We had money to burn and a couple of hours to kill in Istanbul.  But being a Sunday, Istanbul’s famed shopping market, The Grand Bazaar, was closed.

Still, there were plenty of other shops lining the streets to choose from. Mainly aimed at the tourists, they were crammed full of belly dancer costumes, pashminas, trinkets, postcards, fridge magnets and coffee cups depicting the Blue Mosque.  And, of course, intermixed with all this were dozens of variations of the nazar boncuau amulet (blue eye) designed to protect the owner from the evil eye.

But after a while, all the shops started to look the same. 

Except this one…

This one made us laugh.

And after that, it didn’t take too much effort by the shopkeeper to get us to open up the purses and buy a pashmina or two.

When I first visited Istanbul, I found myself fascinated.

I mean “fascinated” in the word’s original sense — to cast a spell, through the use of a fixed stare.  All over the city, there were many eyes fixed on me. Blue eyes.

They were hanging from the walls of restaurants, displayed in quantities in the warren of the Grand Bazaar, dangling from the rearview mirror of cars and taxis, from key chains, from the necks of fashionable women. A glance down at a table would reveal a thicket of blue eye beads, braceleting the wrist of a dining companion, just peeking out from under her sleeve.

These blue eyes are called nazar boncugu, often shortened to nazar – amulets to protect against the evil eye. They’re made of cobalt blue glass, with what looks like a sunny-side-up egg in the center, although the “yolk” is often pale blue.  There’s a black dot in the center, which represents the pupil.

This amulet is meant to protect the bearer from the destructive coveting of the envious, which itself starts with a hard, unblinking stare.  There are apparently other ways to ward off the evil eye if you know for a fact someone has fixed you with it – incantations and so on –  but these nazar amulets protect  against unknown or hidden jealousy – a bit of blanket evil eye insurance, if you will.

There are evil eye beliefs all over the world, but they’re particularly common in the Mediterranean, which in turns offers many means of symbolic protection. Turkey and Greece both have the eye amulets; Italy has horseshoes, horns, a small troll called a gobbo; Jewish folk tradition combats the evil eye with red ribbons, blue ribbons, and blue beads.

Whatever the particular form of protection, the danger stems from one person’s jealousy of another’s success, wealth, or beauty,  which somehow leads to its damage or destruction. The stare is what summons the trouble, the eye being a source of mystical power going back as least as far as ancient Egypt.

There’s a practical reason for seating this power in the eye. “Eye-to-eye engagement is universally a first step to a train of action,” write Vivian Garrison and Conrad Arensberg in their article in The Evil Eye, published after a symposium on evil eye beliefs held at the American Anthropological Association in 1972.:

“On eye-contact, predator and prey, or rival and rival, or lover and loved, are alerted, tensed for what might come next and a move that follows: predators or rivals to the attack, lovers to tactile approach…the gaze initiates further action among both animals and humans…”

Since all of us stare from time-to-time, the evil eye was a handy explanation for all sorts of inexplicable calamities, from mental illness to famine.  To this day,  an amazing number of our habits and customs stem from protecting ourselves from this stare. For instance, there’s using a diminutives as a term of affection – a less disgusting variation on spitting on something or someone that’s received a compliment, rendering it less desirable to the envious. And there’s the military salute — it seems it was meant at first to shield a superior from an inferior’s dangerous and direct eye gaze, writes Joost Meerloo in Intuition and the Evil Eye: The Natural History of a Superstition.

The evil eye is also why many societies, including ours, sustain a taboo against staring.

And that is why, although I swear I had no envy in my heart, I felt somewhat uneasy in Istanbul — with all those blue eyes fixed steadily upon me.

The Falls Road runs west out of the center of Belfast, up in to the hills that ring this part of the city. It is a road whose name resonates through the Troubles, that term which is describes, accurately, the harder parts of contemporary Irish life and recent history: the divisions over politics and religion which have at times turned bloody and bitter, and at times, still do.

There are murals on the walls of buildings along The Falls. Some express solidarity with oppressed people across the world, some offer hopes of peace, others honor those who have died in the Troubles. One such man was Bobby Sands. On a mural honoring him is a line from his writings: “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”

A Presbyterian Church, a headquarters for a branch of a loyalist Orange Lodge, a small Irish language school: the building that is now Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich has had a varied history. It is in the Falls Road, not far from that mural of Bobby Sands.

You’ll hear laughter if you stop in at An Chultúrlann.

It is a warm and welcoming place, with a tourist point to help you find out about Belfast, and a bookstore with a wide ranging selection of Irish language material as well as English language works on the history of Ireland. There’s a friendly cafe where, at the weekends, you will find traditional music sessions. There is an art gallery, a theater troupe is based on the top floor, and classes in Irish language, art, and other subjects are on offer.

The building is named for two men, Robert Shipboy McAdam, a nineteenth century Presbyterian businessman, and Tomás Ó Fiaich, a twentieth century scholar, who was from the Catholic tradition. Both of them contributed to respect for and continuation of Irish language and heritage. Cultúrlann is meant to be, and is, a friendly place where neighbors from all traditions are welcome to drop in, and where travelers find welcome as well, to talk, to laugh, to learn some words in Irish or brush up knowledge, to meet a new friend, to share a cup of tea.

There’s an Irish language choir which rehearses every week, and you’ll be welcome to sit in if you’d like. There’s also a intimate jewel box of a performance space, where that theater troupe performs plays and where top international artists such as Cathie Ryan and Mairéad Ni Mhaonaigh sometimes offer their music, in English and in Irish.

When Cathie Ryan gave a concert there, she asked her audience to sing with her on the song So Here’s to You, a song of leavetaking and hope for reunion. She told of an idea she’d learned while traveling in the southwestern part of the United States. “The Native American people there have the belief that when you sing in a place, you leave your echo there,” she said. “ So you all have left an echo here tonight. Thank you.”

An echo, perhaps, of peace. There is another mural along The Falls Road not far from An Chultúrlann, this one a painting of a man playing a fiddle, and his grandchildren listening. The words on this wall say ceol gan teorainn. Music without borders.

In travel, like life, things don’t always go to plan.

But even when disaster strikes, there is usually a silver lining.

You just have to find it.

So while Mom was safely tucked up in a hospital bed at the Oslo University Hospital, I decided to go and find my silver lining – the Vigeland Sculpture Park.

The park, which had been on my original list of places to see, was in walking distance of the hospital. So, armed with map and camera, I left the hospital and headed out.

All it took as a short ten minute walk down Kirkeveien Street and I was there.

The Vigilend Sculpture Park is a wonderland of life-size bronze and granite sculptures depicting humans, ranging from small children to closely entwined lovers, friends, families, and elderly couples, in everyday activities such as walking and playing to holding hands and hugging.

The work of one man, Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland, this park has been a favorite of locals since 1940.

In a deal with the city of Oslo, Gustav Vigeland situated his home and workshop (now the Vigeland Museum) in the park and then proceeded, over two decades, to design the entire park around his obsession with the human form.

Highlights of the park include ‘The Fountain’ a controversial sculpture  of 60 individual bronze figures (children, teengages, old men, and skeleton) representing the circle of life and the highly symbolic “Monolith” consisting of 121 intertwined human figures representing human’s desire to reach out to the divine.

But it’s ‘The Angry Boy’ who draws the biggest crowds.

No one knows why he is so upset.

But everyone wants to take his photo.

(photos by Liz Lewis)

The Scottish Borders and the Himalayas in India do not at first seem to have much in common. Through the imaginations of the musicians of India Alba, however, the structures of Gaelic song and certain raga gats, or themes from the borders of the Himalayas connected, and formed both a bridge between the musics and a base for exploring connections.

India Alba’s debut recording was called Reels and Ragas, which is a fair description of what’s within. For their recently released second collaboration, The High Beyond, Scottish traditional musicians Ross Ainslie and Nigel Richard and classically trained Indian musicians Sharat Chandra Srivastava and Gyan Singh take things even further, creating a clear and adventurous meeting of sounds, played out in Scottish traditional tunes, original music, and compositions by groundbreaking Scottish piper Gordon Duncan. Border pipes, whistles, citterns, violins, tablas, frame drums, other sorts of percussion and an instrument called the hang are all parts of the sound. Reels, ragas, and a flashing, melodic, and tantalizing structure that comes from the meeting of these minds and sounds are parts of the music. Jog, the extended closing track, moves from raga to reel to blues and back again in music composed and played by the four men. It’s like nothing so much as a walk down a path in the borders that ends up in a villages street in the Himalayas, with a few side trips along the way. It makes a fine end to this journey and suggests roads these musicians might walk next.

Terri Hendrix is a singer and songwriter well acquainted with crossing musical borders as well, though hers are grounded in the many facets that make up Americana, folk, and Texas music. Her latest album, Cry Till You Laugh, actually started out to be a jazz recording, but in the course of researching and writing that material, she realized that the songs were calling her a a different direction.

The resulting music is a fresh mix of genres which Hendrix has often loved and visited before on record and in live performance. The jazz flavor is there, and there are blues, New Orleans music, folk narrative that, though the stories are varied, seems to draw from the life of her native Texas, songs that’d fit a country playlist, and through it all energy, hope, and a clear eyed and sometimes wry look at life’s ups and downs and what’s nexts. “When I do a show, I want people to feel like ‘Man, we just went on a ride,’ “ Hendrix says. “I love it when people cry, and when they laugh. As a performer, as a songwriter, I feel like it’s my job to get them to do both.” The fifteen tracks on Cry Till You Laugh offer a generous helping of music, emotion and idea, opening with a dark bluesy vision and closing with an uptempo affirmation of hope, possibility, and the unknown. The trip between, light to dark, laughter to tears, courage and hope, swing to jazz, to folk to country, is worth the taking.