Turkey stuffing

I am stuck in Erzurum, Turkey for a few hours---I arrived here an hour ago, missing my connection to Artvin by 15 minutes. Oh well. It's pouring, so I don't feel like exploring the city (plus, I'll pass through Erzurum again in about 10 days), which means I either sit for in a dark, smoky bus terminal, or I find an internet cafe (there's one on every block) and write a little about my previous week.

When I last wrote I was in Sivas. It was good to move on from there--no particular reason why, I was just eager to move again. I took a dolmuş to Divriği, and then a train from there to Erzincan. I caught a bus from Erzincan to Trabzon. (It doesn't matter if you don't know where the hell any of these places are--I didn't either until I was just a few hundred kilometers away from them.)

Let me pause for a minute to describe the Turkish ''dolmuş.'' If you translate the word literally, it means ''stuffed.'' (That should give you some idea.) Basically, you take a 10 passenger van, stick a few extra seats in it, jamm it full of people, and then go careening down the road, with no more than a horn and Allah as safety equipment.

To get off, you shout ''enecek var!'' and the driver abruptly brakes and steers to the side of the road, throwing passengers and luggage every which way. In the east, seating is segregrated by gender, which means I have to move a lot: as an unfamiliar, lone male traveler, no one lets me get too close to the ladies. (And what a bummer that is!)

Turkish buses are considerably more comfortable, but they have their downsides, mainly a constant stream of bad television and movies aimed at my eyeballs. A few weeks ago, I watched the Turkish equivanent of the Food Network (Kanal Yemek) for three hours. The trains are best: although they are painfully slow, they're cheap, quiet, and don't dangerously swerve to avoid tractors hauling loads of potatoes as the dolmuşes do.

Anyway, my route. I stayed in Trabzon longer than I had expected--five days--and then started moving again, more or less towards the Georgian border, and beyond it, Armenia. I'll cross the border into Georgia on Sunday, and expect to be in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, on Monday. I'll spend a few days there and then return to Turkey.

I spent last Friday night in Divriği, a tiny town known best for its famous mosque, built by the Seljuks in the 13th century. I visited it right before the afternoon call to prayer, which was almost drowned out by a brass band practicing in the school next door. I thought I would only stop for a few hours to see the mosque and eat a meal, but I got stuck until 3 a.m. Saturday morning, when I caught a train to Erzincan.

I'm glad I stayed. I ate dinner and drank a few beers in a little restaurant off the main square, where I met some curious people. (It's rare to find restaurants in the east that serve alcohol, and whenever I do, I do a little dance and shout hooray! Not really, but that's what I feel like.) As I was paying my bill, a very drunk old man embraced me and kept kissing my forehead. (A sign of respect.)

I eventually escaped his grasp, but as I was headed to the door, three men called me over to apologize for their friend--they explained that he's a great guy, but that when he drinks, he gets kind of crazy. I wanted to say that I know plenty of people like that, but that phrase requires some grammar I don't know in Turkish.

They insisted on buying me another beer, and who ever says no to that? We talked for about an hour, mostly about women. All I could really add was, ''bayan problem var!'' which means, ''women are problems.'' I don't really believe that, but it seemed like the appropriate thing to say. After all, one of these guys had been married three times, and another was trying to get 500 lira ($300) from an ex-girlfriend. Somehow I understood all that.

My time in Trabzon was pleasant. I stayed with Seher, a nice girl from couchsurfing, for three nights. (I spent my first two nights there in an awful hotel--one of the worst I've ever seen.) She introduced me to several friends, and I was really happy to spend time with girls again. Turkish society is heavily segregrated by gender, and after a my time in the masculine tea houses in Sivas and a smoky restaraunt in Divriği, it was really nice to talk with women. (I'll write about gender in Turkey sometime soon.)

So that's that. I can't possibly write about everything, but that's a good thing: I'll have stories no one has heard yet when I get back in December.