Gifts for Mongolia

Once you get outside the cities in Mongolia you run into the tents of the nomadic population, known as gers or yurts. As a traveler you are expected to enter such tents without waiting for an invitation, and partake of whatever food is out. In announcing yourself you should say "Nokhoi Khor," which means "Hold your dogs."
But you are expected to bring gifts.
So yesterday I stopped at a dollar store and loaded up with $25 worth of gifts: pocket knives, decorative nail clippers, transparent soaps, and laser stickers for the children. Here they all are laid out on my bed at home:

Above the gifts you can see the tablet on which I'm writing, my toiletry kit, journal and other sundries. In the middle is a map of Mongolia.

Departure in One Week, Destination: Istanbul & Cappadocia

I leave March 31 and arrive in Istanbul at 11:40 am the next day. Barbara gets in at 5:15 pm. So I plan to run into town and visit the Archaeological Museum, then run back to the airport to greet her—it will be our first face-to-face meeting. I think she's taller than I am.

Then we'll want to get from Istanbul to Cappadocia and not spend a day doing it, nor spend the money on a flight. So we plan to go overnight. Most people take the bus, but there's also a train with sleepers and couchettes. They go to Kayseri, the largest city in that area. Why don't most people take the train, which is much more comfortable? Probably because the train station lies on the other side of the Bosphorus, the waterway the separates European Istanbul from Asian Istanbul. The main airport and the main attractions are on the European side, and you have to take a ferry to get to the Haydarpasha terminal on the Asian side—as my Turkish friend in New York told me. Good to know. 

Here's a map that explains things:

 
The terminal serves the ferries and is also a train terminal, one of the busiest in Europe and Asia. We'll catch the train that leaves after midnight and gets there the next morning.

Another reason why I'm going round the world...

I've just spent two days at art fairs in New York, and tomorrow I'm going to the Armory Show—59 "modern" dealers (20th Century), and 146 "contemporary" dealers. Ken Johnson in today's New York Times notes that the typical artist in the contemporary section—in contrast to the wide variety in the modern section—is "a canny juggler of ready-made signifiers. Everywhere you look, you see artists mixing and matching generic styles, images and devices in the forms of photographs, paintings, high-tech simulations and myriad nontraditional materials, sometimes using all these at once." (p. C31) He later mentions the "strange feeling of no context that prevails in contemporary art." This engenders a similarity of style between the art from cultures as diverse as China and the U.S. The Internet is ubiquitous and everything is pretty much available to everyone. Does this mean national styles are becoming as extinct as so many animal species driven out of their habitats by deforestation and agriculture?

In my own wanderings so far today and yesterday, I see lots of cleverness, lots of manipulation of cultural tropes, but very little of the world outside the U.S. and European cultural merry-go-round (the exceptions were by African artists). You see a lot more of the outside world at photography art fairs, and one of the reasons I'm going on this trip is to bring some more of this outside world home. It's astonishing how global-parochial we have become, imagining that our Internet connections and mobile devices actually bring us the diversity of the real world to our screens large and small. Of course, popular culture (including sports) can and does entire fill the minds of most Americans. Brief cultural forays outside it on a PBS station or serious play or documentary bow to the wide world outside, but most of us still live culturally within a cocoon inside a box inside a room. I'm traveling to get outside this room, and to bring back as much direct testimony and as many truthful and powerful images as I can, which is, of course, the royal province of Photography.

Please remember to visit my Indiegogo site, http://igg.me/at/marvels2014/x/6154797