Hearing Glory- St. Anne's

Today I was hanging out at St. Anne's. How lucky am I- being able to just hang out in such places!

Anyway- I was admiring the way the light shines through the stone latticework windows, how the pillars are un-faced and have rugged seams in them, and the look of huge oak and black iron doors. There was an Italian (I think) tour group sitting in the pews (which, by the way, try to avoid them if possible- rare forms of torture calculated to keep tourists moving) in front of me. They were singing in Latin and enjoying the acoustics.

Remember St. Anne's? For those you who have been there it needs no explanation, but for those who haven't- you can practically sing three-part harmony with yourself because the notes echo around the dome so long. Very nice, as long as you stay on tune.

After a bit most of the group stopped singing. A few hadn't had enough and kept on going- a young man (in an exceptionally ugly hat), and sundry middle-agers with good voices. Fewer voices are really less confusing anyway, and I sat back in bliss to listen. How they sang! Controlled, slow Latin hymns with beautiful harmony. One exceptionally pure soprano would suddenly rise out of the steady flow of the harmony with a few notes of pure joy.

The young man with the ugly hat seemed particularly intent. He never got up and wandered around, and didn't even seem interested in looking around at the architecture. It wasn't until they all started to move out of the church that I saw why- he was walking down the center aisle arm-in-arm with an older man, and with a familiar rigid and focused gait.
He was blind.

As I watched him out the door I wondered what it must be like sight-see without being about to see, to tour and to need a guide for every step, to visit the Holy Land and not come home with a 1,000 photos to remember it by?

But what vividness some memories must hold- memories of sound, heat, the feel of the stones underfoot, the voices of people praying, singing, the Arabs on David's Street calling their wares.

No wonder he kept singing. All the rest could wander at will, and see, but oh how RICH that sound must have been for him!

Lucky man.

A Tale of Two Airports.... and Several Continents

I'm an irritated state of mind right now. I'm trying to finish a project. The project has a goal to be reached. It should be reached soon. Sadly the goal is difficult to define. The steps leading to the goal are difficult to define. Nobody else seems to be able to define them for me. I can't define them for me. So I am lost in a sea of rabbit trails, loose ends, computer issues and circular thought patterns. I hate this.

So now I am sitting on the floor with the sun on my back listening to Valentina Igoshina play Chopin and I shall tell you a funny story to help me forget my troubles.

Once upon a time I flew to Turkey. I didn't really want to fly to Turkey, but hey, whatever. The day before I left the travel agent called to ask me if I minded taking by an earlier flight. I didn't....

wait a sec, Valentina is buffering and I must go pause her.

Okay, as I was saying, I didn't have a problem with that. Mark and Liz were going to pick me up at the other end and I was pretty sure 3 pm was better than 8 for them.



"Same airport, right?" I asked the travel agent person.



I put that question on its own line with extra spaces to make it stick out. It is the crux of the whole matter. Don't forget that I asked it.

The travel agent allowed as how it was the same airport. Or, maybe she really meant that my leaving and returning flights both left from the same airport.

Anyway, I flew to Turkey to see the king, or at least the Stamps.

I landed in Istanbul at 3 pm. If you have a moment, look up a map of Istanbul. You will notice that the city has two sides separated by water. That water is called the Bosphorus. The two sides are on two continents! Isn't that cool?

So Istanbul has an Asian side and a European side. What does that have to do with my story? Well, there is a tiny airport on the Asian side, a bigger airport on the European side, and Mark and Liz live sort of mid-way between them, but on the Asian side.

Ahhh, we begin to see why it might be important to know which airport we are going into!

Anyway, I landed in Istanbul and scanned the crowd for a familiar face. I was really looking for a guy who looked like Matt without a military haircut, because I hadn't really seen Mark since he was a small lad. And I had no idea what Liz looked like.

I saw no Matt-esque men. Suddenly I knew what had happened. I wasn't in the tiny airport on the Asian side. I was really in the larger airport on the European side.
But Mark and Liz were on the Asian side. Holding down the tiny airport and looking for me.

But I wasn't there.

Funny, I had worried about lots of things involved in this trip to Turkey, but arriving at a totally different airport wasn't one of them. Guess I'm bad a worrying.

Anyway I didn't have time for worry now. I went to the nearest information desk to double-check my location. Is there any non-stupid way of asking, "Excuse me, but can you tell me where I am?"

Then I changed money into.... ummm liras? Somebody (that would be me) did absolutely NO research about Turkey before they arrived. But I learned a lot, fast.

I found a phone.

I found a post office.

I bought a phone card.

I called Mark and Liz's home phone. I'm not sure why, since I knew they were at the airport. Not MY airport of course, but AN airport, which isn't where they live.

Then I took the next logical step and called my Daddy. He called Rachel in NH to get Roy and Lee's number in California. Daddy called California to get Liz's cell number. It was an old one. So Daddy called Mike who was on a business trip in China. Couldn't reach him.


While Daddy was continent hopping via phone, I was looking at ways of continent hopping myself. Take a taxi? I nixed that without a second thought. I don't trust a taxi unless I can speak the taxi driver's native language.
Shuttle bus? Some helpful Turkish guy told me all about it and showed me a map and was so polite. But I wasn't sure of the exchange rate and it seemed an awful lot of money. I called Daddy and had him run it through a exchange rate calculator. $115????!!!? Ummm, I don't even have that much cash on me! Maybe I should just walk. In a foreign country, after dark, in a city. Ha.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or the airport on the Asian side, Mark and Liz (being smarter than the average bears) decided there was problem. Their airport was so small that there were only three planes in the whole place. None of them were from my part of the world. So Mark decided to stay at the airport and Liz when home. Whooo hoo! Good has been done here!

Lisa meanwhile sent them a message on Facebook on my account. In essence it said:

"Katie's in the other place!"

To make a long story end soon:
Liz saw the message, called the accompanying phone number (Daddy), and got all the gory details.

Then she took a ferry, a tram and a light rail to pick me up. This was simpler and cheaper for all involved. Really. Its was just more time-intensive. Poor Liz.

I sat at the airport taking boring pictures and wondered what Liz looked like.

Thankfully she looked at my picture on Facebook, so she knew what I looked like. She found me and we went home via light rail, tram and ferry. Arrival time: 9 pm.

Bless his heart, Mark had bought pizza. Pizza, pizza, love of my heart, joy of life.... when was the last time I had real pizza?

Moving on...

I have been involved in fiascos before. I have done many stupid and clumsy things and have had to be dragged out of multiple scrapes by sundry people. But this is the first time that I have involved all the following in my ineptness all at once: family, friends, China, Turkey, California , New Hampshire, Israel, long-suffering relative strangers,Turks, Israelis, trams, ferries, light rails and large bodies of water.

This, my friends, takes the cake.

the moral of this story is: Never travel.
ha.