Turkish Culture

I'm finished with Turkey.

Enjoy the film guys. Then go to hell with the person who sent you.

Here in America

Back in America for the semester break. It's pretty cold here in Michigan... so cold that it feels unreal compared with the modicum of chill I get in Turkey.

I've gotten used to being on vacation and just like I don't want to leave this warm little apartment to go outside, I don't want to go through the hassle of flying around the world with nine hours of layovers and get back to Izmir just in time to go to work and face students and noise the next morning. However, I'm a little bit excited about the week's lesson plan and I'm doing a lot of reading to prepare for next year when I'll be teaching kindergarten (assuming that everything goes as planned).

In Turkey, the selection of beer is pretty pathetic, so I swore that in Michigan I'd spend some real quality time with the hops, but I had just a few non-Turkish beers the whole time I've been here. The best was Boffo Brown Ale, brewed in Michigan. I also tried Shipyard IPA, brewed in Maine. Any other beer I had was just basic: Killians and a light Mexican beer.

I also intended to get some nice curry, but haven't really gotten around to it. We run out of time so quickly on vacation.

It happens sometimes...

It just happened again; a motor somewhere purrs down some street on a normal night, and there is a sound like a garbage dumpster being dropped. After that, the motor is silent. Sometimes there are rapid-fire voices immediately afterward, and the men at the tea shop downstairs stop playing their game. For an instant, the voices of people on adjascent balconies stop... just long enough to listen to the nothing that happens after the crash before resuming their conversation. The men at the tea shop start to play their game again, whatever that game is. Even from my apartment on the eighth floor, I can hear the plastic pieces moving around on the game board.

Tonight it was a motorbike that went suddenly silent, and the script played out predictably. Now, only minutes after the crash, I can hear the usual sounds around my apartment as if nothing happened. Maybe in Turkish people wondered aloud, "Was that a crash?" "I don't know. Maybe not..." before the hiccup in their converstion passed and the topic turned back to the usual. I don't know. I don't speak Turkish.

Guns, God, and American pundits.

The truest test of your beliefs is to get yourself out of context... way out of context, and see how ridiculous it looks when other people do it. For me, major voices of those actually in politics and the paid mouths of network pundits in the American political scene began to look quaint, like plastic figures in a snow globe... or like little cars and people viewed from the window of an airplane. As the old cast of characters fade into the horizon of stage right, new figures come onto the scene, a referendum as horrible as the Patriot Act is adopted, and a mob of religious fanatics assault art gallery patrons.

It was as God demanded in the bible: "The viewers of art and drinkers of punch from plastic cups shall be maced and beaten with sticks by a dim-witted mob."

The dumb junk that American pundits say, particularly the ones slow on foreign policy, sounds twice as dumb and removed from the world when it's broadcast over an ocean. It just lacks immediacy. Their work is for the semi-skilled; the non-expert who has a good voice and can put on a nice suit. The important tone of voice is present, but the issue begins to look silly when the picture gets bigger.

It's as though they're living in Plato's Cave, but instead of looking at shadows on the wall, let's imagine there is a tornado outside of a house:
The pundit says, "It's drafty in here. There are too many windows open."
The politician says, "My opponent voted to leave the window open. If elected, I promise to close it."

Found the Road to the Flag

I found the road to the flag at the top of the mountain... now it's not as alluring as before. I can go anytime I want. Just take the bus to Cankaya and walk past the hat shop straight north to the big flight of stairs. There you are. I'll probably go this weekend and it'll take just a few minutes.

Actually, it's a pretty exciting walk... lots to pass and some good hawkers with good stuff to hawk. Furniture. I really need furniture, but I'm happy with my 'yoga room', which is a room that is completely empty except for a yoga mat because that is all the furniture I could afford when I first moved to Izmir. The yoga mat cost about $12 or $13 U.S., which is a real bargain when you consider the fact that I have a room that is always clean, and hiring a cleaning lady costs about 60TL.

In truth, I'd rather have a sofa. I'd rather have a table and chairs, but those are things that can be purchased or built, kept or thrown away. Over the years I've seen a lot of nice furniture come and go, get recycled, outlive its usefulness... but I've never seen a yoga mat that looked old or even used.

About my apartment, I know that it's the first place I saw in Izmir... the rent is reasonable, the neighborhood is OK, and it's a livable couple of rooms, but I'm beginning to envy the places my friends have. I think I'm going to stay here only as long as I need to before making some kind of move to a better neighborhood. The area is a little bit conservative and I'm having trouble with the Ramadan drummers at night... actually, they came around yesterday asking for money, a young guy and an old guy (I filmed them waking everyone up before, so I know it was really them).

They looked so sweet, so sincere, that I actually paid them. My anger over the sleep I'd lost these past few weeks melted away completely. I'm a sucker for tradition, and these guys seemed genuinely nice.

The recommended amount was about 5TL, but I only had small coins, about 1TL, in my coin bag. At the very least, these guys are doing their jobs well night after night, playing their drum to wake everyone up between 3:30am and 4:30am and deserve a few coins.

At the very, very least, I didn't kick their asses and take their silly drum.

Urfa Kebab, Two Museums, Climbing the Mountain, Hawking the Hawker, Buying a Hat

Today there are sweat salt and sunscreen deposits on my shirt, my dogs are barking, and I learned how to use the metro in Izmir. It was a very, very good day that started out with on simple mission: to eat Eskender Kebabs on the Kordon with a big glass of beer. That was the simple Sunday task I set before myself to complete my day. I didn't manage it, but I managed much, much more.

First off, I didn't find Eskender Kebabs on the Kordon. There are a lot of good looking places to eat, but at one point I took a quick right away from the water and had an Urfa Kebab sandwich. It did the trick, but because there was no beer on the menu, I had a glass of ayran (the frothy kind), and it was heavenly. So far, so good.

In addition to failing to find an Eskender Kebab, I also failed at a game of 'capture the flag', although I played a pretty good game.

At the top of the hill overlooking Alsancak, there is a Turkish fort with a giant flag planted at its highest point. Today's mission was to get that flag. OK, the mission was to stand next to it and look like a tourist, take pictures, buy a bottle of water, then find my way back down.

I love walking (fancy people call it 'hiking'), old architecture, and strange, dodgey neighborhoods, so I trekked up the mountain through the streets of Kubilay, finding all of that and more in its maze of narrow roads and old women sitting on stoopes in front of colorful little houses. It was beautiful, but I spent most of the time wondering how all of those thousands of people llived up there where there was no industry, no work; There were only little bakkal stores that sold things like bottled water and ice cream bars. Traffic-wise, it was living in the narrowest point of a bottleneck in the messiest maze in the nastiest traffic in the world. Going to work would be so much work that (guess what?) no one would ever go to work.

Once or twice I saw some daring person driving (and Turks are all daring behind the wheel), some trucks that were too large for those streets, which forced them to slow down. I even saw a small delivery truck intentionally bust its plastic bumper on someone's front steps in order to get around another truck, with the person inside pretending to stare lazily at the sky with plenty of room to move (another thing I've learned in Turkey is that the people here are always "on". They don't miss anything. If it looks like they don't see something, they're only pretending).

It was hectic, it was heaven. I walked uphill for a long, long time, then downhill... my leg muscles actually shaking from the workout. The reward for me was finding something in the form of an old building, and there were quite a few of those, as well as some good views of Izmir down below, hugging the Aegean (It's about time I learned how to spell "Aegean"!)

In the end, I got pretty close to that flag... but not close enough to score a point at horseshoes. Only close enough to say that that particular road had taken me as far as it was going to. To the right was a short cliff, not visible from below. To the left there may or may not have been another way up, but heading away from the flag. All around, there were people eyeing my suspiciously, since no one had a reason to be in this neighborhood unless they lived there. I smiled and said, "hello" in English. They sometimes smiled, sometimes looked at me like I was retarded. Somehow, being retarded gave me the courage I needed to take pictures. I took out my camera and grabbed a few choice shots.

One person spoke to me, a man named Mehmet. He was sitting in his doorway with hsi wife, watching his three children play. He told me ruefully that he used to date an American for seven years, but ended up marrying his wife. His wife looked sad and he dismissively ordered her to a bakkal to get me a bottle of water. I didn't like it. I told him that I had water in my bag. I'll also add here that Mehmet's wife, a covered woman, was smoking hot and that he was a bit of an ugger.

So it goes.

After I got down from the hill near Basmane, I took a left and headed towards Konak, where some street children hassled me (my Turkish wasn't even good enough to get rid of them, but I didn't give them any money), had a coffee at Konak Pier, and then went into the bazaar to find a new straw hat. With all of the sun here, it's really surprising that Turkish men don't wear hats for protection. When Turks did wear hats, it was fez!

After walking through the stalls for an hour or so, I found only one that sold straw hats, and they only had three types for men. One was kind of a costume cowboy hat, one was too flimsy, and one looked exactly like the one I already have. I guess I'm stuck with it.

On my way to the main street to catch the tramway back, a guy stopped me and started speaking English with me, saying "Where you from?"

The hawkers are so friendly and so natural that when they speak English to a foreigner, it's both soothing and threatening. It's nice to hear your own language, and they speak it well. It also means that unless you immediately do something rude, you're in for a long, unwanted sales pitch. When the young guy acosted me, I was not in the mood to be rude, and I wasn't even particulary adverse to a long sales pitch. I had ideas of my own.

First I told him to help me to understand how he knew I was a foreigner. He hedged and said I looked like a tourist without saying why. I didn't like that.

He told me that he had a shop, and I was honestly interested in seeing it. The shop was even worth seeing; lots of nice wood and high-quality merchandise; all of it very "ethnic" and potentially attractive to if you wanted to export it to people in the States. I tried to talk turkey with him, telling him that I wasn't a normal buyer, but an aspiring businessman (and potential burden to him). He got tired quickly and ali-ooped me to his cousin, who showed me some lamps. I told him immediately that I didn't want to buy lamps today, but I wanted to start a company with him and export lamps to America. It became kind of a game. He sent me upstairs to another cousin, who wanted to sell me leather jackets, carpets, and counterfeit bags. The cousin was the hardest seller they had, but he used the word, "gavur," which I didn't care for. He asked if he could sell me a carpet, saying that they could send it to the United States. I said "no," several times and he responded with a very sharp "WHY NOT?"

In the middle of all of those counterfeit goods, I told him that he needed to have a catalogue to show customers overseas and that I could find customers. He was excited, the giant dope, but I don't know why. He said he was going to help me find suppliers for soap and spices, but kept pushing carpets. I started to describe a convoluted business plan that had no real benefit for him (probably not me, either... ). His eyes glassed over until he looked like a fish. I told him that carpets were too expensive, that we needed something smaller and cheaper than carpets, and not fragile, like waterpipes or lamps. He asked if i was going to open a shop like his. I said no. I was going to open a website. Suddenly, he didn't want me in his store anymore.

From that little bit of anti-sales experience, I think I actually got a little bit of sales experience. I also found a new way to deal with obnoxious Turkish salesmen.

Permission to live and work in Turkey

The cost of the yearly Turkish residence permit is the only barrier to living here - about $600, and marriage to a Turkish citizen or proof of being able to support yourself with about 2,000 Euro in a Turkish bank.

For some foreigners (like the enraged American I saw stomping up and down the halls), the cost is prohibitive, so you'd better have a good plan and a reason to stay here. Employers will hopefully pay the cost of your work permit application (if they care to - luckily mine does), but they won't pay for the residence permit.

A lot of people, like someone who will never leave and just wants to do a simple job, probably won't pay for residence or bother with work permits.