If I don't make this quick the rest of the family will be most annoyed. We're into our week at the Şamlı's summer house by now, and it's delightfully restful. The days go something like this:
5 a.m. - call to prayer from the local mosque. Hmmm - should we get up? It's almost light.... zzzzzz.
7 - Ron gets up. Should I join him? Hmmmmm - zzzzz.
9:30 - Get up & dressed. Sit on the lowest balcony sipping Nescafé (the only form of non-Turkish coffee around), reading and getting ready to face the day.
10:30 - Breakfast starts. Nothing fancy: tomatoes, cheese, olives, fresh bread, a kind of jam-like conserve that you dip bread into, eggs, cold meat, Turkish tea.
Noon - breakfast ends. Discuss what to do for the day (as though there's any question).
1 p.m. - head to the beach. Swim, tan (with SPF 30 lotion), read, drink tea, drink beer, play tavla (backgammon), learn Turkish, swim...
8 p.m. - back home for dinner prepared by the aunties. Nothing special, they say, just the world's best börek or barbecue or something similar. It looks like some sort of eggplant is underway today.
9 - eat
10 - finish eating
10:30 - fall into bed
Next day - repeat.
Not a bad life.
Our apartment in İzmir is all organized and paid for. We'll be back there towards the end of the month after trips to the Black Sea (cool) and Konya (hot). I have some pictures but can't upload them today. Göröşünüz! (see ya!)
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Back to church at last!
We finally made it to church today. Won't confess how long it's been since we were there last. I wanted to check out St. John's here in Izmir. It was a pleasant and worshipful experience.
It didn't look promising at first. The first thing we noticed as we approached the building was the sound of chain saws. The city had chosen Sunday morning to trim the palm trees outside the church (we hadn't realized that palms need so much attention). The power was off because there was a huge lift truck manoevering around electric lines. So we walked into the dark church on a carpet of palms. Here's the view from inside the front door:
The noise continued throughout the service, with no sound system to help. But it was still a good worship experience.
One thing I liked was the use of Turkish in the service. The gospel was read in English and Turkish (I now have a Turkish copy of the New Testament), and the first 1/3 of the sermon was in Turkish. The prayers of the people were in English and Turkish, and there were other bits in both languages, too. There seem to be quite a few Turkish members of the congregation, and many of the English-speaking members seem comfortable in Turkish too.
We were warmly greeted. One of the Turkish men, someone who seems deeply involved with all aspects of the church's life, volunteered to come with us tomorrow to help us sign the lease on our new apartment.
We do indeed have an apartment in an interesting and convenient part of town. It's not down on the seashore as I'd hoped - that one isn't available after all - but up on a hillside in an ancient Jewish part of town. Interesting connection there: some of my ancestors way back in the mists of history were Spanish Jews. The ones I'm descended from went to Holland to escape the Inquisition. Others came here, to Izmir, and settled in the part of town we'll be living in.
I hope we'll have some pictures of the apartment next time. Today I've uploaded a bunch more to our Yahoo photo album.
It didn't look promising at first. The first thing we noticed as we approached the building was the sound of chain saws. The city had chosen Sunday morning to trim the palm trees outside the church (we hadn't realized that palms need so much attention). The power was off because there was a huge lift truck manoevering around electric lines. So we walked into the dark church on a carpet of palms. Here's the view from inside the front door:
The noise continued throughout the service, with no sound system to help. But it was still a good worship experience.
One thing I liked was the use of Turkish in the service. The gospel was read in English and Turkish (I now have a Turkish copy of the New Testament), and the first 1/3 of the sermon was in Turkish. The prayers of the people were in English and Turkish, and there were other bits in both languages, too. There seem to be quite a few Turkish members of the congregation, and many of the English-speaking members seem comfortable in Turkish too.
We were warmly greeted. One of the Turkish men, someone who seems deeply involved with all aspects of the church's life, volunteered to come with us tomorrow to help us sign the lease on our new apartment.
We do indeed have an apartment in an interesting and convenient part of town. It's not down on the seashore as I'd hoped - that one isn't available after all - but up on a hillside in an ancient Jewish part of town. Interesting connection there: some of my ancestors way back in the mists of history were Spanish Jews. The ones I'm descended from went to Holland to escape the Inquisition. Others came here, to Izmir, and settled in the part of town we'll be living in.
I hope we'll have some pictures of the apartment next time. Today I've uploaded a bunch more to our Yahoo photo album.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
A great thing about Turkey
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.
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.
Friday, August 05, 2005
An environmental look at Turkey
I won't claim to be the world's greatest environmentalist. My favourite car was our Honda CR-V, which counts as an SUV (but a very small one, really!). I waste as much as the next person. I drive too much and walk too little. I use more electricity in a day than a third-world village does in a year. I enjoy the occasional shop-till-you-drop experience when I'm feeling blue. But I do know that everything I buy, like my own body, wıll end up in the garbage dump sometime. And garbage ain't pretty.
You'd think after 10,000 years of civilization Turks would be more aware of the environment around them than an uncultured Canadian. But you'd be wrong.
Gas here costs $2.50 a litre. And everyone who can afford it drives a car. They drive fast and they drive loud and they drive dirty, leaving trails of trash behind. Highways here are filthy. So are the streets. So are the lanes. When the wind blows you're likely to be blinded not just by dust but by flying plastic bags. That in spite of the cities' and towns' commendable efforts to clean the streets, which seem to be washed daily.
People spit and blow their noses onto the street. Dogs dressed in embroidered jackets on rhinestone-studded leashes leave their deposits in the middle of the sidewalk. The first sentence I mastered in Turkish, on a rainy morning in Büyükada with its picturesque horse-drawn carriages was "I've got horse shit between my toes". The roads are not pretty. No wonder they're washed often.
Turks smoke. They smoke when they get up in the morning and when they go to bed at night. They smoke before, during and after meals. They smoke inside and they smoke outside. They smoke in hospitals, restaurants, hotels, internet cafes - not airports, though. And when they're done the butts lie where they're left.
The Sea of Marmara around Istanbul is an ocean of plastic - bottles, bags, tampon applicators, and unidentifyable crap. I don't know why the dolphins still swim there. No one else does, except the street kids.
Putting out the garbage is an experience. After thirty years of composting and recycling we're not used to dumping everything into a plastic shopping bag and tying it to the fencepost to be picked up in the morning. We're told that there are people who pick over the garbage at the dump and make a good living from what they find, so we shouldn't worry about throwing away everything. I don't feel good about it.
What archaeologists are rummaging through at places like Troy and Çatal Höyük is the accumulated detritus of the aeons. Without garbage they'd have nothing to study. Maybe that's why Turks are so good at leaving their messes lying around. But I wish they weren't.
Some of the younger generation are beginning to think about what they're doing. Greenpeace has a few members, and there are other organizations beginning to form around specific issues. I wish them luck. I know I'm going to do what I can - pick up garbage when it's not too hazardous, be careful about what we buy, try to find some place to live where we can compost. And ask questions and talk about the issue, of course.
I hope future archaeologists have a hard time tracking down evidence of this civilization.
You'd think after 10,000 years of civilization Turks would be more aware of the environment around them than an uncultured Canadian. But you'd be wrong.
Gas here costs $2.50 a litre. And everyone who can afford it drives a car. They drive fast and they drive loud and they drive dirty, leaving trails of trash behind. Highways here are filthy. So are the streets. So are the lanes. When the wind blows you're likely to be blinded not just by dust but by flying plastic bags. That in spite of the cities' and towns' commendable efforts to clean the streets, which seem to be washed daily.
People spit and blow their noses onto the street. Dogs dressed in embroidered jackets on rhinestone-studded leashes leave their deposits in the middle of the sidewalk. The first sentence I mastered in Turkish, on a rainy morning in Büyükada with its picturesque horse-drawn carriages was "I've got horse shit between my toes". The roads are not pretty. No wonder they're washed often.
Turks smoke. They smoke when they get up in the morning and when they go to bed at night. They smoke before, during and after meals. They smoke inside and they smoke outside. They smoke in hospitals, restaurants, hotels, internet cafes - not airports, though. And when they're done the butts lie where they're left.
The Sea of Marmara around Istanbul is an ocean of plastic - bottles, bags, tampon applicators, and unidentifyable crap. I don't know why the dolphins still swim there. No one else does, except the street kids.
Putting out the garbage is an experience. After thirty years of composting and recycling we're not used to dumping everything into a plastic shopping bag and tying it to the fencepost to be picked up in the morning. We're told that there are people who pick over the garbage at the dump and make a good living from what they find, so we shouldn't worry about throwing away everything. I don't feel good about it.
What archaeologists are rummaging through at places like Troy and Çatal Höyük is the accumulated detritus of the aeons. Without garbage they'd have nothing to study. Maybe that's why Turks are so good at leaving their messes lying around. But I wish they weren't.
Some of the younger generation are beginning to think about what they're doing. Greenpeace has a few members, and there are other organizations beginning to form around specific issues. I wish them luck. I know I'm going to do what I can - pick up garbage when it's not too hazardous, be careful about what we buy, try to find some place to live where we can compost. And ask questions and talk about the issue, of course.
I hope future archaeologists have a hard time tracking down evidence of this civilization.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
İzmir at last!
Here we are, starting our 24th hour in İzmir and liking it very much. It's hot. The word that kept popping into my head yesterday afternoon as we waited for a lift to an apartment we wanted to check out was fırın, Turkish for "oven". Somehow English didn't seem adequate to describe it. Forget about frying eggs on the sidewalk - you could grill a steak! But it's a dry heat, unlike İstanbul. When we unpacked things we'd put into our suitcases just hours ago in İstanbul they felt wet. We had to hang everything up to dry. İzmir's humidity is around 35% and İstanbul's is closer to 80%, which makes the degree or so difference in temperature quite bearable.
This is a lovely city. It's much newer than İstanbul, having been razed by a fire and a marauding army in 1922. The nice thing about that is that its streets don't follow 10,000-year-old cow paths. It still has lots of ancient history to enjoy, having been settled for at least 3,000 years that we know of and probably much longer - a fertile river vally beside the Aegean Sea would not have been left empty for long, I'm sure.
The gut feeling I had that this is the place we need to stay is much stronger now, particularly after seeing the apartment we'd been told about a while ago. It's right on the waterfront, facing the palm-lined boulevard that follows the harbour. It's bright and clean and furnished with lovely older Turkish furniture. It's owned by a recently-married Turkish-American couple slightly older than we are who seem congenial and helpful contacts and probably excellent landlords. Impulsive Leslie would have rented it on the spot, but sensible Ron and Begüm are doing more research. No problem as long as we end up with that place.
No pictures to download yet, but for a look at where the apartment ıs have a look at this. İzmır has ferrıes like İstanbul going between waterfront piers, but they don't seem as frantic. Nothing about this city seems all that frantic, actually. I think we might like it here.
This is a lovely city. It's much newer than İstanbul, having been razed by a fire and a marauding army in 1922. The nice thing about that is that its streets don't follow 10,000-year-old cow paths. It still has lots of ancient history to enjoy, having been settled for at least 3,000 years that we know of and probably much longer - a fertile river vally beside the Aegean Sea would not have been left empty for long, I'm sure.
The gut feeling I had that this is the place we need to stay is much stronger now, particularly after seeing the apartment we'd been told about a while ago. It's right on the waterfront, facing the palm-lined boulevard that follows the harbour. It's bright and clean and furnished with lovely older Turkish furniture. It's owned by a recently-married Turkish-American couple slightly older than we are who seem congenial and helpful contacts and probably excellent landlords. Impulsive Leslie would have rented it on the spot, but sensible Ron and Begüm are doing more research. No problem as long as we end up with that place.
No pictures to download yet, but for a look at where the apartment ıs have a look at this. İzmır has ferrıes like İstanbul going between waterfront piers, but they don't seem as frantic. Nothing about this city seems all that frantic, actually. I think we might like it here.
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Hey, I've just discovered I can upload pictures to this site. Here are some recent ones.
Last week we went to school via Galatasaray, a part of İstanbul that has many book stores and other interesting places. We got out of the taxi right into a bunch of police:
Last week we went to school via Galatasaray, a part of İstanbul that has many book stores and other interesting places. We got out of the taxi right into a bunch of police:
Looks like Ron's in serious trouble! Actually there was a demonstration on the other side of the street - Kurdish rights, I think.
On the way to school we passed through the Taksim Metro station. There's a very handsome mural on the wall there:
The street between Galatasaray and Taksim is a very popular shopping area. It includes one of the world's first shopping malls, Çiçek Pasaj (early 20th century):
Behind the street are some scenic lanes, mostly full of restaurants:
This is what our school looks like:
Nothing very fancy, really. It's behind the local police station in the middle of a parking lot. The parking lot attendant does what he can to improve the atmosphere of the place:
That's a grapevine he's draped over the back of the police station wall.
A week ago our class spent a day on Büyükada, our home
island. We went with them to a monastery built on one of the island hilltops. Aya Yorgyo they call it here: St. George's monastery. It's supposed to be the place where St. George slew the dragon. I think it's actually another of those 'hıgh places' the Hebrew prophets were always carrying on about - probably a place hit by lightening that became known as a place close to the gods. It's very beautiful up there.
This is a view of the other islands, looking west over the Sea of Marmara.
This is a very hilly island, which may be why we're finding our clothes fit better now than they did a month ago. Every day we have to climb a considerable hill to get home. On Monday it seems incredibly steep; by Friday we're wondering what the problem was. This is the view up the hill on a Monday evening. Our house ıs the white one at the end of the path; we have the top right apartment.
Our Yahoo photo album ist at http://ca.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/lesliel8/album?.dir=/1895.
Monday, July 25, 2005
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)
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)
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