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TheWeaknessofGod
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Interests: Jesus. The Bible. My beautiful wife. My baby daughter. Russian authors. Acoustic guitar. Jazz, blues and roots music. Languages. Philosophy. Engineering. Turkey and the Middle East. History, art and photography. Etc.
Expertise: Not very much in most of the areas of my interests. But I'm working on it.
Message: message me
Member Since:
4/2/2006
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| ... Or photo of the week or possibly of the month, depending when I get around to posting the next time. This is the inside of the former Monastery of St. Gregory, built centuries ago (I can't remember how many exactly) but turned into a mosque when the Turks came along. So then, thinking that it would be a shame to waste such a nice large building, they began holding Friday prayer services and so on there, but unfortunately the monks had not built the sanctuary to face Mecca. So now the original altar area is left vacant, and the actual Namaz prayers are directed toward Mecca, off to the right from the perspective of this picture.
When we visited the building, it was totally deserted, except for a Quran and an empty pair of shoes waiting at a picnic table in the front yard. The Imam was presumably saying his prayers somewhere. We took our shoes off and had a look around before moving on down the valley.
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The other day my friend Mathew was talking to
my other friend Engin about job possibilities. Engin is looking for a job. Mathew suggested a fast food place such as
Starbucks, Burger King, or McDonald’s, since he had seen a number of help
wanted signs at those stores. Unfortunately, Engin said he would not be
qualified – you need to have good experience and recommendations to be able to
qualify for “premium” jobs like that. So presumably you start at less reputable
restaurants and gradually work your way up the ladder … to
McDonald’s. This reminds me of the time my parents visited Ankara a little while back. We were walking along downtown, and my dad noticed a Burger King. "Yeah," I said, "This is one of the more upscale parts of town, so you're going to find the more high-class restaurants here." "Like Burger King," he said. "Yes," I replied, now getting the sense something was not quite right, "Like Burger King."
By the way, if you want to watch a movie with some really funny uses of the word "premium," said with a Ukrainian accent, you should watch "Everything Is Illuminated." Julie and I thought it was hilarious, and touching as well. If you can avoid continually thinking of Elijah Wood as "the guy who played Frodo." Anyway, check it out.
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Here’s a good story from my Turkish friend from a couple
of months ago.
There was a king with three wives. However,
he noticed the one wife of a peasant passing by and took a liking to her. He
offered to trade his three wives for the peasant’s one, and of course since he
was the king, the peasant was forced to accept. When the day came to make the
exchange, the king took the peasant aside to give him some advice about the
wives he was getting.
“Now you’re going to have to watch out for
the first wife,” he said. “She’s an adulteress.”
“Oh, that’s no problem,” said the peasant.
“What about the second wife?”
“Well, she’s a thief.”
“That’s okay, we can fix that,” said the
peasant again. “What about the third?”
“The third wife is disobedient.”
“Well, that’s going to be tough one, but
we’ll see what we can do.”
The peasant took his three new wives home
and starting instructing his sons to get the house ready for them to stay. Coming
to the first wife’s room, he had has sons install an extra door opening
directly into the back street. Seeing this, that adulteress wife came to him
and asked what he was doing.
“Well,” said the peasant, “I thought
sometime you might want to have a friend visit, or you might want to go out at
night to visit some man you’re friends with, and this way you can do it very
easily without being seen.”
“What!” said the wife. “I would never do
anything like that. Take this door out. I’m your wife and I won’t cheat on
you.”
And she never did.
Moving on to the second wife’s room, the
peasant instructed his sons to make copies of all the keys to the secret rooms
and money boxes in the house, and he one copy of every key to his new wife.
“Why are you doing this?” asked the thieving
wife.
“Well,” said the peasant, “I figured that
from time to time you might need to use some of my money or jewels. This way,
whenever you feel the need, it will be easy for you to just get some yourself.”
“Of course not!” said the wife. “You can
keep the keys. I’m sure whatever amount you give me will be fine.”
And so it was.
Finally, the
peasant asked the third, disobedient wife to take a walk with him to the river.
Once there, the peasant threw her into the water and she drowned. There is no
cure for disobedience, but everything else can be cured with trust.
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| So now I'm trying to sell some of my photographs as prints and framed wall art at this website: http://joshuaphotography.imagekind.com. This is not so much because I have a great desire to make a lot of money off photography; I think it's more because I like playing around with pictures and I feel like if I get some money out of it, I won't have to feel like I'm wasting my time. So anyway, here is a sample of a few of the STUNNING pictures for sale at my site now:
    Are you stunned? I'm stunned. I'm telling you, these pictures are just stunning. And there are more that are just as stunning. So if you know anyone who would like to buy pictures like these, meaning they probably have more money than I do, they should check out this site. It's a really cool site and I highly recommend it, even for just surfing around and checking out all the different really interesting art for sale there. And actually most of it is not very expensive, depending what the economy is like in your country.
In other news, I am now a sports radio personality! There is a radio station here that broadcasts in English throughout the city, and the American guy who does the sports show doesn't know anything about soccer (or football, depending what the English language is like in your country). So I have appeared a few times as a guest on the show to talk about European and international soccer. Pretty cool, since a couple of years ago I didn't know anything about it either. But in the past month and a half, I've succeeded in comparing Peter Crouch to a praying mantis, comparing Carlos Tevez to a prehistoric jungle warrior, and comparing the sports fans of England to a bunch of overreacting incompetents who risk premature heart failure unless they calm down about the English team's elimination from Euro 2008 qualifying. That last one elicited a few restraining comments from the radio station staff, but nothing bad came of it because there aren't that many English people here after all. I was just kidding anyway.
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| Just went through some trying times with local beauracracy yesterday, and it reminded me of the time a few months ago when I got a new LPG propane gas system installed in our car. The installation was easy; the registration not so much. But it was worth a lot of laughs later.
I took the mechanic's paperwork and the car to a
leak testing station. I went early in the morning and waited in line behind
about 75 other cars. When that was done a few hours later I had to drive across town to yet
another station. I wasn’t able to understand the purpose of it; it was just for
“inspection,” they said.
So I drove over and found the inspection
station, settling into line with about 200 other cars slowly inching forward.
Men in white coats periodically tapped on the car window, asked me what I was
there for, nodded approvingly and advised me to continue in the line. Eventually
when I reached the front, a more stressed-out man in a white coat with a
clipboard and glasses had me stop the car, opened the hood and asked me where
my application form was. I gave him all my paperwork. Turns out the application
form was not among them; I had never received it. “What? You’ve got to have an
application form! Park your car over there and go get one; then you can come
back.” My Turkish comprehension still being less than a hundred percent, I
parked the car and asked some other guy with a mustache whether I had heard
correctly. “Oh yes,” he said. “You should have gotten the application form
before you got in line. Go over there to that building and ask them about it.
Make sure you lock your car,” he added reassuringly.
I walked over to the building; it had a
small window in the side. They took a look at my papers. “Go to window 2, then
window 7, then go over and pay at window 4,” the man said. “But first go over
there” (this was somewhat vague) “and get an application form.”
I took a look behind the building with the
window and discovered a huge field teeming with mustachioed Turkish men, all
standing in lines that snaked back and forth. Each line went to a numbered
window. All of the windows had signs with words I didn’t understand, and none
of them said anything about application forms. I picked a line at random and
started asking where to go. After getting pointed in three different directions
by three different men and still never finding the form, out of desperation I
ducked into a small convenience store selling candy bars, chips and water. “I’m
trying to find an application form,” I said to the guy behind the counter. “Oh,
yes,” he said. “Here you go.” And he reached under the counter, pulled one out
and gave it to me. “That’ll be one lira.”
A little taken aback, I was still standing
there talking with him when a larger man in a beard walked up and asked for the
same thing. During our conversation, it emerged that since I was a foreigner, I
actually needed a different application form.
Guessing that my comprehension wasn’t all that great, the bearded man got
detailed directions from the counter man and offered to take me to the place I
needed to go. Overhearing the directions, it sounded to me like we were headed
around the corner, turning right and going towards a place where a minivan
was parked. So we did this, and when we turned the corner there was in fact a white
minivan in the distance, but it was in the middle of a field with no buildings
around it. Undeterred, Bearded Man headed straight for the minivan, which I
began to notice had a small knot of people around it. We arrived and looked
inside and sure enough, sitting in the back seat was a little man in a suit
with a typewriter on his knees typing out—you guessed it—application forms. I
paid five lira, got mine, thanked the bearded man and finally, two hours later,
I left with a fully registered LPG system.
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