Turkey stuff

It's turning out to be impossible to maintain the family web page from Turkey with unpredictable internet connections. I've been blogging at Bebo.com but no one is reading it. So I'm going to keep this blog up to date instead. Here are the recent entries from Bebo:

Taxis & things (today)
In my last entry I talked about all the ways you can get around İstanbul except the most important: taxis. How could I have forgotten them? We often take two or more a day because dolmuşes don't run there for some strange reason. So we taxi from there to school and back.

At least half the cars on downtown İstanbul streets are taxis. And no one in the world can drive as well as an İstanbul taxi driver. At first I thought they were all crazy men and was scared witless, but after a while I realized they know very well what they're doing and they do it very well indeed. They know the size and performance of their cars perfectly and are completely in control no matter what. Besides that many of them are friendly and courteous. We've met a couple who teach Turkish better than our paid teachers. A couple have been fools or crooks, but you meet those everywhere. Mostly they're fine people, and I have no problem trusting them with my life.

Another quick note (July 20)

We've stolen a bit of time at the Büyükada Internet cafe this morning. Instead of taking the fast ferry to downtown we'll try the regular ferry to a suburb and catch a dolmuş to downtown.

One thing that impresses me greatly here is the real commitment to cheap, useable public transit. İstanbul has a problem: it's spread across two major waterways (the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn) as well as two continents. Its 12 million people have a major problem getting from home (usually on the Asia side) to work (usually on the Europe side). The ancient, narrow streets are at capacity and the city is still growing. So here are the options for İstanbullus:
1. Bus. There seem to be lots of them and they're very cheap. We haven't tried them yet because there's no way of finding out where they go except experience!
2. Dolmuş - 8-seat vans that follow set routes and pick people up and drop them off as needed. Not as cheap as buses but more predictable. You pay by passing your money up through the other passengers to the driver, who makes change on the fly, usually while talking on the phone, changing lanes and leaning on the horn at 80 km/h in jammed traffic. Fun!
3. Metro - the new subway that will be extremely convenient when done. Cheap, fast, but it doesn't cover much territory yet and it's all on the European side.
4. Ferries of all sizes and shapes. A few carry vehicles but mostly they handle people only. There are so many of them! One picture I took recently had 7 of them visible with another few hidden by other boats. Our fast ferries from the islands run mostly in the mornings and evenings, but the old slow ones are always coming and going. Very fast and convenient.

One amazing thing about this place is the amount of ship traffic going through the city. The Bosphorus is Russia's sea access to the world. Every morning and evening we see dozens and dozens of ships lined up outside İstanbul harbour to get through, and it's said to be the same at the Black Sea end. With all the ferries and things traffic has to be as carefully controlled as at an airport. It's amazing there aren't more accidents.

It feels like we're almost finished our Turkish course. We're nowhere near fluent, or even able to string together a sentence in the heat of the moment, but we can understand more of what we hear. Turkish is an amazingly logical and compact language, very efficient and quite lovely to listen to. But it sure isn't anything like what we're used to.

Enough for now. Take care, and stay in touch!

Istanbul update (July 17)

It's my turn to use the only available computer at our local internet cafe so I'm going to try to catch up as much as possible.
Actually not much has been happening. Our lives look like this:

6 a.m. (Ron) or 7 a.m. (me) - get up. Eat a leisurely breakfast on the balcony overlooking the sea of Marmara. Do homework.

10 a.m. - head down the hill to the ferry. It's a good couple of kilometres down to the terminal through a town that's been bustling for hours already - the little shops in the market open at 7 or earlier. The fresh fruit & vegetables & fish look so good, but there's no point getting any at this point.

If we haven't eaten much at home, we can pick up a bit of brunch at the ferry terminal. Instead of a snack bar with candy and pop there's a çay bahçe (tea garden) at the ferry that offers the world's best sandwiches (sandvıç here). On a fresh white bun slather olive paste, soft white goat cheese, sliced tomatoes, sausage, and cucumber. Wash it down with fresh Turkish tea on the ferry. Smile.

The ferry we take is a special fast one, a hydroplane, maybe like the ones that caused such a fuss in BC. It takes about half an hour to the centre of the city when everything is going well. One day something seemed to be going wrong and it had to travel at slow speed - took almost an hour.

11 a.m. - arrive in downtown with three hours to kill before class. Often we spend the time at a çay bahçe beside the terminal, drinking tea & finishing our homework (there's lots!). Or if we're okay we might walk a little way to a row of nargileh cafes behind a 16th-century mosque. (A nargileh is what we call a hookah, an apparatus for smoking flavoured tobacco with the smoke filtered through water.) One of the cafes has a wireless internet connection. Ron's laptop and my Palm connect well with the network, but my laptop doesn't. It's a long way to lug a computer, anyway. It's a cool place to check email, though. Somehow it seems so typically Turkish: in touch with tradition, but very much in the 21st century too.

2 p.m. - 6 p.m. - class. We started off in the morning class, but that was because I misread my student card. Turns out we were supposed to be in the afternoon one. Pity. The morning people were much more interesting. Still there's a good mix of people: three Americans, a Mexican, a Spaniard, an Albanian, an Uzbekh, two Russians, two Ukrainians and an Albanian. English is the common language for us all except for the Albanian, who understands some French. Still the teacher claims not to speak anything but Turkish and Arabic, so there's no way we get anything out of her except Turkish.
Classes are a bit of a disappointment. Our school uses a very old-fashioned grammar-based method: hours of lectures on fine points of obscure suffixes and not a lot of help figuring out what to say to taxi drivers. If that's the way they teach other languages, no wonder nearly no one speaks Englısh.

Then home and bed!
Out of space. See ya soon!

At an internet cafe somewhere in İstanbul (July 4)

we´re alive and well and safe in İstanbul, but we´ve only just found our first internet cafe. You have to know where to look! We´ve also just activated our cellphone, one of Begüm's brother's old ones, for the first time.

I think our cell phone number is 538 668 72 26, whatever that means. It seems like it will work almost everywhere. People here don't have phones in their houses; they carry them with them. Life is lived in the public eye here.

This Turkish keyboard is going to take some getting used to. The ı is where the i should be, the ö is where I look for the , , and the ç is where the . should be. Hummmph!

It's pouring rain and has been all day and all the night before - very unusual for July, Begüm tells us. When we got here last Thursday it had been a cool spring and early summer, but it immediately turned stinking hot. We perched in the Şamlı family's apartment for a day and then moved to one of their summer places, this one on Büyükada, an island off the coast of İstanbul. It's a lovely place, but what a walk to get there! We can take a horse-drawn carriage most of the way there (motorized vehicles aren't allowed on the island), but the last little bit is something like a 45 degree climb! We will be very fit after a month there.

The livestock around the place is most interestıng. After work the horses graze on the grass behind the house. And the birds! The island should fly away, it has so many yellow-footed gulls. They make a constant racket, helped out by the hooded crows and the rooks. A seagull with a broken wing has taken up residence in our garden, joined by a couple of sick friends. Last night they cried all through the violent thunderstorms. "Mommy, I'm scared and hungry" sounds the same in any language, even seagull. We put out some water for them when it was hot and threw them some bones from the barbecue, but they're pretty miserable.

I have some great pictures to upload but can't here because this machine has only a floppy drive and my laptop has only a CD writer. Another challenge: we don't have a 3-prong adapter and my laptop has a 3-prong plug. Details, details. They'll all get ironed out in the end, I'm sure.

Stay tuned here. I will try to upload some pictures soon.

We had our first Turkish class today. Yikes! I'm not sure my old brain can handle this. The class is an interestıng mix: just us 2 Canadians, a Dutch guy (who married a Turkish girl he met on an internet chat room), a couple of Americans, 3 Germans, a Ukrainian girl, a Norwegian guy, 3 Spanish kids, and a couple of others. Not surprisingly, the policy is Turkish only, not least because it's all we've got in common. But right now that isn't very much. We're exhausted.

We're more likely to be able to update this than our web page for the next little while. So stay tuned for further news.

Nearly out of space, so güle-güle for now.

Leslie (&Ron)