After yesterday's negative musings I thought I should balance things up by saying that on the whole Turkey & the Turks are amazing. To have a strong and distinct society in our homogenized world is a remarkable achievement, and they do it in a big way.
One of the things I admire is Turkish television. I don't know how many networks there are or how they are funded, but there's lots of TV and it's all in Turkish. Sometimes you see an American film with Turkish subtitles, but the by far the vast majority of programming is original. Every night there are hours of locally-made sitcoms and soap operas, and they're hugely popular. Our friends seem embarrassed by this, but there's nothing to be embarrassed about. They're professionally done and really interesting. (Of course we understand at best a quarter of what's going on, but they seem good to us.)
The thing that blows me away is that the Turkish TV industry has a possible audience of - at best - 100 million people. That's the entire population of Turkey plus the Turkish diaspora in Germany and around the world. And for that they produce hours and hours and hours of original stuff. How much original Canadian programming is there? Hockey Night in Canada and ....
The Turks are a strong and proud nation, and rightly so. So their streets are a little dirty - so what? They're full of life and lots of fun to be around.
On the news front: it looks like we might have found an apartment in a most interesting part of town: üçyol, up on the hillside overlooking the fashionable part of town. There's not much fashionable about this place, but it's charming and it is in a neighbourhood that reminds us a lot of Büyükada - small old shops that sell just about anything you can think of. It's close to the Metro so we can get downtown fast, and it costs about half what a seashore place would. More later.
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