Well, despite my protests that I'm a changed man, it looks like I've done it again.  I can't quite believe how "these days bunch up in weeks, collaborate in months against me" (that was aimed at you, Will).  The last month has been a non-stop battery of reading, papers, and arrhythmically placed mid and tri-terms interrupted only by the occasional adventure or trip to the museum... or Southeastern Turkey.  Some time in the last month marked the subconscious shift from "I have all the time in the world, I'll sleep in and see X next week" to the alarming realization that a person who has lost three fingers in a threshing accident could still count the number of weekends I have left in Istanbul on one hand.  Still, I feel that I have juggled school and "the foreign experience" fairly well.  I've hit most of the regions I wanted to, seen the majority of things over two hundred years old in Istanbul, and still somehow managed to maintain my grades.  

I have also been able to clear a looming decision that had been hanging over my head and weighing me down much more than I realized at the time.  The idea of transferring from SPU has been rattling around in my head since spring quarter freshman year and my time abroad has finally given me the break in continuity I needed to get myself out the door.  My crossroads consisted of several options, foremost amongst which was (A) to go back to SPU and continue business as usual, (B) drop out of SPU and transfer somewhere else or (C) finish out the year at Boğaziçi, which has accepted me for another semester.  I had very, very compelling reasons for choosing any one of those options, and none of them, by any means, are bad.  I keep finding myself lamenting to my friends that we are one of the few generations in history to be burdened with the agonizing choice between good and potentially better options.

I chose the middle road.  I will not be going back to SPU, but I will be coming home to Seattle.  SPU is willing to put my scholarships on hold and keep me on the books for up to a full year, so I can return next fall with no penalty (aside from a year of my life) should things not pan out.  The aforementioned things include finding a job and sending out a slew of transfer applications to schools primarily clustered around Seattle, Chicago, and New York.  I will also have the pleasure of living in a mansion with seven of my best friends in Seattle's cultural aorta.  Although I will be sad to leave Istanbul and the dear friends I have made, the quality school whose Byzantine administrative system I've just now begun to sort out, the language whose verbs I can now conjugate in seven tenses, and the pleasures and idiosyncrasies of Turkish culture, it would have been a mistake to stay.  I owe it to myself and to my loved ones in Seattle to come back to them.  Besides, after discovering the disproportionately huge Seattle expatriate community in Istanbul, I've realized that if you stay here any longer than you were originally planning you'll probably never leave.  I'm not quite ready to become a permanent expat.

Home improvement

1.

I inherited a completely furnished room.  I am not on the lease.  My hope was to sneak in, live for four months, and then leave without getting embroiled in any of the complications of renting a place.  Those hopes were dashed when my formerly absentee landlord moved in upstairs.  He is a short but well-built man in his late fifties with piercing gray eyes and a shock of white hair.  He also has no discernible concept of privacy.  

We first met one afternoon about a month ago.  I had just dropped off into a deep nap when a rough hand on my shoulder brought me back.   Dazed and groggy, I pulled off the scarf I'd wrapped around my eyes.  He was standing over me, angelically backlit in the late afternoon light.  My being mostly naked didn't bother him as he made his introductions and tried to ascertain my identity.  In retrospect, I think he may have tried to tell me about the renovation blitzkrieg that was about to engulf our building.  

I awoke the next morning to the sound of the building coming down.  Objects skittered across my desk as I stumbled to the window to find men tearing into the wall with drills that would have looked more at home on an oil derrick.  Fortunately it only took them a day to do my section. Unfortunately, it has taken them two weeks to do the rest of the building.  Jack-hammering away at the wall is the acoustic equivalent of peeing in a pool, no matter where it happens, it affects everyone.  In fact, the building functions surprisingly well as an enormous reverberation chamber, actually channeling and amplifying the sound.  I literally cannot shout something to my roommate two feet away while this is happening.

It turns out that this is part of a project to better insulate the building by attaching big foam pads to the outside walls.  Despite the nuisance, I strongly support this move because I have no doubt that the extra padding will save a couple bystanders' lives when a strong breeze finally brings the building down.  The work goes on nonstop from eight to six every day (weekends and holidays included).  

2.

We have now moved into the painting phase.  Men with buckets prowl every level of the scaffolding, scraping and sanding and sloshing (the latter only for alliterative purposes only.  They're actually quite neat and methodical).  Rather than installing precarious ladders on the scaffolding, my landlord has made use of the building's existing stairwell.  Workmen file up and down the stairs carrying big buckets of paint and inch their way out onto the different levels of scaffolding from peoples' balconies.  

I had the misfortune to be the only person home the first day they began the painting.  The landlord pressed down on the doorbell and didn't let up until I finished in the bathroom and came out a minute later.  He asked if anyone else was home (it turns out Philip's Turkish is a bit better than he lets on).  I said no and we charaded a bit until it became clear that he wanted to get out onto the balcony.  I went to the bowl in the kitchen where we keep the key to the padlock and fished around to no avail.  I had no idea where it might be and my roommates didn't answer their phones.  Thus commenced a half hour process of scouring the entire apartment for keys that might work.  My landlord went into Gurcan's room, took the pillows off his couch, the clothes out of his dresser, and upended every one of his change/pen mugs.  A team player, I dutifully checked under the refrigerator but knew that if it wasn't in the bowl then someone must have taken it.  I hadn't a clue why one of my roommates would have done that and lacked the skills relay my irked bewilderment to my landlord as he grew increasingly flustered and workmen in orange jumpsuits piled up in the entryway.  The man carried on his privacy-invading, Ahabian quest for the balcony key for another half hour while I made a show of looking puzzled and concerned, occasionally checking under random objects.  Just when it seemed like I might be stuck in missing key purgatory forever, my roommate answered the phone.  He had been in class.  He had the key.  The landlord had specifically asked for it, so he'd put it in his pocket and meant to give it to the landlord on the way to school.  Unable to find the man, he went to school anyway.  It all worked out. 

My landlord and I are building up quite a rapport through all this, even though the majority of our conversations consist of one us mentioning something that the other recognizes (Barrack Obama, the weather, tooth paste) and both agreeing that it is very nice/beautiful ( X + çok güzel = passable conversation).  Given a moment to think, I'm capable of such complex constructions as, "Do you agree that your state of having become tired in the past exists, not so?" or "The deep, strikingly blue sea's waves the shore profound-melancholy-with lash."  However, I'm not quite able to synthesize these Yoda-with-a-speach-impediment constructions on the fly and under pressure.  

3.

The painting is almost done and the end is in sight.  My landlord does not carry a key to the building when he's working, so I had to buzz him in before letting him into my apartment.  Once inside he had me grab the vacuum cleaner then ushered me into my room where he asked (if a landlord can be said to "ask") me to vacuum the window sill and the space beneath while he sat on my couch and chatted.  Once I was done he came over and held out his hands, palms open and an inch apart.  I'm pretty sure this meant parallel.  Then he pointed to the window and made a waving, clawing gesture as if something were trying to get in.  He then shook his head and said "no."  I think the gist of it was that the new paint job would prevent beings from a parallel dimension from flooding through my window.  I find this reassuring.  He also may have meant that he's replacing the leaky wood-framed windows with new double pained ones to keep out the cold, which would also be nice, although it means the war will soon be moving to the homefront.

Autumn falling

I have recently made a dangerous discovery: If I take two night buses I can spend three solid days anywhere within a thousand kilometer radius and still make it back to school in time for my morning class on Tuesday.  This is a wonderful and terrible burden.  I have all of Western Anatolia and the Balkans at my fingertips.  Though lately I've been using those fingertips to try and claw my way out of the scholastic hole I'm settling in.  My classes average eight hundred pages of reading a week, which breaks down to (not counting papers) about six hours a day, if I'm lucky (Kant, Foucault, and Bloch tend to go at their own pace).  As you can guess, that ain't happenin'.  I'm caught in a tight place between how much I generally enjoy the classes and readings and the sad fact that every night I spend at home reading means some cool Istanbul something or another missed.  There's also the nagging knowledge that all I really need to manage in any of these courses is a 61% because however well I do its showing up on my transcript as pass/fail.   I came to learn.  I just need to find the right balance between "experiential learning" (a great euphemism for concerts and exploration, no?) and the old books.

But, back to travel.  I found out about my travel possibilities the fun way via a successful trip with three friends to lake Eğidir in South Central Turkey.  We didn't have much of a plan, other than find "autumn". By some sad evolutionary mishap the trees of Istanbul (there are full-blown forests within city limits) don't change colors.  Some spend a couple days looking sickly before shedding, others just fall off while still green.  As four fall-o-philes, we decided a road trip was in order.

Eğidir the town is pretty.  It juts into the eponymous pale lake on a long spit and doesn't dissapoint when it comes to a Southern Turkish town's prerequisites: derelict Byzantine castle, ludicrously steep mountains, endearing hostel, and a flotilla of old men in ragstopped row boats fighting among themselves for the right to lure us out to our watery doom.  The seldom mentioned flip side of traveling in the off season is that, like a fish separated from its school, there's nothing to insulate you from the sharks.  You become the sole target for the badgerers in front of every store and restaurant.  Making eye contact with these people invites the risk of someone following you down the street serenading, "Very good.  Very choice.  You see.  No problem.  Cheap.  No problem."

We hit it off with our hosteler, Ibrahim, who took us on an excursion to the village's Sunday market.  He had been born and raised there, so we strolled around windy dirt rolls waving at neighbors and old friends.  What would have been an hour's walk doubled as we wandered, picked, and gorged our way through orchards and vineyards and other even more exotic yards littered with exotic yellow, brown, and orange fruits that I'd never heard tell of before.  

The market's main attraction was the pens of goats for sale.  Once bought, their occupants could be carried by their hind legs over to a blood-spattered, open air abattoir and eviscerated before your eyes.  There were also dozens of colorful, cheap stalls selling everything for olives to women's stockings to pruning hooks.  I bought non-essential clothes that I had considered too bulky to bring to Istanbul... like a decent coat... and fawn-pants (they look like a prop used the BBC production of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe).  

The next day we biked thirty kilometers (most of it spent on one infernal hill) to a nearly kilometer deep cave that had been used for religious rights by the Greeks and Romans.  The entrance was nestled in a craggy ravine and only reachable by crossing an old Roman bridge.  It wasn't open.   But when in need of a fall fix, old holes in the ground are ancillary.  The long ride took us through a countryside that was all golden poplars and crisp high plateau.  We even encountered several red and yellow half acre heaps of apples sprawling on the side of the road.  We may or may not have dove into one like the inviting pulpy McDonald's ball pit it was.  Suffice to say we got what we came for.

Excursion One

Thank you for giving this one last look before permanently moving on to things that are updated more than once every month and a half.  A lot has happened in this interval and I apologize for being so derelict in my duties to keep you informed.  I've got a back log of enormous, half-finished, grandiloquent posts that really aren't what a blog is meant to be and which have built up into an increasingly self-conscious bottle-neck for me.  I'd also half-forgotten that I'm actually going to school, and one of the most prestigious and academically rigorous ones in the Middle East, at that.  I'm averaging five hundred pages of reading and one and a half papers a week.  Life's only about 67% fun and games.

With school getting progressively harder, working in Turkey has become an increasingly enticing prospect.  This year Turkish Government employees, if they play their cards right, will have in excess of one-hundred-fifty days off.  Security guards enjoy a ten minute tea break every hour on the hour.  Every middle or upper tier restaurant has a devoted heckler (or two) whose entire day consists of chatting with passing friends and trying to entice in anyone wearing a flower-print shirt or carrying an expensive Nikon.  Most Turkish fast food chains (there are more of them than you can shake a stick (despite multiple attempts on my part)) employ someone between the ages of sixteen and twenty to change the napkins flip between fütbol and a ludicrously oversexed MTV simulacrum on the big flat screen TVs hovering over the patrons. Even the trash-sweeper-uppers work with a buddy, one sweeping and the other supervising.  I can't say it's much of a workers paradise for the professionals, though.  My bank auditor roommate usually works ten hour days with an hour commute on either end.  Last night we went out to dinner with a friend of his who works air traffic control at Atatürk International who had enough harrowing stories that I was surprised he still had a full head of hair and no nervous ticks.  Most of the Russian pilots who fly in do not know English,It also happens that despite the international aviation standards demanding at least five kilometers of room between landing planes must be waived at Atatürk Intl. due to the heavy volume of traffic.  Instead, it averages one to one-and-a-half.  This gives the plane on average ten seconds in which to clear the landing strip before being plowed into by the next one.  

During the end of the Ramazan** Bayram (the big family reunion Christmas-ish holiday at the end of Ramadan), with pilots doing milk runs returning from family gatherings, one fellow flew nineteen hours sans break and had to be lifted out of the cockpit at the end of his rotation because he could no longer stand.  It turned out that all the unrelenting high stress coupled with the uninterrupted sitting position had caused a blood clot to form in his leg that could have easily traveled to his brain at any point.  I was alarmed, but not surprised, to learn that he flew for Atlas Jet.  And this is how that long aside segways into what I had really meant to write about: my first big intra-Turkey trip.  I was able to wrangle two new friends into heading towards all points South West with me.  We used Antalya, a small splayed out on the Lycian Coast among many old things as our jumping off point.  

Turkey is amply provided for when it comes to transportation.  There are four low-cost national carriers and upwards of two-hundred long-haul bus companies (a very welcome switch from greyhound's mediocre monopoly).  Atlas Jet's eighty lira direct flight was too good to refuse, although the fact that their online ticket reservation system was broken didn't bode well.  While trying to find an alternative way to reserve the tickets I instead stumbled across an article about Atlas Jet's diminished safety standards (with the cost of fuel where it was, cuts had to be made somewhere) and how that had led to two out of their fifteen planes crashing last year (thirteen percent of their entire fleet).  Still, as college students we had a larger sense of our own invincibility than we did our financial security, so we opted to hazard it.   We bought the tickets at the airport and boarded with five minutes to spare.  Per expectations, the plane proved to be rickety and the food anomalous.  As we began our descent to Antalya we broke through the clouds onto a vista of impossible steep mountains and blue blue water.   This was made all the more breathtaking by some sudden turbulence that sent all the flight attendants running back to their seats and an abandoned drink cart careening down the aisle.  I was a bit unnerved but still feeling generally ok about my situation until someone in the cockpit decided that the time had come to put play the soothing elevator music over the intercom from a scratchy tape that I'm sure was labeled "How to relax for your imminent death".  As you may have guessed, it proved to be a false alarm.  In fact, just two hours later saw me a considerably happier camper rolling around in Mediterranean surf and lolling on the beach.  

Our hostel was in the heart of the old city.  This being Turkey, the title was pretty apt.  The town's walls were an eclectic assortment of Roman, Byzantine, and Seljuk additions with towers betraying each civilization's distinctive flare, which we entered via Hadrian's Gate (circa 130AD).  I am beginning to understand how so many Turks get so callously jaded on these sorts of things.  Many of the walls were both the perpetrators and recipients of serious litho-cannibalism.  Mildly conspicuous marble columns occasionally poked out from the bastions' masonry like asparagus spears from a sandwich.  Most were probably over a thousand years old by the time they were toppled and laid like cordwood to bolster the city's defense.  Truth be told, you can't really walk out your door without stubbing your toe on some ancient something or another.  This has done very little to temper my involuntary "ooh-ing" and "ah-ing," though.

We visited the ruins of Termessos the following day.  The city was nestled high up in the steep pine and sage strewn mountains a half hour inland from Anatolia.  It was already old when it resisted a siege by Alexander the Great and was granted sovereign ally status by Romans who decided to engulf rather than attempt to capture it.  And with good reason.  The remains of forty foot walls blocked off the whole approach up the steep valley.  Someone had added a second one five hundred meters further up for good measure.  The city itself was overgrown with dusty pine forest.  Most of the buildings had been shaken into disordered heaps of cut stone by earthquakes, but many impressive façades still stood despite some of their enormous blocks looking like they'd been half pulled out by some timid Jenga player.  This being Turkey, we exercised our right to climb all over everything.  We had the place almost entirely to ourselves.  

The remains of the amphitheater were breathtaking, in large part because of the dramatic background (photos are forthcoming, I swear) but also because it brought home the humanity of the people who must have lived there.  An even more profound moment came when my friend noticed an unusual name scratched into one of the massive marble blocks.  It belonged to a Greek man named Nicolas M-something and carried the date 1910.  This was history-coated-history.  It was strange to consider that in little over a decade this man's entire community would likely either be dead or relocated to mainland Greece as part of the post WWI population exchange (despite a history of uninterrupted Greek settlement in the area going back at least twenty-three-hundred years).  I'm not the sort of person who feels compelled to immortalize myself through acts of petty vandalism, but I can't help but wonder if I scratched "DAN THE MAN ZIMMER 2008" whether some visitor to Termessos a hundred years from now wouldn't shake his/her/its head and mutter, "Poor bastard must have never seen it coming."

The city's necropolis occupied the entire upper tier of the valley.  A thousand years of civilization means fifty generations of people in need of an eternal resting place.  The valley was littered with what must have been thousands of large stone bread boxes with steepled granite  lids.  Invariably, every lid was ajar or a corner of the sarcophagus had been smashed open.  My grave-robbing career was over a thousand years before it began. 

Our exploration of the long dead's gingerbread houses lead us well off the path as we searched for bigger tombs and better bas reliefs.  We were startled when someone shouted at us in Turkish.  We looked around.  No one.  The man shouted again and we looked up to see someone gesturing at us from a forlorn guard tower a half kilometer further up the canyon.  His words were lost in echos, but the big rifle the man was gesticulating with spoke volumes.  I scampered back to the trail half-expecting to hear bullets pinging off the stones around me.  We regrouped, winded, dirty, and scratched from our hurry to stop doing whatever it was that upset the gunman.  We looked up at his tower.  To our surprise, he'd put his weapon down and was dancing, arms above his head.  A second later he broke into a warbling song.  Evidently my  Turkish has not progressed to the point where I can differentiate between "Desist or be shot" and "allow me to entertain you, my strange guests."  Cant' stop me from trying

A running theme in my adventures has been a failure to appreciate distances.  I'm always a bit surprised when what looks like only an inch on the map metamorphoses into a four hour bus trip.  Well, we traveled a long inch from Antalya to the resort town of Fethiye and didn't get there till mid afternoon.  Fethiye is a tourist trap built in the seventies alongside a series pebble beaches with a dozen Greek islands a day trip away.  The beaches are a bright white and serve as a perfect camouflage for the stout pallid flab of the British Islanders lolling on them like a legion of beached walruses (an illusion furthered by the men's mustaches).  The town was literally England's newest colonial outpost.  Everything was priced in pounds, restaurants served fish and chips, and some of the tourist agents spoke with a weird glottal-stopping half-cockney accent.  Interesting, yes.  What I came for, no.  We bypassed most of the town and headed south fifteen kilometers along soaring bluffs to George House**, a lovely family run hostel situated at the top of Butterfly Valley.

As best I have been able to tell, Butterfly Valley has no Turkish name, but rather was settled in the late sixties by an international commune of hippies.  It is now populated by a small community of their heterogeneous, yoga practicing and pot growing offspring, many of whom may not have left the valley their entire lives (not that I can fault them for this).  Geologically, it is a pie slice taken out of the mountain in which the berry filling on either side is instead three-hundred meters of cliffs and the lip of the pie pan is a pristine beach and absurdly blue water.  We arrived too late to hazard a trip down the improvised trail.

A storm blew in during the small hours that night.  The power went out.  Rain blew in sideways.  The lightning struck every two or three seconds, to the point that I was, with no exaggeration, actually able to read by its purple incandescence.  It was a sight.  

The next morning we learned that this was the first significant rain they'd had there in four months, and that it would now be much too dangerous to hazard a trip down.  Uncertain of whether I'd ever be back, I formally absolved our hosteler Hassan of any culpability for our impending deaths, twisted my friends arms, and descended.  Whoever had demarcated it had had the sick humor to do so by way of splashes of bright red paint that looked at home on the set of a cheap horror film. The trail of gore led us along smooth, mud-slick ledges of boot-polished stone and down rope-railed crevasses with hundred of feet of open air on either side.  It quickly became apparent that this trail was best suited to adventurers of the cloven-hoofed variety.  As if to highlight this, a very diarrhetic goat must have recently passed by, leaving its own series of greenish-brown splashes to compliment the trail markers.  This not only smelled horrible but rendered already slick rocks virtually frictionless.  However, despite a litany of complaints and the occasional accusation of attempted murder on my part from a party who will go nameless, we took it slow, each only fell once, and made it into the valley just in time for the last of the previous night's clouds to blow away.  Once again, the Mediterranean provided ample reward for any near death encounter incurred in reaching it.  Paradoxically, we made it back up in half the time.

It was a fourteen hour overnight bus back to Istanbul.  The buses here are quite an experience.  More on them forthcoming.  And it will be forthcoming, thank you doubters.  I will, henceforth, make every effort to have updates weekly.

*The Ottomans, having ruled the entire Middle East for the majority of their existence, reserved the right to arbitrarily change letters in common words as a way of reasserting their authority.

*Incidentally, there is no one named George associated with the place... although it is located on the edge of a "gorge."  One has to wonder.

Princess

I am all registered for classes and my schedule has congealed into something that I hope will resemble its final form.  Registration has been a bit of a headache.  The system is largely predicated on the assumption that you will not get into half of the classes you want or need.  Rather than the SPU system of staggered online registration system which paces student registration out over four days according to credit seniority, Boğaziçi has opted for a much more democratic battle royale system in which ten-thousand students all get to take a stab at once as of 10:01 am on the morning of registration.  The school computers have a more direct connections to the servers so students cue up and take numbers hours beforehand to get a chance to edge out their off campus peers.  Inevitably the massive influx of traffic slows the servers to a crawl. I watched many students got tantalizingly close to finalizing their schedules only to see the wait for loading pages grow from seconds to minutes as they got tantalizingly close.  Then the servers crashed.  The International office opted to spare us visiting students the anxiety of this slow motion anarchy by not activating our login IDs in time to participate.  I couldn't even log in until that evening.  This put my chances of immediately getting into the classes I wanted at somewhere between a snowball in hell and a candle in a cyclone.  

Early in the afternoon as I compulsively tapped the refresh button on my browser I came to the conclusion that snagging a spot in Pre-Ottoman Turkish history wasn’t worth the ulcer I was nursing.  Classes be damned.  If absolute worst came to absolute worst, at least I’d be taking basket weaving in Istanbul (and not have to worry about Christmas presents).  I dropped everything and went with a friend to the Princess Islands, which are neither metaphor nor innuendo, but rather a small chain out in the Sea of Marmara about forty-five minutes away by ferry.  Having done little preliminarly research, I’m afraid we picked a bum island (there were five to choose from).  A Turkish naval base sprawled over most of it.  Men behind barbed wire fondled big guns and alternately scowled and smirked as we walked by on our way to the beach... which happened to be perhaps the only place in the entire Sea of Marmara where the water is brown instead of azure.  Plastic trash bags rolled in limp surf like depressed jellyfish and two crusty French men, spedos nearly invisible under baguette-fed bulk, lurked in the shallows.  We opted to walk another mile past the beach to an Orthodox monastery we'd heard tell of, purportedly Byzantine.  We found it, but it was being lived in by a small Turkish family and the only monks on the premices were in the overgrown cemetary out back.  Alas, the building was about five hundred years too new to be a legacy of Eastern Rome.  It was all gaudy pastel icons and painted glass windows.  Unfortunatley, its relative newness did not save it from being utterly delapidated.  But, as seen in the late afternnon light, the peeling paint, cracked walls and broken windows lent the building a sense of moldering dignity and serenity that I doubt it enjoyed in life.  Also,  one of the stained glass skylights depicted a beatific bearded man flying a pretty lewd gesture, which, even if the photos did not turn out, certainly made my day. 

I did eventually make it back and hammered out a working schedule.  I am not taking basket-weaving.

In the interest of helping you form a more complete mental picture

I realize I have done very little in the way of illuminating my environs.  My flat is on the second floor of a five-story apartment building named Gül D1.  Gül is the Turkish word for rose, but D1 is a mystery.  I am fairly certain that it doesn’t refer to our block, as our block is actually a narrow finger in a delta of several streets that flow down the back side of the hill from campus.  This fanning delta must be, without exaggeration, at least 30 degrees steep in places.  Given the casual mania of most Istanbul drivers (more on that forthcoming) I dont' want to be walking them when the first snow hits.  However, when this hill does become a white, frictionless deathtrap for the hundreds of cars and minibuses that already careen along it seemingly unperterbed by the laws of physics, I doubt I'll find much refuge in my room.  Living on the second story puts me on the first floor on the uphill side.  Actually, I’m slightly subterranean.  My window looks out at  stucco wall and a sliver of the dizzying asphalt ascent beyond.  This view is preceeded by a small level area that could be construed (if one were in the right state of mind (panic)) as a runoff area for a runaway car.  I wouldn't be at all surprised to look up from reading in bed this winter to find one of those very nice, but especially maniacal BMWs two thirds of the way through my north wall, which, I’m afraid, would likely bring the poor old building down on top of us. 

Another part about being at street level means that I’m intimately aquanted with street sounds.  I am beginning to recognize individual cars by their distinct chugging and clanking noises as they struggle up the hill every morning.  My neighborhood also has two types of push-cart-men.  One is a water-seller who goes around during the day shouting suyu which means the water in the same tone a Texan hog rancher might shout sooweee.  Despite being somewhat annoying, this has a certain Orientalist charm.  Slightly less charming is the scrap-metal guy, whose push cart is full of metal odds and ends collected from the neighborhood that he takes to a plant to recycle.  I have not yet been able to decipher the meaning of his ululating cry, but there’s something about my window that compells one to explode from his lungs whenever he’s beside it.   Better still, he and his compatriots troll the streets until the small hours.  Suffice to say, if you’re looking to get rid of some scrap metal at two in the morning, you’re up to no good.

But back to the flat.  It’s a charmer with wood and marble everything and big iron bars on all the windows, but tends to creak in strong winds and drips in odd places when it rains, suggesting deep cracks running through places they shouldn’t.  The plumbing is old enough to have been done by Atatürk himself.  Pipes poke out of the walls in unexpected places.  Periodically a gurgling banshee wail begins somewhere upstairs and rattles its way down the pipes that run through the wall I share with the bathroom.  I believe I am getting intimately aquanted with biorhythms of my upstairs neighbors.

Our water is heated by a blue box on the kitchen wall.  We leave it unplugged because of a leak in the coils that the water passes through.  They are in the top of the box.  If you leave the machine on long enough, the water gradually courses its way down to the eletrical heating component on the bottom and short curcuits the entire thing.  This limits hot showers to around ten minutes (not exactly a hardship, I know but I'm a bit of a shower hedonist), fifteen if you’re willing to risk opening the bathroom door to the smell of singed plastic.  This hasn’t been a concern recently, however, because for no obvious reason (although I more than half suspect dark magic) our water pressure has been twentiethed.  The heater seems to find heating such a piddling amount of water beneath its dignity, so I’ve been taking frigid pseudo-sponge baths of late.  

Although I still brush my teeth with it, the water is not recommended for drinkng, despite purportedly being chlorinated.  The website for the school's foreigner dorm says that it is entirely potable, but recommends students drink bottled water.  Well, an Ausie student decided to take that at face value won himself a trip to the hospital.  He caught some sort of bug that set him leaking from every orifice possible.  Although the connection is textbook post hoc ergo propter hoc, the doctors said it was waterborne.  He was put on an IV and some heavy-duty antibiotics and is just about recovered now.  Like many cities in developing nations, Istanbul is turning out to be an unpredictable melange of the ultra-modern and the throwback.  We are still waiting on a resolution to the water pressure issue.  Unfortunately, Turkey doesn't seem to have modified its tennant laws much since Ottoman times.  We can be evicted on a whim and the onus for fixing broken apartment appliances and even building’s front door seems to fall on us.  I suppose I’m just lucky that we aren’t made to wear serf blouses and farm watermellons. 

Boat shoes in back alleys

On my way back from the Church of the Holy Wisdom, (or less grandly, the Hagia Sophia) I was exiting an underpass when a shoe-shine man dropped his brush in the midst of going home. He didn’t seem to notice so, like the generally kind oaf that I am, I picked it up and gave it back to him. This pleased him immensely and he insisted that he give my shoes a brush. I insisted that I had to go. He said (as best I could make out) that this would just be a brushing and free, because I’d helped him. I caved. Low and behold, after he’d finished brushing my leather boatshoes out came the polish. He had my feet well in hand, so I just sighed and rolled with it. He asked where I was from and I told him A.B.D. (U.S.A. in Turkish). He was from Ankara. He’d come to Istanbul to get eye surgery but had gotten lost during the post-surgery blindness… or something, and was now shining shoes to pay his way back to Ankara. He was a well-built man in his late fifties and it was a bit intimidating when he finished and demanded twenty lira. We were alone, just the two of us and several of his shoe-shine buddies at the mouth of the darkening tunnel. I said no, free. He protested (rather loudly and a little too close for comfort) that he had lavished a lot of expensive shoeshine on my ungrateful feet (or something to that effect) and that he had a sick baby. “Doesn't everyone,” I would have said had it been within my power. Instead, I told him that that it was too expensive and that I was just a student, although in retrospect I realize I was actually telling him, “Much too cheap, my student.” He was kind enough to keep a straight face abruptly dropped his angry façade when I gave him ten lira. He complimented me on my Turkish, shook my hand, and went in peace. I’m willing to chalk this up to a learning experience. Although, to be fair, my shoes are considerably shinier.

The sights

I spent my third day working on my blisters. As any of you who’ve traveled with me know, my MO is to point myself in a direction that looks interesting and continue that way until I find adventure. I caught a bus from school to Taksim (Istanbul’s Capitol Hill) and walked south from there to the old Genoese enclave and then crossed the GOLDEN HORN (I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to write that) to the old city where I traipsed around the Ottoman mosques and the Hagia Sophia. The great thing about the mosques (or camiler, as they’re know in this neck of the woods) is that, as holy houses of worship, they’re free to the public, provided you have the decency to take off your shoes and carry them around with you in a trash bag. Thus, I got to see the inside of the Blue Mosque with its gilded domes all ablaze in the golden late afternoon light. I nixed the Hagia Sophia when I discovered it would cost twenty lira. This isn’t negligent miserliness on my part, though. In fact, it almost pained me not to explore it, but every museum in the country will be free for me the moment I get my student ID card from the university in a few weeks, so I can bide my time. While tooling around a neighborhood of dilapidated wooden Ottoman villas a series of wrong turns left me on the wrong side of Constantinople’s sixteen hundred year old sea wall. I spent the better part of an hour walking around its perimeter while cars whizzed by on the freeway at an arm’s length. I passed the time mooning over the wall and pondering which tumbledown breach the army of Second Crusade might have poured in through.

I eventually made it back across the GOLDEN HORN and found that the stretch from Galata Tower (built by the Genoese 1348 as part of the fortifications of their enclave (you are dealing with a history major)) in to Taksim was lovely. Someone blocks off the street at night and thousands of people stroll the wide avenue between lines of classy boutiques, gourmet restaurants, antique bookstores, and the occasional tourist trap. I passed three gypsies playing music in front of a change-filled hat. They were accompanied by a rather goofy, overenthusiastic touristy-looking guy strumming guitar while wobbling back and forth on a unicycle, though they seemed to be trying their best to ignore him.

Turkcell kindly furnished the entire strip with a couple hundred rows of elegant icicle-like lights spanning the width of the street, the only catch being that they hung the Turkcell emblem at either end of each string. This wouldn’t be a problem if it were something innocuous, like a swoosh or Michael Jordan dunking. Instead, Turkcell felt that the singular thing that best summed up who they are and what they stand for is a vaguely ominous yellow Tella Tubby clone… that or some sort of malevolent yellow alien with two feelers rising out of its face. Suffice to say I wasn’t happy about having hundreds of the things glaring at me on my way home. The thing is, Turkcell has completely saturated Turkey, to the point that you can’t go a block without seeing a Turkcell booth, or building-sized mural, or child dressed in aforementioned yellow alien outfit (unless of course Turkcell has, infact, somehow obtained a live alien, which might justify why they’re so bleeding eager to show it off). Thankfully, the only thing more ubiquitous than Turkcell’s little urchin is the calming, stolid stare of Mustafa Kemal. Perhaps my favorite thing about Turkey thus far is that you can’t go more than a hundred meters without encountering a bronze statue of the omnipaternal Ataturk reading, or striding purposefully, or playing with children, or gazing piercingly into the future, or inventing the latin alphabet. Easily the coolest founding father of any country ever (Benjamin Franklin being a close second followed by Jean D’arc).

Language

Gürkan and Phillip’s girlfriend Özlem were both very plussed by my Turkish and even more so by my drive to learn. I was told by both of them that my Turkish was better than Phillp’s. I laughed at their kind joke, but the last several days have proven them to be quite serious. I saw the same deer-in-the-headlights stare reflected in my flatmate’s face at lunch while we watched helplessly as a string of verbal miscommunications and misunderstandings gradually morphed my order from a shepherd’s salad into meatball sandwich. Later that day, while butchering a verb conjugation in front of Gürkan, he encouraged me by telling me that Phillip doesn’t even try to conjugate things. Although I’m beginning to see how it is entirely possible to get by here with a minimal understanding of Turkish, I find it incomprehensible that one wouldn’t put concerted effort into learning it, especially if one had lived here a year and had a Turkish girlfriend with Turkish parents. It strikes me like continuing to complacently bring a knife to a regularly scheduled gunfight. To be fair, Philip’s English is fluent-and-a-half, so perhaps he deserves to take a break.

First contact

Those of you who know me well know that no news means one of two things: I’m either having a great time or dead. Well, this update means that you can forget the latter. The Zimmers fall in the “no news is good news” camp. However, having been here for four days (really?), I think I’m officially derelict in my duties.

I’m pleased to inform you that the trip was about as painless as these things go. Northwest allayed my unease about traveling via US carrier by providing a meal every four hours and a private LCD screen that actually let me choose between a couple dozen movies (no animal comedies on this flight) and the option to play virtual poker other passengers on the plane (“Excuse me, flight attendant, the man in seat 13F owes me his tie.”).

The Amsterdam sunrise was a riot of pink and the last leg to Istanbul short. My new German roommate was there to greet me at the airport and my luggage survived intact. The only real catch was that I slept three hours the night before leaving in order to sleep better on the plane. When deciding to do this, I never considered that I might, by some cruel miracle, not manage to sleep on the plain. I scraped out a grand total of some six hours of sleep in two days. The bright side of completely shattering my biorhythm is that I was able to piece it back together in time with Turkey. After a night-and-a-half’s sleep I woke up in the right time zone.

My flatmates are a nice pair. The German’s name is Phillip Brulez (no relation to Crème Brûlée, he assured me (I wish I was lacking enough in dignity to actually ask that)). He was kind enough to show me around campus, hook me up with a bus pass, and not break my legs for not being able to pay rent (owing to a low cap on my debit card withdrawals). He is taller than me and a bit on the dour teuton end of the spectrum, but is affable and has been immensely helpful in getting me settled here. He also happens to be mastering in something computer-related, which makes him an especially good person to have at arm’s reach. He has a Turkish girlfriend of several years who’s staying with us until the dorms open next week.

My other flatmate is a fellow name Gürkan, who recently graduated from Boğaziçi and now audits banks, which is good work in these parts because not only are there ten in a hundred meter radius, but they each belong to a different company. Last night I joined him to watch Turkey tie Belgium on his big flat screen TV. He kindly clarified some of the Turkish used in the match.

I was particularly interested by the banner that the station kept super imposing over everything. It read simply, “PAVAşLI ET”. Using my fledgling Turkish, I was able to puzzle out et as the imperative form of the verb to do or to make. The suffix lı means with. Dying to know what it was they were commanding me to make things with, Gürkan explained to me that pavaş is a special type of Turkish pants. This of course begged the question: What exactly are you supposed to make with pants (aside from more money (joke (but statistically true)))? Well, it turns out that et in this case was not derived from the verb etmek but instead the monosyllabic word for meat. The phrase actually means, “meat with Turkish pants,” which apparently is some sort of brand in these parts. Go figure.

Where things stand

I have three full days left stateside, which means time triage and mounting regrets. I imagine I'm feeling something similar to the way a terminally ill person might upon realizing all the things they never got around to saying. However, like said chronically sick person, I also have the promise of going to a new and better place soon, not that expect Istanbul to be heaven per se, but it doesn't make a bad consolation prize for leaving friends, family, and Seattle. But enough of that metaphor.

Things are all coming together well. My student visa arrived in the mail last week, my tuition's been wired, I just bought study abroad life insurance (it is comforting to know that my parents are guaranteed $30,000 to repatriate my tattered remains in the event of "death or dismemberment*"), and my flight is booked. One of the bigger headaches of the process was trying to track down a place to stay. The alluringly titled "Super Dorm" was the only university residence open to "special" (a pithier title than nondegreeseekingundergraduateinternational, which, incidentally, is all one word in Turkish) students. Unfortunately, the Super Dorm people operate independently of the Special Student people, which meant that the dorm was full by the time I applied, which happened to be the day after receiving my acceptance letter. My rejection from the dorms was followed by a nail-biting month of trolling Craig's List Turkey and stretching my inchoate Turkish to the breaking point to decipher message board threads. In my desperation, I nearly wound up with a fellow whose facebook 'about me' reads, "Eat-Drink-Get Drunk-Go Party-Sleep-Wake up-Eat-Drink-Get Drunk :)" Affable guy, but not quite my scene. The second guy was an atheist communist with perfectly sculpted Che hair and gruffbeard. Although he was a fellow history major, I found his prominently displayed personality test, which described him as "a manipulative bully" and hypocrite who "likes to see justice done to others while avoiding justice himself," a bit disconcerting. Also prone to breaking promises. Suffice to say, he didn't seem like someone I ought to forward a sizable deposit to. Anyway, I finally got hooked up with a 25 year old German grad student. He seems like a very solid, down-to-earth fellow. Heck, when I asked if there was anything I could bring him from the states, all he could think of was sour skittles, which are easily my favorite thing about America too. He cemented my love by offering to pick me up from the airport. If he does turn out to be a deranged murderer, at least I will have gotten a free ride for my trouble.

He also has fairly perfect English. This is good because I have a nagging feeling that my Turkish, while functional, isn't quite as hot as I'd like to believe. I mean, it's hard not to get over inflated when you unlock the power of possessives. Suddenly all the things that were floating free in the world are now mine... and yours, and his/her/its. Or the the power of the future. I am no longer constrained to the present or present progressive, but can now describe with absolute certainty things that are going to happen. Granted, this is less about clairvoyance than the fact that all I've learned is the future definite tense and lack the ability to even phrase things in the future conditional or future dubitative. Despite this, and somewhat scarily, I believe my Turkish is rapidly approaching the point where my French would be if it weren't for a couple thousand godsent cognates (William the Conqueror is my hero). The French actually gives my a slight leg up on Turkish because that seems to be where the Turks borrowed most of their Western words, such as kuafür, şofür, and plaj. If worst comes to worst, I think I've established a strong enough Turkish foundation that I will be able to communicate reasonably well with someone who deigns to adress me like they would dull three year old, if they make sure to enunciate every syllable.

Really all of this is to say that I am excited to go and almost feel ready.

*I can't help but wonder what they mean by member in this situation. Because if they're talking about dismemberment of the member I'm thinking of, well, as perversely fear-factor-esque as this sounds, a $30,000 subsidy to become a eunuch might be an offer I can't refuse. I wonder if the Topkapı Palace still needs harem guards...

Opening Salvo

In the past few months, several friends have requested that I start a blog. Or, especially flattering, that I "should like so start a blog". Which I have, as of now. As much as I enjoy naked emotional exhibitionism, this is primarily about stoning as many birds as ergonomically as I can. I simply don't expect to be able to keep up as well as I'd like with all the many people I'd like to keep up with.

Unfortunately, I like words and writing and can err on the side of verbosity. In the end, I'm afraid this blog might only appeal to fans of Robert Jordan and Victorian writers with large gambling debts who were paid by the word (I'm looking at you, Dickens). While I can't guarantee that I'll chronicle the best of times and the worst of times, I will try to provide some wit, insight, and updates to anyone interested.