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This past winter, as I worked one more time in California to bridge the financial gap that always occurred each winter in Turkish tourism, with economies tightening and a decade that has seen wars, terrorism, earthquakes tossing in more than the occasional challenge to making a living, I decided to work with a life […] After nearly 12 years in Turkeyand a lifetime of loving weavings and embroideries, I’m hardly an expertdespite a formal textile education. In a city like Istanbul,I’m surrounded by generations of rug merchants who could offer the equivalentof a PhD in techniques, styles and the various regions from which their warescome. While I’ve met a […] We’ve launched a project on Kickstarter, the creative arts crowd-funding site, to help us fund our East meets West fiber arts workshops, in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet, starting March 2011. Can fiber arts bridge cultures? Will women from multiple countries knit up new versions of traditional skills? Is there a common language of craft? Read the […] Nationalism.Ethnicity. Religion. Economic status. Politics. If I had to pick a way to save our troubledworld, to guide us beyond these barriers that divide us, the tool I’d startwith to bring us together is music. Monday night, I was among the 50,000+ people who made thelong journey to an isolated corner of Istanbul,to a […] Tuesday, early evening, the last full week of August, in the month of Ramazan. Our window on the fourth floor faces east, overlooking themouth of the Bosphorus. I’ve taken to working here each late afternoonuntil the sun sets. Sounds from outside float in over a strong,cooling breeze; after so many weeks of excessive […] HYBRID AMBASSADORS: a blog-ring project of Dialogue2010You met our multinational cultural innovators this spring in a roundtable discussion of hybrid life at expat+HAREM. Now in these interconnected blog posts they share reactions to a recent polarizing book promotion at the writing network SheWrites. Join the discussion on Twitter using #HybridAmbassadors or #Dialogue2010 Looking […] In 1890, the newly opened Sirkeci Station was the last stop on the Orient Express, that fabled train route that led from staid Vienna to exotic Istanbul. Then and now, it is as far east as one may travel by rail, arriving in the Old City along the shore of the Bosphorus, skimming the […] SFO International Terminal. The flowery taste of jasmine tea takes my mind back to those years I spent traveling to Hong Kong, Osaka, or Seoul from this very airport. 16-hour slogs across the Pacific, flying most often into the old Kai Tak, coming in so close between the highrises you could almost see […] “I’m Kurdish. What do you know about the Kurds?” the attractive man at the sidewalk café asked me. Scrambling for a witty response, I said the first thing that popped into my travel-weary head. Uzbek rings of folkdancers by CS Bayar “Lonely Planet says not to talk about the Kurds while I’m here in Turkey. […] |
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