Vagabond sunbirds

We in New England, like folks in many parts of the US, are having a rough winter. Snow that won't quit and brutal, sub-zero temps. ("These are good days to teach kids about negative numbers," said Joan, a yoga-mate and retired math teacher.) Meteorologists tell us we're looking down the barrel of our fourth major snowstorm in as many weeks.

Ever since we began traveling Mike and I have made mental notes of cities, towns or villages that would make nice havens in winter, knowing that at some point we'll want to flee Boston's cold for somewhere else's relative warmth. Every once in a while -- including recently, with cheap foreclosures flooding the market -- we've been tempted to buy a place in Florida. But we'd be tied to it, and that's not what we want.

Our plan is to spend the coldest months of our retirement years in various places, renting our way around the world. No mortgage, no furniture to buy, no taxes, no maintenance, no feelings of obligation to go or guilt if you don't. We'd rather find a beachfront cottage or apartment in some pretty place, pay a few months rent, and settle in for an extended stay, immersing ourselves in our temporary neighborhoods and living like the locals. Then, the next year, put down seasonal stakes in a new place.

The Mediterranean and Aegean will no doubt figure in our future sunbird plans. We've scouted beautiful, quiet places like Albufeira, Portugal; Menton, France; Italy's Ligurian coastline; Chania on the island of Crete; Nafplion in Greece's Peloponnese; history-rich Antalya, Turkey; and fishing villages like Spain's Calella de Palafrugell, pictured above.

It's February in Calella in these photos, yet warm and sunny enough for a stroll on the beach or a relaxing rest on a bench overlooking the harbor. It may not be sunbathing weather, but it sure beats shoveling.

www.LoriHein.com

Minaret: Stone poetry

Shame on Switzerland. The Swiss finished up 2009 by banning the construction of new minarets. Switzerland is arguably the world's purest democracy -- every person's individual vote counts, and it's those votes that effectively determine policy. So the people really do rule, which makes this sad decision all the sadder: it is truly the Swiss people who have spoken.

I'm glad I've been to Switzerland several times and have taken in its astounding physical beauty, as I'd be hard pressed to book a trip to that Alpine land now. I'd feel I was supporting or at least turning a blind eye to intolerance -- not just random acts of intolerance that exist wherever there are humans, but mass, premeditated intolerance that will be written into the Swiss constitution. (France, please don't ban the burka or I will have to put you on my bad list, too.)

I've gazed at hundreds of minarets around the world -- in cities of all sizes, in dusty villages, desert outposts, mountaintop hamlets and seaside towns, in diverse countries on four continents. Many have been small and simple, some towering and ornate, and their age has ranged from just-built with funds collected by the citizens of a village to a thousand years old. They are invariably elegant.

I feel a quiet rush of peace when I see a minaret, and, when I've been lucky enough to hear the call to prayer that is a minaret's reason for standing tall and pointing heavenward, I feel doubly blessed.

I'll never forget the morning in Izmir, Turkey when Adam and I were awakened in a purple pre-dawn by multiple, simultaneous calls to prayer emanating from the dozen minarets we could see from our hotel room balcony. We stood on the balcony and tried to connect each call to the minaret that owned it. Izmir, site of ancient, biblical Smyrna, is built across broad hills, and the muezzins' calls bounced off the hillsides and reverberated through the city. It was a sublime moment, alone worth traveling halfway across the world.

Here are photos of a few of the minarets I've met: At top are the slender fingers of Istanbul's Blue Mosque and the Koutoubia in Marrakesh, Morocco.


At left, an Ottoman-era mosque sits in central Sofia, Bulgaria, and below, a richly-tiled prayer tower rises from the floor of a valley in Morocco's Atlas Mountains.

And here, the Qutb Minar, built in 1199. Rising 238 feet above the streets of old Delhi, it is the world's tallest brick minaret and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

www.LoriHein.com

Losing your marbles: The Parthenon and beyond

Warning: Reading this post may make your brain explode. (If it doesn't, I guarantee you'll enjoy this post from 2005: "Has Charles Veley Been to the State of Chuuk?")

Athens' new Acropolis Museum, scheduled to fully open in September, has a rectangular, glass-walled gallery with a view of the nearby Parthenon. The old Acropolis museum, a narrow, cramped affair that managed, despite itself, to stun visitors with its rich collection of Greek antiquities, may, it's rumored, be turned into a coffee shop. The old museum's holdings, along with breathtaking artifacts from the Acropolis and other Greek sites, have been moved into the new venue.

Key among the new museum's exhibits will be the frieze that once adorned the Parthenon. A room was built to hold it. The rub, of course, is that Greece only owns a few pieces of the frieze.

Most of the pieces -- the marbles -- live in London in the British Museum, which bought them from the British government, which bought them from Thomas Bruce, the 7th earl of Elgin, who took them from the Acropolis in 1801 and shipped them off to England. Lord Elgin, serving as ambassador to Constantinople, had the sultan's permission to slice the frieze into pieces and remove it from then Ottoman-controlled Greece.

Greece would like the Elgin Marbles, which it calls the Parthenon Marbles, back, and the frieze gallery at the new museum is designed to be more than an artistic display; it's a plea for repatriation of priceless pieces of patrimony. The reconstructed frieze will consist of the few original pieces still in Greece's possession interspersed with reproductions of the pieces Elgin took. These lost marbles will be covered in netting, yielding, it's hoped, a powerful visual statement about the cultural crime Greece feels has been committed.

Should the British Museum give the Marbles back?

Loaded question leading to a web of loaded questions. Museums large and small, of all types, all over the world, have stuff that came from somewhere else. So...

If the British Museum gives the Marbles back, should other museums give stuff back, too?

Which museums should give stuff back? Some museums? All museums? Big museums? Small museums?

Which stuff should they give back? Big stuff? Small stuff? Some stuff? All stuff?

To whom should they give it back? To other museums? To countries? What if the countries aren't countries anymore? (Think Mesopotamia and Babylon.)

Should method of acquisition matter in the give-it-back-or-not determination? Museums acquire through purchase or donation, but how did whoever sold or donated get the piece in the first place? And what about absolute provenance -- how an object came to be removed from its true source? Removing outright theft, tomb-raiding, smuggling and other overtly illegal and illicit activity from the equation -- pieces thus acquired should clearly be returned -- what in a piece's bloodline -- from war, conquest and colonialism, to commerce and trade, to excavation and archaeology, both accidental and intentional, whether by amateur hacks or skilled scientists --should or might mark a piece for repatriation?

Should there be an international marble quid pro quo, a supervised global game of marble trading wherein museums -- or countries, universities, foundations, families...-- that get marbles back have to then return marbles they've held, sometimes for centuries, that came from somewhere else?

Imagine trucks and trains and ships and planes loaded with statues and stelae, paintings and pottery, sculpture and sarcophogi, crisscrossing the globe, the transported objects taking each others' places in cases and galleries and on shelves and pedestals. Eventually, if you imagine an endgame in which every item ever removed by any means from its original in situ state finds its way through this great marble trade back to where it was created, every museum in the world would end up being a homogeneous warehouse of stuff from just its own little corner of the world. To see gold and lapis Egyptian death masks, you'd have to go to Egypt. A peek at sublime Tang Dynasty terra cotta figurines would require a ticket to China. To ogle Aztec headdresses, you'd need to book a flight to Mexico. After returning pieces to the places they were born, institutions like the Louvre and the Met could consolidate their remaining holdings into a few rooms and rent out the rest of their space for other uses. Gaze at a Goya then head down the hall for a few strings at the Prado Bowladrome?

Who's got other people's marbles? Nearly everybody. (But not, it seems, the Egyptians or Greeks. Their marbles fit pretty justifiably into some aspect, phase, layer, race or period in their long, complex histories. They've got so many marbles of their own that they've never needed to take anyone else's.)

You can find other people's marbles all over the world.

One day a few years ago, Adam and I followed our guide to the summit of ancient Pergamum (Pergamom, Pergamon), a glorious citadel-ruin that rises above the modern city of Bergama, Turkey. We came to a large, pedestal-like structure shaded by a few hearty trees that grew in its empty center. "There's not much here now," said our guide of the stripped platform. "The great Altar of Zeus was here, but the Germans took it to Berlin." Indeed, the star attraction and raison d'etre of Berlin's Pergamom Museum is the massive Zeus Altar excavated by engineer Carl Humann during the building of a rail line and sent, in pieces, to Berlin, where it was reassembled.

If Germany gave the Zeus Altar back to Turkey, would Turkey consider giving some of the goodies it's been holding back to Egypt and other places? Istanbul's Archaeological Museum houses artifacts "discovered" in Cyprus, Palestine, the Arab world and ancient Mesopotamia. It has a collection of sarcophogi found at Sidon, in ancient Syria, and owns mosaic panels from Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar's Ishtar Gate. And, piercing the sky near the minarets of Istanbul's sublime Blue Mosque is a 16th-century BC Egyptian obelisk from the temple of Luxor that was appropriated and replanted by Byzantine emperor Theodosius in 390 AD. There are only 28 Egyptian obelisks left in the world -- only a few in Egypt. (New York has one, Italy has about a dozen...)

If the give-me-back-my-marbles game really took hold, Italy would be mighty busy. It would be on the receiving end of countless Roman, Etruscan and other treasures from museums and venues worldwide. And, it would have some items it might consider shipping back to their places of origin.

Even the Vatican has marbles. (I know, Vatican City is not politically Italy, but if you've ever stood in line in the hot sun to see the Sistine Chapel then, after contemplating the masterwork, sought relief at the gelato shop next door, which sits in Italy, the Vatican is in Rome.) The Vatican's Egyptian Museum holds items won by conquest: the Roman Empire was one heck of a far-reaching enterprise. But if conquest-gotten gains count in the you-should-really-return-this column, the Vatican might have to part with seals from Mesopotamia (we'd better shore up and secure the Baghdad Museum) and bas-reliefs from Assyria, which spans today's Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq.

And Venice has marbles. Those four bronze horses over the portal of the Basilica of San Marco? They once adorned an arch that the Romans built in Constantinople (today's Istanbul). And the Romans allegedly nabbed the equine arch decorations from Greece...

Should Greece get its frieze back from England?

I've lost more than a few marbles just thinking about it.

LoriHein.com

To Turkey with Chicken Soup for the Soul

The Chicken Soup for the Soul folks have just released a four-volume set of "flavorful" titles (Soup for the souls of tea, wine, chocolate and coffee lovers). I have travel stories in two of the four: Chicken Soup for the Tea Lover's Soul and Chicken Soup for the Wine Lover's Soul. The books are available online and will be on store shelves in November.

I take you to Turkey in Tea Lover's Soul:

Apple Tea and Crazy Eights

We’d spent the morning driving through the rocky, hardscrabble beauty of the Bey, a range of Turkey’s Taurus Mountains. Erhan, our driver, maneuvered our microbus up and down the February snow-spattered mountain swells and through the streets of terra cotta-roofed towns like Derekoy and Karamanli. Cows grazed in yards, men in plastic chairs lined sidewalks, smoking and rubbing prayer beads, women in billowy pantaloons called salvar stooped to sweep porches with handleless brooms, and boys walked fields of just-turned black soil, casting seed from flax bags slung across their shoulders.

Our group was small. Besides Erhan there was Yesim, our guide, who’d been married a year but had been on the road leading so many tours that she’d spent only 60 days total at home with her husband. Her charges this trips were me, my son, Adam, then seven and proudly sporting a Tintin in Istanbul sweatshirt, Bob and Estheta, a retired couple from Long Island, and Jan and Rose, puckish seventysomething friends from Pennsylvania who’d been globetrotting together for 30 years. They delighted in just about everything and enjoyed pinching Adam’s cheeks. We were a well-traveled, glass-half-full lot, and we bonded quickly.

Up in the mountains, the bus door had jammed open, its hydraulic workings kaput, and Erhan had roped it shut against the February chill. This worked for us but violated the tour company’s safety code, and it fell to Yesim to get the door fixed.

"Toilet stop," she said, as Erhan eased the bus into a tiny paved lot in front of the Kulcuoglu Restaurant. "We’ll be here for fifteen minutes." We weren’t fooled. Yesim told Erhan to take the bus to a repair shop in Denizli, the nearest city. It was 11:30. At three that afternoon, Erhan would reappear, door still kaput – he couldn’t find an open garage – to collect us.

The restaurant was technically closed. Tourist season began in March, and we were a month early. The owners, an extended family of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and teenagers, were busy readying the place, washing floors and windows, scrubbing toilets, mopping halls and stairs. They weren’t prepared for guests, but, consistent with the hospitality we’d been shown since landing in Turkey, welcomed us as if we’d been eagerly awaited.

We weren’t five minutes inside their door when the first tray of hot apple tea appeared. One of the owners’ black-haired daughters came from the kitchen bearing a metal tray of small, clear glasses filled with the steaming, honey-colored beverage. We stood in the hallway sipping the sugared drink, toasting serendipity.

While Yesim stayed downstairs and worked her cell phone, rearranging our itinerary to accommodate what she (and we) knew would be a sizable delay, we followed the father up a worn wooden staircase to a cavernous dining hall, empty except for stacked tables and chairs and a squat iron stove, quiet and unlit, that sat in the middle of the room. The father pushed a table and six chairs next to the stove, then fed it from a woodpile by the stairwell. We knew wood was scarce here, and his kindness warmed us before he struck the first match. As the blaze began to hum and crackle, the black-haired daughter mounted the stairs with the second of what would, before the afternoon was out, be a half-dozen trays of apple tea.

The family got on with its cleaning, and we sat, in coats and hats, wondering how to entertain ourselves. Adam, veteran of several global circumnavigations and no stranger to having time to fill in strange places that move at slow paces, rummaged through his Lion King backpack and produced the tiny deck of playing cards he’d been given on the British Airways flight we’d taken from Boston to Europe.

Jan and Rose beamed with simultaneous delight when they saw the cards. They clapped and rubbed their palms together. "Gin rummy!" said one or the other or both. They reacted to the lilliputian cards printed with winking, bulb-nosed cartoon airplanes fished from a vinyl Disney bag by a seven-year-old as if a vision of Our Lady of Atlantic City had just descended into the dining hall of the Kulcuoglu Restaurant. "Gin. We’ll teach you," they said, reaching for the deck.

The gin rummy experiment was short-lived, as Adam had the attention span of, well, a seven-year-old, plus an already-established favorite card game: "Let’s play Crazy Eights!" I gave Adam a big thumbs-up, Bob and Estheta laughed and told him they loved Crazy Eights, and Jan and Rose pinched his cheeks and told him to deal them in.

For three hours, we huddled at a table by a snapping stove fed with precious wood by a gracious host, playing Crazy Eights with teeny weeny cards and enjoying sweet swallows of hot apple tea, raising a glass now and then to bus doors going kaput in unexpected places.

www.LoriHein.com

Muezzins and bagpipers: Sounds of a place

Mark Twain allegedly said, "If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait a minute."

Well, our weather swung last week from the extremes of a violent and destructive nor’easter to brilliant, back to back 80-degree days, one of which I spent catching rays on my deck, soaking in the summer sounds that whirled and floated around my ears. It was April but felt like August, and as I laid on my towel, eyes closed and baseball hat over my face, I listened deeply to the warm-weather sounds of my suburban Massachusetts neighborhood.

Robins splashed 20 feet above my head in the stormwater that sat in the roof gutters; the guy two doors down spun the peeling paint on his picket fence into subatomic particles with a gnashing electric sander; traffic on the highway five miles away emitted a stealthy hum; mothers pushed babies in strollers and talked about husbands and home remodel jobs; bees in the budding forsythia near my driveway dove, hovered and buzzed, drunk on busy-ness and early pollen.

And someone played a bagpipe. That’s a new sound in my neighborhood. We have our musicians: when the air is warm and windows are open, our summer sounds can include, from our various basements, bedrooms and living rooms, Dennis on drums, Louie on trumpet, yours truly on piano. Now we have a bagpiper in our mix and midst.

Every place has its sounds, its particular ripples and echoes, calls and clangs, voices and noises. Sounds -- and silences -- that are integral components of its texture. When I travel, I pay attention to a place’s sounds.

The Altiplano does not sound like Venice, which does not sound like Bangkok, which does not sound like the Everglades, which does not sound like Jamaica, which does not sound like...

When I reflect on the sounds of my travels, Turkey rings clearest. The sounds of that place will never leave me.

Adam and I were on one of the many mother-son trips we took when he was young. I considered exposing him to cultures different from his own a duty, and Turkey was his first experience in a Muslim country.

After 24 hours of travel that included three flights, two layovers, and airline delays (Turkish Airlines’ mechanics were on strike, and I prayed to Allah that it wasn’t the white collar management team out there on the tarmac futzing around with our craft’s engine...), we arrived in Antalya on the Mediterranean. We hit our beds and slept like stones.

About 5 AM, an amazing sound reverberated through the still-dark predawn, waking me. I opened our balcony door, stepped out into the blackness, and looked down on a domed mosque bathed in green fluorescent light. From the mosque’s towering minaret, a loudspeaker carried the crisp, wailing voice of a muezzin calling the faithful to the first of the day’s five prayers. In the streets below, men in trousers and suit jackets and women in burkhas streamed from all directions, heading toward the mosque.

I woke Adam and brought him onto the balcony, where we watched and listened. As the muezzin’s electric song worked its way inside our heads, I told Adam everything I knew about the Five Pillars of Islam, the second of which is the salat (salah), the series of prayers offered daily in the direction of holy Mecca.

This was a lot for a little, jet-lagged boy to take in on a dark, stone-cold morning in a strange place. But he took it in, the piercing chant helping him to feel Turkey and begin to understand it.

For the rest of our trip, we’d stop and listen deeply to each day’s calls to prayer, the sounds as vivid and rich a sensory experience as any kebab we ate, spice scent we inhaled, ruin we gazed on, or carpet we ran our hands over.

In Istanbul, we stood on the bow of a boat plying the busy Bosphorus as simultaneous calls from every mosque in the city bounced through the air and over the water, engulfing us. In Izmir (photo), biblical ancient Smyrna, scores of synchronous calls reverberated off the city’s hills, then collected and coalesced into a wonderful and tumultuous cacophony whose epicenter was right outside our hotel room window, which we opened in wide welcome at prayer time.

Wherever you go and wherever you are, don’t just hear your place’s sounds. Listen. You’ll learn much.

Who is that bagpiper, and what, when, where and why does he play?

Add Ribbons of Highway to your summer reading pile

Turkish tea

We’d spent the morning driving through the rocky, hardscrabble beauty of the Bey, a range of Turkey’s Taurus Mountains. Erhan, our driver, maneuvered our microbus up and down the February snow-spattered mountain swells and through the streets of terra cotta-roofed towns like Derekoy and Karamanli. Cows grazed in yards, men in plastic chairs lined sidewalks, smoking and rubbing prayer beads, women in billowy pantaloons called salvar stooped to sweep porches with handleless brooms, and boys walked fields of just-turned black soil, casting seed from flax bags slung across their shoulders.

Our group was small. Besides Erhan there was Yesim, our guide, who’d been married a year but had been on the road leading so many tours that she’d spent only 60 days total at home with her husband. Her charges this trips were me, my son, Adam, then seven and proudly sporting a Tintin in Istanbul sweatshirt, Bob and Estheta, a retired couple from Long Island, and Jan and Rose, puckish seventysomething friends from Pennsylvania who’d been globetrotting together for 30 years. They delighted in just about everything and enjoyed pinching Adam’s cheeks. We were a well-traveled, glass-half-full lot, and we bonded quickly.

Up in the mountains, the bus door had jammed open, its hydraulic workings kaput, and Erhan had roped it shut against the February chill. This worked for us but violated the tour company’s safety code, and it fell to Yesim to get the door fixed.

“Toilet stop,” she said, as Erhan eased the bus into a tiny paved lot in front of the Kulcuoglu Restaurant. “We’ll be here for fifteen minutes.” We weren’t fooled. Yesim told Erhan to take the bus to a repair shop in Denizli, the nearest city. It was 11:30. At three that afternoon, Erhan would reappear, door still kaput – he couldn’t find an open garage – to collect us.

The restaurant was technically closed. Tourist season began in March, and we were a month early. The owners, an extended family of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and teenagers, were busy readying the place, washing floors and windows, scrubbing toilets, mopping halls and stairs. They weren’t prepared for guests, but, consistent with the hospitality we’d been shown since landing in Turkey, welcomed us as if we’d been eagerly awaited.

We weren’t five minutes inside their door when the first tray of hot apple tea appeared. One of the owners’ black-haired daughters came from the kitchen bearing a metal tray of small, clear glasses filled with the steaming, honey-colored beverage. We stood in the hallway sipping the sugared drink, toasting serendipity.

While Yesim stayed downstairs and worked her cell phone, rearranging our itinerary to accommodate what she (and we) knew would be a sizable delay, we followed the father up a worn wooden staircase to a cavernous dining hall, empty except for stacked tables and chairs and a squat iron stove, quiet and unlit, that sat in the middle of the room. The father pushed a table and six chairs next to the stove, then fed it from a woodpile by the stairwell. We knew wood was scarce here, and his kindness warmed us before he struck the first match. As the blaze began to hum and crackle, the black-haired daughter mounted the stairs with the second of what would, before the afternoon was out, be a half-dozen trays of apple tea.

The family got on with its cleaning, and we sat, in coats and hats, wondering how to entertain ourselves. Adam, veteran of several global circumnavigations and no stranger to having time to fill in strange places that move at slow paces, rummaged through his Lion King backpack and produced the tiny deck of playing cards he’d been given on the British Airways flight we’d taken from Boston to Europe.

Jan and Rose beamed with simultaneous delight when they saw the cards. They clapped and rubbed their palms together. “Gin rummy!” said one or the other or both. They reacted to the lilliputian cards printed with winking, bulb-nosed cartoon airplanes fished from a vinyl Disney bag by a seven-year-old as if a vision of Our Lady of Atlantic City had just descended into the dining hall of the Kulcuoglu Restaurant. “Gin. We’ll teach you,” they said, reaching for the deck.

The gin rummy experiment was short-lived, as Adam had the attention span of, well, a seven-year-old, plus an already-established favorite card game: “Let’s play Crazy Eights!” I gave Adam a big thumbs-up, Bob and Estheta laughed and told him they loved Crazy Eights, and Jan and Rose pinched his cheeks and told him to deal them in.

For three hours, we huddled at a table by a snapping stove fed with precious wood by a gracious host, playing Crazy Eights with teeny weeny cards and enjoying sweet swallows of hot apple tea, raising a glass now and then to bus doors going kaput in unexpected places.

www.LoriHein.com

Football diplomacy

A while back I got an email from blog reader Patrick Vickery (a gardener and author who lives in the Scottish Highlands and writes lovely snippets and anecdotes called blethers). He’d enjoyed my post, “The universal language of pigeon,” in which Adam and Dana use the feeding of birds to interact and make friends with people whose language they don’t speak. It’s worked everywhere from Lisbon to La Paz. The entente-building power of a few fistfuls of corn thrown into the air by a kid standing in a big public space is amazing (and fun to watch).

Wrote Patrick, “Universal language of the pigeon…Great phrase. Could also apply (to a lesser extent perhaps) to football – a common 'language' across the world. Give warring nations/factions/groups a football and they may well end up playing together in preference to anything else. I would hope so anyway.”

Football was the vehicle for some cross-cultural bonding during a tour that Adam and I took of Istanbul's Topkapi Palace, a vast complex sitting grandly atop Seraglio Point overlooking the shimmering Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn. Built in the 15th century by Mehmet the Conqueror after he turned Constantinople into Istanbul, and home to four centuries of Ottoman rulers, the sultans' palace turned museum takes hours to explore, and I was worried about boring Adam silly with too many rooms, too many buildings and too much guide commentary. Adam was younger then, and I needed to approach Topkapi in surgical strike mode. We couldn’t do it all, so I had to decide what to see and what to skip.

As the tour guide announced she’d be leading us first to the harem, two Turkish teenagers who’d been kicking a soccer ball on the palace grounds -- just inside the gate and in the shadow of the only Christian church Mehmet did not convert into a mosque in order to give his non-Muslim wives a sanctuary -- held the ball up and motioned to Adam to join them. His eyes lit up.

So did mine. Their timing was perfect. Adam could play soccer in the sun instead of spending a half hour with a bunch of adults inside a dark building full of cells, and I could escape having to answer the question, “Mom, what’s a harem?”

In what was likely Topkapi’s first international football match, Turkey threw the game and let America win. The football diplomacy included smiles, hand signals, pats on backs, and lines and letters drawn in the dirt with sticks. We learned the two boys were 12 and 14 and were allowed inside the palace compound because their parents worked at Topkapi.

When the tour group exited the harem, before we turned to catch up (the next stop would be the Adam-friendly treasury, full of cool stuff like daggers, swords and jewels the size of golf balls), I thanked the teens.

Whether they knew it or not, when they invited the young American boy to kick that ball around with them they became gracious ambassadors. Each kick, each shout, each smile said, “We’re friends. You are welcome here.”