by Lehua Parker | May 14, 2014 | Travel
You could wear pajamas grocery shopping and no one would know.- Skip everything but eye make-up.
- Ponytail hair every day.
- No shaving, waxing, or nylons.
- No sunscreen.
- Big lunch? No problem.
- Ultimate crowd blend—you could hide in your car and check email instead of sitting with the other mothers at the soccer game. (Of course I saw your awesome goal/kick/pass/tackle, honey! I was sitting on the bench right there!)
- One black handbag.
- One pair of comfortable black shoes.
- Carrying a scythe, you could scare the crap out of people walking down a hospital corridor.
Big Note:
I understand that what I called a burka in this and previous posts is a religious garment, an outward reflection of an inner commitment to a particular standard of modesty and propriety. I respect that. I also understand that these garments are usually worn only in public where men not related to a woman might see her. However, as a non-Muslim woman from the USA, seeing so many women wearing hijab, niqab, and burqas in Turkey made me wonder what benefits I might get from wearing Islamic dress. For those interested, here’s a better description of what I saw.
Hijab: Covers a woman’s body leaving only face and hands visible. What I saw most often in Turkey, particularly among women walking alone. Long skirts or long pants with thigh-length coats and head scarves. The clothes were always dark blue, grey, black, or brown. Some of the under 30 crowd wore brightly patterned head scarves. Well, sorta. Lots of blues, golds, muted greens, and browns. Very few pinks, reds, yellows, or purples.
Niqab: A loose fitting garment that also covers part of the face leaving only eyes visible. Less common, but I usually saw women in niqab in pairs or threesomes. Black. The fabric weight varied with some floating more like silk or nylon and others looking heavy like wool.
Burqa: A loose fitting garment that also obscures the face with a mesh so even the eyes are not visible. Fairly rare, but burqa wearers tended to travel in packs with male escorts. Black, only black, and heavy weighted fabrics.
by Lehua Parker | May 9, 2014 | Travel
Private function dinner at the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul, Turkey.
Sunday evening, May 4, 2014, Istanbul, Turkey.
There are 800 of us in semi-formal western attire walking through the plaza past the Hagia Sophia to the Basilica Cistern (Yerebatan Sarayi) where we’ll have a dinner so fancy that at 2 am my husband will order pizza from room service.
The walk is long, over uneven cobblestones and up and down slick marble steps. Most of my attention is on avoiding holes and cracks, teetering along in my sparkly spiked heels. My swollen and healing foot isn’t quite up to the stress, but every women knows beauty is pain. I keep a tight grip on my husband’s arm.
I’m not the only woman walking gingerly, so we’re strung out in a line that runs about a third of a mile long. What little attention I can spare is spent bedazzled by the soaring minarets and domes of the buildings we pass by. It’s everything I’ve seen in history books and more. Carts selling roasted chestnuts, watermelon, corn on the cob, and something I suspect is tea are strategically placed along the way, as are benches under shady trees.
Benches.
And that’s when I see them.
Burkas and cell phones. Fo’ real.
It’s Sunday evening after all, and local families have been enjoying the day in the Old Town, the part of Istanbul that was once Constantinople and before that, Byzantium. Ancient doesn’t begin to describe it. Over loud speakers we hear an Imam wailing praise and glory to Allah, calling the faithful to remember and give thanks.
Perched on benches, gathered in front of spurting fountains, and lining both sides of the walkway are women in burkas. I can only see their eyes, but I can feel their disapproval. They clutch children close and whisper in their ears. I resist the urge to tug down on my hem. In a fitted black cocktail dress that comes to my knees, covers my shoulders, and barely shows my collarbones, I feel like I’m wearing a bikini.
Ahead of me people in my group are taking pictures with cell phones and surreptitiously point with their chins at men in fezzes offering to shine shoes, beggars leaning against walls, gypsy children chasing around a tree. At the same time I see cell phones peeking out of burka sleeves, snapping photos of us, the freak show on parade. Some of the young men walk up and boldly take pictures of long legs and short hems, crowing to their buddies as they gather to review their spoils.
I catch their eyes and give them my best motherly you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself look. They back off. It’s only later that I learn that making direct eye contact with a male stranger is more scandalous than cleavage.
Basillica Cistern without tables.
I take note of the few burka-less women I see: dark colors, closed-toed shoes, long pants or skirts to the ankle, long sleeves, thigh-length coats, head scarves. I think of what I packed: bright colors, capris, sandals, short-sleeves. There’s no way I’m not going to stick out like a naked sore thumb. Even my rain jacket is bright raspberry.
I’m not used to this. By most American standards, I dress on the dowdy side of frumpy. I’m pudgy in all the wrong places. Baggy and shapeless are my friends. The idea that anyone besides my husband could find me titillating is ludicrous, but waves of disapproval are crashing all around me. I begin to question my own standards of modesty and wonder if it’s all in our heads.
Maybe modesty is really more about what people think and assume rather than how much skin is showing.
by Lehua Parker | Apr 30, 2014 | Travel
It’s been nine days since I got a whole can’s worth at once.
Nothing says I’m back in the USA like the large Diet Coke I ordered at an airport kiosk that’s brimming with ice, half a gallon at least, and rocking a thick lemon slice. I never figured out if in the Caribbean ice was the luxury or the soda—did bartenders serve me two ice cubes in a glass so I would get my money’s worth of soda or were they trying to save the ice for all the rum-blended drinks?
On the cruise I popped for the bubbles sticker, a flat rate per day for all the soda and juice you could drink. You’re charged for every day of the trip, including the first and last day of the cruise, which I think should count as one day since I couldn’t get a Diet Coke to save my life the morning we disembarked. We immediately dubbed them bublé cards. (Even sober, when you’re on vacation, things tend to make less sense later on.)
I paid for four bublé stickers all at once and almost fainted at the total, more than the GNP of many of the small island nations we visited, but I figured if everyone in our family only drank two glasses a day, we’d break even. At less than a can a glass, I knew I’d be drinking more than two.
My daughter delighted in ordering root beer, which always confused the bartenders. Earnest Filipinos and Malaysians would hold up Dr. Pepper and other drinks while she shook her head and pointed at the dusty case of Barq’s in the back. I swear it was loaded on the ship back in 2010 by mistake. My son drank a ton of ginger ale. Bartenders know that one by heart.
The cruise ship had an adult beverage version of the bublé sticker that started at $50 a day, depending on your poison. Suddenly, my Diet Coke pass didn’t seem so expensive.
It’s all a matter of perspective. After a week in the Caribbean even airport prices looked good.
by Lehua Parker | Apr 29, 2014 | Travel
We’re screwed. Taxis in the Caribbean are more than four times what I expected and everywhere I turn people have their hands out for a tip. I didn’t bring enough cash, which usually isn’t a problem, but our bank and credit cards won’t let us get cash from the ATMs.
Yes, I called all our financial institutions before we left and told them we’d be traveling and where. They all said no problem.
Problem. Out in the middle of the Atlantic, the AMEX and Mastercard satellites don’t want to talk to the cruise ship. While we can charge all the ship services we want, they won’t give us cash against our credit cards without first talking to the credit card companies. There’s no problem, the cruise ship assures us, we have lots of ship to shore adventures you can charge to your room or you can just stay on the ship.
Not going to happen.
My husband finally places a ship to shore call to our bank, America First Credit Union. The customer service rep tells us we can access our cash if we use our account’s Visa/debit card, the card neither of us carry, preferring the old-fashioned ATM cards we’ve had in our wallets for fifteen years.
We’re screwed.
Except my husband remembers our son must have one of the newer debit cards. It’s late and he knows our son is fast asleep five decks above him. He asks the customer service rep if our son’s account has that kind of card.
There’s an awkward pause when the rep says she can’t give out that information because my husband isn’t associated with that account.
What? my husband sputters.
She’s right. Our son’s account is in my name and his, not my husband’s.
My husband names a figure and says check your records, that’s a weekly deposit into my son’s account from mine. It’s his allowance.
There’s a muffled giggle, then rep says she still can’t tell my husband that a charge was made that morning in St.Thomas, which means our son has his Visa/debit card on him.
Cool, says my husband. Let’s up his allowance.
Small town credit unions rule.
by Lehua Parker | Apr 28, 2014 | Travel
Outside of the walled resort the town is poor, clothes from Goodwill poor, the kind of poor where there are not enough jobs for young men, so they congregate around shade trees waiting for the day’s catch to arrive in leaky dinghies. My kids have never seen this kind of poor outside of a National Geographic special. Remember, I think hard at them. Understand how much you have and be grateful. Remember also, I think, that to whom much is given, much is required.
Eventually, we walk to a bar where the only non-alcoholic drinks are water and Coke. The older men in the neighborhood gather around us and talk guns with my husband, sell bracelets to my daughter, and once they realize I know what breadfruit, papaya, and mango trees look like, joke with me about island life. Too busy on the mainland, they tell me, you must teach your children to slow down island-style.
Along with the Reggae comes the herb. My son looks like he’s about to blow a blood vessel when they politely offer him some. “No thanks,” I say, “The day is enough,” and they laugh some more.
“Chill,” I tell my son. “Rastafarians. It’s part of their religion. To them it’s a sacrament.”
He frowns. It’s not like this at home. He’s had a few problems with drunken frat boys on the ship and is clinging to his just say no mentality with both hands clenched tight.
“I’ve never seen a belligerent pakalolo head,” I tell him. “Mellow and munchy is the worst to expect.”
I cross the street to where a small boat is unloading its catch, sorting fish into five gallon buckets that are whisked away, disappearing down shanty alleyways and behind bar counters. “How’s the fishing?” I ask.
Three men proudly display thirty or so small fish that look like miniature marlin and a couple of red snapper.
“Net?” I ask.
“Of course, mon,” they say, “unlike de tourists we don’t have all day.”
by Lehua Parker | Apr 27, 2014 | Travel
Shoes are a problem. Any pressure on the healing scar on my heel and I want to curl into a little ball and quiver. It’s not supposed to be this way, but what can you do? Knowing I was going on these trips, I had the surgery in early January, assured that I’d be walking pain-free by now.
It’s better, certainly, than it was before surgery when I could barely hobble down the stairs. But walking six to eight miles a day in slippahs causes tissues to swell alarmingly.
Ice and elevation, I think. 800 mg of Ibuprofen.
Swallowing the pills, I open my purse and take out the quart-sized plastic bag that I’d used to get my mini-hand sanitizer and sunscreen through airport security—TSA: keeping our skies safe at four ounces of fluid or less at a time.
The first time I try to use it, I have to beg a bartender to fill it full of ice. The second and third time I fill it myself near the buffet line. Apparently, I’m supposed to buy chemical cold packs at the gift shop.
I’m also supposed to wear high heels and formal wear at dinner tonight.
Not going to happen.
Besides, I’m on vacation, damn it.
