October 2, 1996

A best seller? Maybe, but I think the name might more aptly be 'The Bloody Mosquito Encased'. We have back to Istanbul on a mission to buy. That was the easy part. Finding the store again was nearly impossible. There are 50 exits to the Grand Bazaar and only one of them led to the street we wanted. "Ok, it's on a hill. It's near some jewelry stores. There was a good local restaurant on a corner...somewhere." The rats chasing the cheese were going to starve.

"Excuse me. We're looking for a restaurant where the locals go at a corner near some other kebab places somewhere on one of the streets outside the bazaar. Can you point us in the right direction?" How many different ways do you think we went?

"Wait..there, this looks familiar..I think..no." Brain waves were reaching back to data processed four weeks earlier. "Yes, yes...there it is...I think."

The search missions chewed up two hours of our morning. But finally we saw the familiar steps leading to the tiny shop and there was that local lunch stop. We were pooped, but there's nothing that a little Turkish apple tea won't cure and as soon as we entered, there was the offer. Then we began our task, search, sort and choose amber. There were boxes of it. After we pawed through an entire gigantic plastic display box, the shopkeeper said, "Wait, I have more." A cardboard box, the size of a 19" TV landed on the counter. "Dig in."

And that is how we spent the rest of the morning, plastering a desk with yellow and orange, sweeping rejects aside, adding more to the white paper we had laid out. We were quite the assembly line. John unloaded the cardboard box. I, quick as lightening, made the ultimate decision - keeper, loser. I pushed the winners to the left, the losers off toward the man on my right. He scooped and dumped.

"What kind of money are we talking here?" My question was casual; I was a big time buyer; startle me if you think you can. I didn't flinch when the words came. "$2 per gram, wholesale price, my lowest."

"Your lowest?"

"My lowest!"

Well, his lowest was knocked down to $1 per gram - I guess this was his 'I'm-desperate-to sell, I'm-drowning-in-the-stuff' price.

We kibitzed; we sorted. The shop owner occasionally pulled pieces from the box, sucked in a breath, blew warm air out on the amber, polished the piece on his trousers, then presented me with the crown jewel. Me, I was the queen rejecter, veto power over all others. The bugs were the best finds. They went in the good pile. That pile grew in to the OK pile and got blended with the maybe pile. We sorted again. Eventually I threw my hands in the air, "OK enough...weigh 'em up."

In total we rounded up forty-five pieces including nine with bugs, bees, ants, beetles and the infamous bloody mosquito. Case solved. Now I'm working on another case. John has just handing me his money belt with the zipper stuck so tightly that I think only scissors can rescue the contents. This one is loaded (though not with bugs!); it could very well be the next big best seller.