That night after finishing my scribblings I met my bunkmates for the night, the only other tourists in town- Eric and Rich, two New York City ski bums on vacation from their jobs as dishwashers at an Alpine resort in Austria. Sinop was a beach resort town, but no foreigners made it out here; they all flocked to Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, the so-called Turkish Riviera. Eric and Rich had already made friends with Turkish college kids in Sinop for a sort of Spring Break.
After a few hours on the beachside strip playing backgammon we all made our way out to the Telescope club further down the shore to see a bunch of Turkish heavy metal bands play. The hour beforehand, which we all spent outside the club drinking cans of Efes beer and listening to Metallica and Nirvana out of one of the Turkish kid’s car stereos, was the only moment when Turkey ever reminded me of New Jersey. The bands we saw weren’t unlike their American counterparts, slick hair and power chords, only with lyrics in Turkish. I asked one of my new friends, Gokce, (the name translates as “Sky Girl”), what the chorus to a particular song meant in English. She said, “He is singing ‘I am just I.’”
After that we rolled back downtown to the Diogenes Bar. Inside, the crowd was dancing to old Elvis records and we happened upon an American archeological team. They succeeded in talking me out of the Indiana Jones-ish career in antiquity recovery that I had been contemplating and pointed me to several Hellenistic sites that were in hitching range and would be good unique finds for my chapter about the Black Sea Coast. Two of the archeologists turned out to be practically my neighbors back in the States, and their Turkish grad student proteg?s offered me eloquent insights on the legacy of Ataturk. The evening descended into drunken revelry and dancing to Elvis, topped off by a late night snack of sheep entrails soup across the street.
By the time we stumbled back to the Gul Palas, we heard the vibrating Arabic of the muezzin in the mosque next door, an exotic lullaby.
