car stood up, probably posing for my picture.

There is another museum at the railway, a sort of small art museum. We went in, but the guard seemed convinced we were in the wrong place and we wanted the railway history museum.

Next we wanted to go to Ataturk's Mausoleum. We hired a cab. It cost us a dollar or so and saved us a lot of walking. We rarely use cabs and it is foolish.

There were military guards standing at attention on the road leading us to the site. This seems excessively formal to us. On arriving there were a bunch of people in jackets and ties milling around. That explains the formality. Something is happening. Sure enough there were a bunch of tourists in the buildings waiting to see some arriving dignitary. I got my camera to the ready with the telephoto lens. One of what I think were plain-clothes men was eyeing my camera to make sure it did not mask a gun. I saw the man arrive and he was a little white-haired old man with a bent spine and an almost beatific look on his face. A ceremonial guard came out and presented him with a wreath that I later saw he carelessly left when he visited Ataturk's tomb.

When he had passed I asked the plain-clothes-man "Kim? Who?" "Bernard Lewis." I don't know who that is. He looks American. The wreath said "Prof. Dr. Bernard Lewis" in letters stapled on. There is no W in Turkish and they crudely stapled together two Vs. [Bernard Lewis is a historian and expert about the Middle East in general and Arabs in particular.]

Everywhere in Turkey a great deal is made of Ataturk, and nowhere like Ankara, and in Ankara so much is made no place but here. There is a long marble walkway flanked by stone lions. It leads to a big courtyard with the mausoleum at one end. All around the outside of the courtyard is a wall with buildings at the corners that constitute a museum of the life of Ataturk. Even before the walkway there are two small buildings whose subject is just the memorial showing alternate designs including an interesting and somewhat kitsch pyramid design. Inside the courtyard the walls are decorated with symbolic reliefs. When wet the reliefs are harder to see because they lose their contrast with the background. In the museums you can see Ataturk's library, the clothing he wore, documents he signed, gifts that were given him, walking sticks he used, and cufflinks he wore. There is even a case of photographs taken in Turkey in which cloud patterns look like his face or just his eyes watching over Turkey. I would say it is a little ostentatious, but it is a punishable crime to not show sufficient respect for Ataturk in Ankara. This was very much a gray sky day, but as we were walking between buildings I noticed peculiar billows of blackness rising up from the city. Something in Ankara was burning pretty fiercely. We will probably never know what.

The exhibit concludes with cars used by Ataturk and the caisson that carried his body to his funeral. Then there is a souvenir shop. Evelyn bought postcards, but I got a really unique souvenir, a little geometry book written by Mustapha Kemal. I should point out that Mustapha was his name at birth. One of his mathematics teachers renamed him Mustapha Kemal for his excellence in mathematics. Kemal means perfection. Later when he was named Ataturk, father of Turks, he kept the Kemal and dropped the Mustapha.

On the way back we discussed why our own leaders do not have nearly the personality cult of an Ataturk. Evelyn later pointed out that our only real personality cult is Elvis Presley. Perhaps if you are going to have personality cults, it is better it be of a singer than of a politician. But maybe not. I mean, what does that say about Americans?

For lunch we stopped in a chicken restaurant called Mudurnu. I had a Chicken Schnitzel, and Evelyn had Chicken Shish. I thought mine was pretty good. Schnitzel is fried a different way than things are fried in the US. I put some lemon juice on it and it was very nice in spite of being a fast food restaurant. Very different than the repetitive food we are having.

It is a fair walk from the mausoleum to the ethnographic museum but at least there is a Locomotive Open Air Museum along the way. This is where they have engines from the glory days of Ataturk building the railroads of Turkey. Unfortunately the locomotives are pretty much all from the same years, the 20s and 30s, and look a lot alike.

Walking from the open-air museum to the ethnographic museum turned into more than I had bargained for. We had a minor revolt in which I suggested that we really would enjoy the trip more if we took more taxis. I guess the long walk uphill to the open-air museum in Goreme convinced me that I was arriving at sites I wanted to see already exhausted. We should be more selective.

We got to the ethnographic museum and discovered it to be full of Japanese ceramics. We were in the wrong museum. Actually we had found the Fine Arts Museum. The Japanese ceramics were fine, but not what we were expecting.

Behind the Fine Arts Museum we found the Ethnography Museum. It is a nice collection of the expected sorts of things: wedding dresses, napkins, and ethnic clothing. There are guns, woodwork with inlaid mother of pearl, bookstands, the inevitable carpets, and brassware.

There were some historic photos. Turkish uniforms of the 30s look like French from WWI uniforms. They look like trenchcoats and hardhats with rounded work helmets. Officers looked like Nazis with broad flat-topped hats. Other helmets look like Nazi metal helmets with the rim that comes down to protect the ears and the back of the neck.

Continuing on there are decorated swords and guns. It is not clear to me why you would want these things highly decorated, but I guess they were for a different age and different values. I remember how beautiful was the carved work on the Wasa in Sweden. It was really very ornate. The fish must have been really impressed since it was top-heavy and had an active career measured in minutes. When it comes to weaponry I will take functionality over glitz every time.

They had a calligraphy exhibit with pictures in Koranic calligraphy, including sailboats, birds, human faces, etc. They also had a sepulcher decorated in woodwork calligraphy. Nobody venerates calligraphy like Muslims, not even the Japanese. And there is a sort of lounge. The Turks go in for horizontal living.

As we were headed back we saw there was the main branch of the Fine Arts Museum right there so we visited it. It has mostly European style art. There was a nice piece about a sword-seller in a marketplace with a very Arabian Nights sort of feel. They have a fair amount of modern art. Some of the art is very attractive.

After that we continued on to see if there was anything playing at the opera house. Sure enough tonight was a performance of "Cingene Baron" by Johann Strauss. We bought tickets and found them to be at the double-take price of 400,000TL. Yes, if you want a night at the opera they sock you $1.60 for a seat. For the price of one opera in New York you could see 25 or more here.

We got back to the room and found the toilet again broken. I figured out that the way to get it to work was to take the top off the tank and push the float down by hand when its own weight does not push it down.

We are watching a little bit of Turkish cable TV. The most popular station seems to be SHOW. This is a station that seems to show soap operas and Italian melodramas both dubbed into Turkish.

Kind of a risque ad for Turkish TV but funny. A man and a woman are kissing passionately on a beach. She lends him a coin and he goes running to buy a condom. He is ready to put his coin in the machine when he sees next to it another vending machine labeled "Magnum." He spends his coin on a Magnum Ice Cream Bar instead. I don't think we would have an ad that risque on American TV.

Interesting to see a lottery ad built around the song "If I Were a Rich Man." How many mostly Islamic countries would know the song from a play about Ukrainian Jews?

We had dinner at a restaurant called Kebabistan where I had chicken kabaps and for desert shredded wheat with honey and nuts, something I had had in Greek restaurants at home.

It took about 15 minutes to walk to the opera house. I mentioned before that people start buildings that they cannot finish just to show the commitment. I think the same thing goes for sidewalk repair. The sidewalks are in dismal shape but at many of the places where the sidewalks are falling apart are some of the materials for repairs. Most likely they are cement tiles. Now they may be eighteen-inch sand pits in the sidewalk waiting to catch the unwary, but there will be a pile of sidewalk tiles there showing the intent of the city to make this a whole and healthy sidewalk some day. There is always the hope for the future. Your children or perhaps your grandchildren will live to see this sidewalk repaired. The reason the sidewalks are always torn up is in part that cars are allowed to park on sidewalks. Heavy vehicles tend to really rip up pavement. Next time you see some big trailer truck saying this vehicle pays some exorbitant amount for road taxes each year remember he is on the road a lot more hours a year than you are. And for each of those hours he does a lot more road damage than you do with one of your hours. His road taxes probably do not cover the wear he causes and your cover yours and some of his. But remember also that he may be bringing food to your grocery store and part of what you pay is so that you can eat.

Anyway, so we walk to the Ankara Opera House. It is a nice little unassuming little opera house. We buy tickets for tomorrow's dance performance. Up we go to the balcony where our seats are third row from the back. This is a hot country and you should never assume that air conditioning someone else controls will be to your standard. It must be at least 80 degrees.

The opera begins with a stirring overture followed by the Entrance of the Late Arrivals. Once they are in their seats the story starts in a gypsy camp near a town. Don't let that fool you. This is an operetta by Johann Strauss. He could have Act One about peasants living in a Paris sewer, eating garbage, and being bitten by rats. By Act 3 it will be about Austrian aristocrats waltzing.

The operetta was performed in Turkish. At the first intermission I commented to Evelyn that under the circumstances it was surprisingly easy to follow considering I had never heard the story. Not that I had every plot point. When pressed I could tell her lots about the story. At one point someone thanks someone else. I happen to know the Turkish word for "thanks." Another point some colorfully dressed women bring out some baked goods to the crowd.

There was of course somebody selling cans of soda at the intermission. I got one more out of curiosity about the price than because I was really thirsty. It was 150,000TL, probably what you would pay at a kiosk on the street. The chime to call people back to their seats is the first 15 notes of Beethoven's 6^th Symphony. Those are probably the 15 most gentle notes in music outside of a lullaby. There were two intermissions and each took a serious toll in attendance.

The third act, though short, was the spectacular finale. Gypsies and townspeople were back from the war in their grand uniforms and were waltzing around the stage. So much glitter was dropped it looked like the scene was taking place in champagne. Now I didn't think all that much of the film Top Secret when I saw it, but the humor has stuck with me and I still think I it is funny. One of its legacies is that I cannot see a ballroom scene of everybody waltzing without it looking just a little ridiculous. And that really is the function of satire.

One other thing did come to mind. In The Paths of Glory when Dax visits General Mureau on last time to try to avert the execution, Mureau is giving a ball in which they are dancing Strauss waltzes. It never occurred to me but that is the music of the enemy. France was fighting Austro-Hungary in the First World War. That is a very clever touch. If you don't know what I am talking about, I envy you but hurry before it is too late. Get your hands on Stanley Kubrick's best film, The Paths of Glory. Other than a couple of crime films it is his first film and he never made nearly so good a film again. That film is much better than this operetta, of course.

There are all degrees of skin tone one sees in Turkey but there were no dark Turks on the stage and few in the audience. I could be wrong but I think there are no women in headscarves either. What is interesting is that many Germans and Austrians look down on the Turks as cultural and racial inferiors. They are considered just cheap labor for the auto plants. But the Turks care enough about Austrian culture to want to put on Strauss operettas. It is sort of the relation between Korea and Japan. I have never seen a Korean restaurant that did not have a sushi bar and at serve a fair amount of Japanese food. The Japanese think of the Koreans as racial inferiors. Ah, such is unrequited love.

After the opera we walked back to the hotel and wrote a while.