Turkish Adventure By Jim Buie: Travel

08/12/2009

Passports, Ataturk and Us

Photo of Alex, Lucia and Ataturk. Originally uploaded to Flickr by jimbuie3.

As we prepared to spend a year in Turkey, my wife, son and I had business to attend to at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. Here's a photo of Alex and Lucia in front of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern, secular Turkey and a model leader for Islamic nations.

We also picked up our new passports at the State Department. I love the design and the quotes on the new American passports -- makes me proud to be an American and feel like I personally am an ambassador, and that we are all ambassadors for our country. I did a Google search and some people don't like the newly designed passports, first issued in 2007. Karrie Jacobs on the Marketplace website describes it as "gaudy." She finds the quotes over the top:

"What a glorious morning for our country." -- Samuel Adams;

"We live in a world that is lit by lightning. So much is changing and will change, but so much endures and transcends time. -- Ronald Reagan.

When she travels, she says, she thinks of herself as "the Complex American -- a citizen of the fascinating, nuanced, multicultural, messy and basically decent place I know this country to be. But I feel like this passport blows my cover. It's like suddenly, against my will, I'm wearing ugly khaki shorts and talking way too loud. It's not that I'm unpatriotic. But the need to repeatedly thrust our whole catalogue of national iconography in the face of every customs officer we meet strikes me as kind of gauche. Isn't the gold eagle on the blue leatherette jacket enough of a symbol?"

I don't feel that way. Not yet, at least. I want Alex to memorize the quotes, as I did during my school days.

The Southeast Asia Travel Blog lists the quotes and describes the artistic renderings.

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08/13/2009

Hurry Up and Wait for Turkish Work Permit

My wife, son and I had planned to leave North Carolina this month to live and work in Turkey for a year, but there has been a bureaucratic delay in our work permit(s) -- a delay of three to eight weeks. We are told that such delays are routine. Supposedly, once a work contract has been signed, sealed and delivered, there's a six-week waiting period. But we have heard of people getting them in one week. A friend asks if maybe we need to offer some baksheesh. Since the work permits are being handled for us, I'm afraid it's out of our hands and we don't even know who to contact. Knowing the truth of Murphy's Law, as soon as I put money down on an office for another month and get re-involved in work in the states, making new appointments and getting new projects, the work permits will come through. Sigh.

I'm told that in traveling abroad, we will come to appreciate, and not just take for granted and presume American-style efficiency. Oh well -- a greater awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of one's own culture is one of the benefits of world travel.