villa luna

otuz, XXX

this makes me think of the day i tried to tell an istanbul taxi driver that it wasn't as hot in cappadocia, in the center of the country, as it was in istanbul.

instead of saying it was 36 (celsius, of course), i told him it was 306 degrees. not so hot, i said. he looked at me doubtfully. so i thought it must be my pronunciation and i repeated myself several times over. yeah, it was 306. 306. 306 in cappadocia.

i couldn't understand why he couldn't get it.

yirmidokuz, XX9

i so need me some of these corn flakes... i could do without the attitude though.

1930s: You do all the household chores - and still look fresher every day, darling. What's your secret? A bowl of Kellogg's PEP vitamin cereal for breakfast, naturally.

yirmisekiz, XXVIII

o frabjous day callooh callay! this insanity known as nablopomo is almost over!

walking home tonight, i started to wonder how one would spell crankiosity. crankioucity, crankyosity. it's been a long couple of weeks at work. the other editor (s) and i have been up to our cute little earlobes in work while the people sitting next to us have hit a slow period. yesterday, they were playing scrabble on facebook. we were feeling a bit like the kids standing outside the ice cream shop with our noses pressed solidly to the window as we watched everyone else have fun and eat ice cream.

so today, in a moment of divine clarity, we thought of new roles for ourselves  -

Dear bossperson -

S and I have nominated ourselves for the newly created positions of Scrabble Player 1 and 2. Barring that, we believe we should move on to writing the web articles as we believe our experience has perfectly prepared us to write the crap other people do every day, week after week.

We are highly motivated to spell previously unspelled words, make utterly amazing, unbelievably impressive, stunningly staggering leaps of logic and redundancy and repetition as well as write incoherently and inconsistently about booming mega-hubs. This means we will easily and unwittingly boggle the mind and kill the will to live of any editor brave enough or fool enough to take us on.

We will personally ensure, assure and insure  that every quote is bungled, every fact misstated and every figure thoroughly incorrect - except for those we just make up out of pure thin air.

We promise to write confusing articles that miss the point, are filled with utter nonsense and show our fine ability to be shills for any old company that smiles at us.

Respectfully and giddily yours -

S and I

yirmiyeti, XXVII

once upon a time, not so long ago, i was a peace corps volunteer in romania. today, i got an email from another former volunteer about the daughter (sinziana) of one of our language teachers (roxana).

because roxana was an amazing language instructor and because her daughter is a great kid (who is FLUENT in english), i'm going to post the email about sinziana here as my entry for the day.

if anyone has any brilliant ideas, please post a comment and i'll get your email address from that so we can talk offline. ok? OK!

Dear Friends -

As many of you know Sinziana is going to high school in the States. She was able to visit one of the former volunteers in Austin where she had a fabulous time. But upon returning to Arizona, she fell into a depression. She is staying with a host family and it not working out. This is really bad because her grades have dropped and it is imperative she pass and with decent grades. She has not been invited to eat dinner with the host family in a month. She is being ignored for the most part and there is absolutely no support.

Basically, Sinziana needs to get out of this situation and Roxana has asked me if I can host her...I am currently in a war with my landlord...but will try to work it if I have to. I am even looking into having her stay with someone for the weekdays and come stay with me on weekends...

I am asking all of you to see if you may be able to host her for the next 5 months or know someone who can host her. Roxana said she can pay room and board. (As we know the salary of a teacher in Romania is about 1/4 of the salary here...just to give you an idea of the situation.)

The other thing is that Sinziana can only attend SEVIS-approved schools. I am attaching a link that gives a list and a map of the schools she is allowed to attend

http://www.ice.gov/sevis/map/approvedschoolsmap.htm

 

Let me know if you have any ideas...

Thanks!

ok. that's pretty much it for the public service announcement for the day except - anyone? any ideas? does anyone know a family who can host a great kid for the next five months?

yirmialti, XXVI

turkish is not an easy language for most people to learn. it's easy enough to pronounce but things seem to go in a bass ackwards order and there are so many im, iz, uz, chuk, yuk sounds, it doesn't take long before it all starts to sound the same. at least that's my problem.

and i admit, learning a language that is so far from languages i already know is just a little scary. at least with a romance language, i might have a chance of knowing what i am saying. here, it's really not a lot different than learning hungarian (ok, it's easier) and that went so dreadfully wrong for me, i'm not sure i'm willing to venture far into turkish.

my big adventure in hungarian had me saying, repeatedly, something along the lines of "i'm a small mountain of poo." actually, what i said wasn't that polite. all i was trying to say was something a little more involved and gracious than "thank you" - something like -  "thank you for your hospitality."

so it's understandable i haven't rushed out to one of the many language schools to cram my head full of more confusing language bits and pieces. although, thinking back on it, it might have been a good idea in the summer when i could have at least taken advantage of the air conditioning.

anyway, while i haven't said anything about being a pile of poo, at least not to my knowledge, i often get "i don't know" and "i don't want" and "i don't understand" confused, which is not always so helpful when someone wants to know if i understand what they are trying to tell me. my incorrect response usually elicits a confused look as i smile knowingly because i have understood and more of the same explanation. you'd think by now i'd get it all straight just to avoid being subjected to another strained explanation of something i have already mentally grasped.

i have said "good evening" in place of "good morning" and "i'm beautiful" instead of "i'm fine". however, i was saved by a co-worker who told a story of thinking that the noun and the verb for work were the same. people would ask how he was doing and he thought he was replying, with an appropriate shrug of his shoulders, "working a lot." as it turns out, he was telling cab drivers, waiters, women he met and even his landlord that he was in fact, peeing a lot.

there but for the grace of my own embarrassment go i.

i should note, due to my love of food, i am pretty adept at reading menus and ordering food.

all this was brought on by the simple fact that my cable (tv) is not working tonight and the error message on the screen has a whopping four out of fourteen words i think i know. "news", "please", "this or here" and "service". while it provides a phone number to call, i'm guessing my ability to order chinese chicken and vegetables and a diet coke is not going to impress the person on the other end of the line.

dang! i really should have gone to turkish class this summer! i could have sat in the air conditioning and learned new ways to embarrass myself while trying to learn how to call the cable company or electrician to fix something in my apartment.

yirmibes, XXV

after this past week's festivities with all the eating, drinking, talking and late nights (i almost said cooking but seeing as how i did nothing more than mix up a can of pumpkin goo with a bunch of other stuff and throw it into a pie shell (hand carried to istanbul from a safeway in america) i can't claim to have cooked.), i thought of something else i am thankful for.

food delivery.

i can sit in my pajamas, tap a few keys on my laptop and voila! i'm looking at menus for dozens of restaurants across istanbul. in the comfort of my own house, in my unwashed state, i can order food online and someone will bring it to my apartment door.

the people who created the website - which has service available in five other cities - are geniuses! they must have known about people like me who are too tired, too lazy, too hungover, too whatever, to be bothered with buying groceries and cooking or going to a restaurant.

if only i could get a coffee delivered in the morning...

yirmidort, XXIV

still feeling a bit as if i ate a whole goat by myself on thursday. why do we do this to ourselves?

just to be clear, i did NOT eat a whole goat or any part of a goat.

but if i needed to at some point in the future, i could get my knife (for cutting up a cooked goat) sharpened on the street.

this is just one of the many things i love in istanbul. three times in the past week, i've seen the "knife guy" (there's more than one, of course! i mean, istanbul is bigger than new york city!) with his spinning whetstone set up on a sidewalk. in two cases,  the knife guy pumped a pedal to make the wheel spin while the other guy had an electric spinning whetstone.

in all three cases, i've seen them outside either a butcher shop or a restaurant that served doner. the guy just sets up the wheel on the side of the street and gets to work on whatever knives have been brought to him - sparks flying and grinding noises filling the air.

i watched one guy outside a butcher shop as he worked on one massive, rather wicked looking knife. grind, pedal, pedal, grind... he'd stop to look at his work .... then pedal, grind, pedal, grind.

i guess i'm assuming anyone could bring their knives to this guy. i've never seen people lined up on the street carrying their entire collection of kitchen knives waiting for him to sharpen them. so maybe i'm just imagining i could get my knives sharpened.

ahh... it's istanbul. ANYTHING can be done!

yirmiuc, XXIII

this has to be quick because i fell asleep on the couch and it's 11:37 as i sit down to write!

we had a great day yesterday and ate an obscene amount of food - and yet, there was still an embarassing amount of leftovers. it's all good though - my co-workers were happy to get the uneaten pumpkin pie i made and my roommate even more happy to get the leftovers of that.

but by far the best part - even after all my obsessing about food for the last few days (weeks?) was all the people. holy macaronis! it seemed like every time i turned around, there was someone else to talk to, someone else to meet. i don't know how many people were eventually at this extravaganza of eating but i know i never ran out of people to talk to.

one of the things i love about living here is you just never know who you are going to meet. as i talked to a guy last night, i realized he worked in afghanistan with a peace corps romania friend of mine. just how completely random is that?

there were people who had travelled from san francisco, washington, d.c., new hampshire, denver, kazakhstan, moscow, beirut, iraq, afghanistan, azerbaijan, ukraine and even honduras - that was just the americans (oh. i think one of those was a canadian but that's close enough for thanksgiving!). there was also a turk and, i think, an iranian although i never did get a chance to meet him.

and not to diss any of the fine folks i talked to, two of the most entertaining people were last minute additions to the guest list. on tuesday night, a bunch of the "thanksgiving crowd" went to see a band called acrassicauda (latin for black scorpion) at a nearby club.

this doesn't sound like a good idea, does it? i mean not now as you sit there wondering why you had to go back for that third plate of thanksgiving yumminess (i never do, i just pick bites of turkey and mashed potatoes out of the serving dishes - cause that doesn't count, does it?). you're wondering if people here had lost their collective minds.

as it turns out, acrassicauda are THE heavy metal band from baghdad and apparently, when some of the "thanksgiving guests" were full of alcohol, it suddenly seemed like a good idea to invite them to the thanksgiving festivities.

and two of them did show up - faisal and marwan.

which meant at one point during dinner, someone found their videos on youtube and we got to watch and listen to heavy metal (think metallica or slayer, if that helps) while we ate and talked. of course, perfect dinner music.

but, it actually kind of was because we had real live rock stars sitting at our table!!!

they were so not what many people might expect. they look pretty much like any other 20-something anywhere in the world - wearing jeans and t-shirts and leather bracelets. they have short hair and were unfailingly polite and interesting to talk to - no matter who came their way asking the usual 60 questions about where they are from, how did they learn such excellent english, where are their families, how long have they played as band, how long will they be able to stay in turkey, what's next for them, what did they do in baghdad, how did they get out of baghdad, what did they do in syria.... not that it's not interesting to hear all these answers but by now, one wonders how many times they've been asked the same things.

so, it was a great thanksgiving. the food was amazing - two huge turkeys, a whole ham, candied yams, cranberries, enough gravy and mashed potatoes to sink the mayflower and so many pumpkin and apple pies we could have made serious money at a bake sale fundraiser. the people were way fun, the conversations silly and interesting and illuminatiing and the overall wonderfulness of the day was very very high.

so rock on!

yirmiki (?), XXII

holy cow! 22 straight days of blog posts! for those of us insane enough to have done this, all i can say is -
we need help.

alisoun - a new bloggy friend - tagged me with a modified meme. she was asked to name seven random facts but she modified it for seven things she is thankful for.

since i'm usually the dork in the room who forces people to say what they are thankful for on thanksgiving, i guess i deserve this.

i am thankful  -

1. i woke up this morning without a hangover (lets hear it for those french and italian wines free of weird chemicals that give me a whopping headache!)
2. i don't have to work today
3. i have a job that allows me to live in istanbul
4. for the friends my mom has clearly paid off so i have people to hang out with. she's done a great job!
5. i will be eating tons of great food today with lots of interesting people
6. that to the best of my knowledge, my friends and family are all healthy and relatively happy
7. i didn't have to cook that massive turkey
8. bonus - that alison gave me this idea so i could write earlier in the day and not later - a point anyone reading this should be thankful for as it means i will not be blogging drunk again.

geezz...

happy thanksgiving!

may the eating begin!

yirmibir, XXI

(disclaimer - this is drunk blogging)

slammed through 6 articles today - an all-time record. i don't know what got into me but i managed to fly through articles about kuwait, brunei, bulgaria, ukraine, south africa and.. uh... some other emerging market somewhere.

all those silly articles i read every day and the only thing i can remember is the ruler of dubai is sheikh mohammed (who likes falconry and puzzles) and the population of brunei. helpful stuff, eh?

it's thankgsiving eve in istanbul and i'm already having a blast!

friends of friends are staying in the most amazing rented holiday apartment with an incredible view of the city. it's two floors, with pretty tiles in the bathrooms and the kitchen, gorgeous wood floors and a stunning view of the city. depending on which drunk you believe, you can see 11 or 12 mosques from our balcony plus what we think is a greek church.

seriously, this is the most beautiful city at night. well, a pretty city any time but even more so at night.

we had a great dinner - fried hamsi (little fish that are eaten whole - eww), tons of wine and pasta with homemade sauce and shrimp. mmmm... food... mmmm... wine from italy and france....

and people from so many places. well, americans who are living in so many places - the furthest visitor is from honduras. yes, honduras. he really did come all the way from honduras to istanbul to celebrate thanksgiving. wouldn't you?

as i've mentioned before, there will be lots of food and obviously, lots of people. i don't know when i was last so excited about thanksgiving. this is like being a kid on christmas eve!

and the conversation, as i log out, is what is your porn star name? you take the name of your first pet for your first name and the name of the first street you lived on. i have no idea what the name of the first street i lived on so i just went with the first neighborhood i remember.

so watch out for the debut of 'stupid alewa"! not coming soon to theaters near you!

all i can say now is i think i should get a special award at the end of this month for not only posting every single day (cause i will!) but for blogging through all the thanksgiving WEEK festivities.

surprises are expected for the upcoming events so STAY TUNED!

y

yirmi, XX

it's raining, again.

ondokuz

once again, chocolate chip cookies are a big success. this time in istanbul. first, it was romania where not only were the cookies a raging success, but so were brownies and, quite strangely, carrot cake. brownies have been quite popular here too - but who doesn't love a good double chocolate gooey brownie??? i will still have to try carrot cake out here.

really, that's about all i can think about. food. thinking about thanksgiving and pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes and turkey and HAM! right, ham. sure, ham is not typical thanksgiving fare but in a muslim country with people coming from other, more strict muslim countries, a good chunk of pork apparently seemed not only appropriate but necessary. it might possibly (but not quite) be more so than the turkey. i''m just wondering if i can sneak a bit of ham in my pocket to make a ham and cheese sandwich the next day. hmm....

the things one misses when living in another country.

for me, those things include good cheddar cheese (going to stock up on that tillamook when i get to the states next month), deli sandwiches (made with HAM), sour cream  (yogurt, no matter how good, is most definitely NOT the same thing), good canned soup for when i get a cold, fresh peas, corn and asparagus, maple syrup, trader joes trail mix and mexican food.

that's not to say the food here isn't good. it's great. but there are times when i want what is already familiar.

that being said, i was reminded today, as i brought chocolate chip cookies to the office, of the food things i brought with me.

• chocolate chips
• crisco (for cookies)
• brown sugar
• cheddar cheese
• some spices
• vanilla extract
• brownie mix
• jello (we'll be having jello shots this weekend! what could be more american?)
• tabasco sauce

possibly a strange list but all of it (except the jello) has been used and appreciated - mostly in baking.

and really, none of it is all that strange. certainly no more bizarre than contemplating, as i stood in a market in ljubljana, slovenia, a jar of hellman's mayo i had just found. i HAD to have that mayo but, in the end, couldn't see carrying it in a backpack on trains and planes all the way back to romania. i sadly had to put it down. clearly, i really wanted it because i still remember that jar and the horrible feeling of putting it back on the shelf three or four years ago.

onsekiz, XVIII

right. so i didn't really get kidnapped yesterday. but my day did go off in a completely unexpected direction after the old woman told me i should be covered in the black bedsheet (i'm sure those weren't her words - black bedsheet), i started talking to the turkish guy who had translated a little for me when the woman was leaving.

we people watched, commenting on what we saw going by, talking about turkey and turkish politics, food, people, travel and whatever else popped into our heads.

after a while, i figured it was about time to go, when ali suggested we go have a fresh orange juice. errr... why not? sounds great!

he started walking me down a small street near the spice market i'd only walked part of the way up before. there on the side of the street was an open air sort of street cafe where you could buy doner sandwiches and durum (wraps) and about a dozen or so different kinds of fresh juice combinations they squeezed to order.

orange? greyfurt (grapefruit. i think that is one of the silliest words in turkish.), pomegranate (which ali thought was an equally silly word in english. it's nar in turkish.), apple, banana, pineapple, kiwi... i'm sure there were more. they even had something called grippin they would add if you wanted something to help you ward off a cold (grip). i was overwhelmed by the choices and let ali decide. orange and pomegranate it was. and it was amazing! yum!

the next thing i knew, ali was ready to walk me to "a great place to buy electronic stuff" because i mentioned i needed a new cable for my i-pod. just a few streets from where we were is a small shopping "mall" full of teeny tiny electronics shops selling everything you could think of. there were electric razors and toothbrushes, i-pods and knock-off i-pods, a wide variety of digital cameras and video cameras, new and used cell phones and accessories, all manner of cables, cords and digital media cards, security cameras and even medical devices for testing i don't know what.

not only did they seem to have everything i could think of, it did seem cheaper than anywhere else i'd seen similar things. ali said he rarely saw foreigners there and figured it was because they just didn't know it was there. i have to admit i felt a little like an oddity. but what's new in that?

then we walked from eminonu, across the galata bridge and up the hill past the galata tower. ali walked me up a steep street that was a shortcut to the end of istiklal caddesi (the pedestrian street) but warned me it wasn't a place to walk alone - esp. at night. i thanked him for taking me to a sketchy neighborhood but he assured me i would be ok with him. still, i was ready to whack someone with my new soup pot if i had to.

then suddenly, we were at galata tower and walking up the street where all the shops with musical instruments are. he pointed out the dervish place i knew was in the tunel/galata area but had never found.

back when we were drinking juice, ali told me about one of his favorite places on istiklal that had really great pudding. so of course, we had to go have pudding. we walked into a pudding shop that has been on istiklal since 1930-something and had to walk up to the 3rd or 4th floor before we could find an empty table - it is that popular.

he was right. the pudding (i had chocolate because as any sane person knows, that's really the only flavor of pudding worth eating!) was really really good. watch out bill cosby! we talked about my work (editing), his job (teaching music) and the beetle club he belongs to. that's beetle as in volkswagen beetle. apparently, turkey has some very active beetle clubs. whoda thunk?

we traded phone numbers and then i headed home (because i had to make a blog entry before midnight!) and he went off to play music with some friends.

it wasn't the afternoon i was expecting and that was perfect. it's those days where you get the opportunity to surrender yourself to whatever is happening that are sometimes the best ones. i hope i made a new friend. even if i didn't, i learned some interesting things, found some new places and had a great time overall.

it was a far cry from the black bedsheet lady and her leeches!

(sorry for lack of editing. must to give laptop back to flatmate!)

onyeti, XVII

i went over to the grand bazaar today in search of christmas presents. it's a great place to wander around and people watch and window shop but it does require a certain amount of mental fortification to face the endless salesmen trying all sorts of lines to get you to stop and talk to them so they can get you into their shop to possibly buy something. ("hey lady! you dropped something!" "come see my flying carpets!" "come let me spend your money for you!" "i have everything you need!")

i found a few things (not telling!) and then headed down to the spice market. i walked down a different street than i usually take and found myself in an area with few tourists and got more than a few curious looks. i try not to think of it like i'm some sort of an oddity - like a two-headed freak - and think more like i'm a rock star and they are in awe. otherwise, the whole thing sort of creeps me out.

after some more successful shopping outside the spice market (best place to buy kitchen stuff!), i plopped down on one of the low stone walls to sit and people watch for a bit. the area outside the spice market has a lot of food shops selling everything from fish to fresh cheese to nuts to chocolate. there are all sorts of turks there - mostly from the lower middle class. you'll see everything from village women in their flower print pantaloons and conservative muslim men with beards and small caps to ordinary istanbullus and their families.

a few minutes after i sat down, an older woman in a  - i don't know what it's called. you know the whole black head covering/ body tent (turks call them black sheets)?  - spread out a piece of newspaper she picked up off the ground and sat down next to me.

she pulled a small water bottle out of her shopping bag and i couldn't help notice there were holes poked in the top. i looked a little closer and realized she had a bunch of live leeches wriggling around in there. she noticed i was looking and, as happens all too often to me here, she started talking to me a mile a minute in turkish.

why does that happen? i couldn't look less turkish if i wore a big american flag or a billboard that said, "not from these parts!" but it does.

and the strange thing - i usually get the gist of whatever is being said.

she explained to me the leeches were for putting on cuts on her skin. eww!!!! and she laughed when she accidentally spilled a little of that leech water on my jeans. double eww!

then, slapping my knee after i made a face, she told me i was pretty (which i did understand in turkish) and then told me i should be covered - like her.

at which point, i figured the best thing to do was to pretend like i didn't really understand and laugh like it was funny. well, actually, it is funny. right. me in a black bedsheet. not going to happen. ever.

then she lectured the headscarf women sitting next to me - telling them they shouldn't be smoking. they smiled at her like one would a crazy aunt. sweet, but completely insane.

she slapped my knee a few times, shook her head over the women next to me, told me her friend was coming and once again said i should be covered.

as she got up to go, the turkish man next to me said something to me in english. she asked him if i spoke english and then demanded he translate (in that crazy aunt authoritative way). she wanted to know if i was from america. did i speak english. and then, once more for good measure, said i was pretty but i  really should be covered like her.

with that, i smiled and said goodbye as she turned to walk away. her parting words were for allah to bless me.

at least, that's what my newfound friend, ali, told me.

tomorrow, i'll tell you about how i got "kidnapped" for an afternoon.

onalti, XVI

time and age has theoretically brought me wisdom. between that and just plain exhaustion, i have learned to be a much more patient person than i used to be.

but in some situations… i just go a little mental.

for instance, there is this crazy and, for me, unbelievably annoying habit that turks (disclaimer: this is a generalization, i know that!) have about any kind of transportation.

for some inexplicable reason, they MUST, as if their very lives depended on it, get on the bus/metro/boat/elevator/trolley FIRST. it’s not just that they have to be first, but that they can’t wait for people to get off said transportation.

imagine this, if you will. you’re on your way out of an office building at lunch time. you take the elevator down to the lobby. the doors open and you are facing a crowd of people who all want to get on the elevator RIGHT NOW. not after you get off. not as you are getting off – but while you are still in the elevator.

sure, you think, “well, that’s not so hard, just move quickly.”

there’s nowhere to go. they are all crowding the door, lying in wait, ready to pounce the moment the doors open.

the unsuspecting zebra in the national geographic special about lions has a better chance of survival than a person does of getting off an elevator unmolested in this country.

and today, i lost it. i usually try to remember i am a guest in this country. i try to remember to be culturally sensitive and all that dippy stuff. but today, as the doors opened and people were already in the elevator before any of us could get out and the crowd behind them were standing exactly where my co-workers and i needed to go, i lost it.

i wasn’t the polite foreigner working my way around the crowd. i wasn’t the typical turk just pushing my way blithely through the crowd. i got all american on those people. i pushed and muttered. i growled about how if they would just get the heck out of the way, other people could get out of their way. someone even apologized to me as i shoved way, elbows stuck out from my body, through the horde. rumble. growl. snarl. SNAP!

will it change anything in turkey? no. but it made me feel better for a few minutes and made all of us foreigners laugh.

onbes, XV

i'm tired and grumpy and i'm going to rant today. first, this blogging every day thing, bad bad bad BAD idea. i'm committed to seeing it through to the end but i may need to BE committed when it's all over.

no offense intended but this past week has been a long reminder in how men and women can be so completely different in the workplace. when a woman makes a mistake, they often fall all over themselves apologizing while men, it's more like, "oh yeah, i guess that's wrong." it's hardly ever, "oh, i did that wrong" or "i made a mistake."

blagghhhh! that's just so wrong.

i'm not saying men should also commit emotional hara-kiri (although once in a while, it would be gratifying). it's just that women should maybe, to paraphrase a friend, think more like they had a certain part of the male anatomy.

damn straight!

so if there's anyone reading this, particularly any women, the next time you make a mistake (if that ever happens!), admit it, fix it if you can and move on. that's what i'm going to do.

ondort, XIV

in the lead up to national elections this summer, there was an abundance of turkish flags all over istanbul - far more than the usual.

one of the major issues for many, certainly what got the most coverage in the press, was the balance between turkey being a secular state and a muslim country. the secularists were saying, by displaying flags from balconies, windows, cars and anything else where a flag could be attached, turkey was not and should not be an islamic state.

one day just before the elections, i had an interesting conversation with some recent university graduates. one of them, noting the flags hanging from balconies across the way, said she was angry "her" flag had been appropriated. the rest quickly agreed.

until then, i hadn't really thought about what displaying an american flag said in the united states. while there are so many things about it to be proud of, there are a multitude of things about the us i disagree with these days. still, right or wrong, it's my country and i think my flag has been appropriated by many i disagree with.

i'm just saying, it's my flag too!

onuc (ohn ooch), XIII

quick and dirty because i have too many things to do today.

news reports today said that turkish helicopters fired on abandoned villages in n. iraq last night. both the military commander for the mission and an unnamed pkk (kurdistan workers party) person said the villages had nothing to do with the pkk.

earlier yesterday, iraqi president jalal talabani said any attack by the pkk on turkey was an attack on iraq. i have to wonder how he's feeling about that today.

that being said, this is not exactly a news event as the turkish military has done this in the past. it's just that given the latest tension over the situation, this is somewhat newsworthy.

in other news, eight turkish soldiers who had been captured and subsequently released by the pkk are now being detained by the turkish government for disobeying orders that could have led to a "catastrophe". i have yet to see any explanation for what orders they disobeyed or what catastrophe the government thinks could have occurred.

some people in turkey have accused the soldiers of aiding in pkk propaganda.

obviously, things are never quite as they seem.

oniki, XII

yesterday evening, i needed to borrow a bowl from the carpetdogs' people to make chocolate chip cookies. for some reason, i'd thought to buy a mixer but not a bowl big enough to mix up cookie dough. obviously, my priorities are on gadgets.

the carpetdogs' dad likes to cook so i figured they would have a bowl or two in their kitchen. however, they were out of town for the day so in exchange for a big bowl, i offered to take the two medium (border collie) - sized carpetdogs for a walk.

i generally feel pretty safe in istanbul. i have NEVER felt as safe as i did taking the carpetdogs for a walk. rather than worry about people coming up to me, i had to watch that i didn't scare the bee-jesus out of someone by walking right behind them with the carpetdogs. it was actually kind of fun. people would see me coming down the street, take one look at the carpetdogs whose only real interest was finding a good place to do their thing, and they would cross to the other side of the street. heck! more than safe, i felt kind of powerful!

you see, having dogs and cats as household pets is mostly a fairly new thing in turkey and many people don't have much experience with dogs. meaning, they are afraid. i've seen people shriek, yelp, jump and run the other way when they encountered a dog.

interestingly, while people aren't so keen on dogs, they do treat them pretty well here. along the sidewalk last night were numerous meat bones outside butcher shops - left for the street dogs and cats. unlike in some countries, people don't seem to yell at or in any other way abuse the animals on the street, which means the street dogs aren't as scary and mean as they are in some places.

so, for a little taste of power and having the "masses" scurry before you, take a dog (or two!) for a walk in istanbul.

(here are the carpetdogs - http://carpetblog.typepad.com/carpetblogger/2007/01/carpetdogs_repo.html)

onbir, XI

this was going to be about grocery shopping but i'm having technical difficulties today. the power cord for my laptop is tired and doesn't want to work any more. i will have to find a solution to that right quick. in the meantime, i've only got a few minutes of battery time left.

so i'm just going to share a story i read today about turkey and the pkk.

"ISTANBUL (Reuters) - It is not too late for Turkey's military to carry out a full-scale cross-border operation into northern Iraq, the head of Turkey's armed forces said." (he's referring to the fact that it's not yet winter so the weather is not too cold and there isn't a lot of snow on the ground in the area between turkey and northern iraq.)

and later in the article -

"On Friday the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) said it was open to political dialogue that could lead to the separatist group laying down its arms, a news agency close to the rebels reported." (the turkish government blames the pkk, a kurdish separatist group, for the deaths of about 30,000 people since the mid 1980s.)

for the full article - http://in.news.yahoo.com/071110/137/6n28m.html

last weekend i saw a protest on istiklal where people were carrying signs that said that if prime minister recep tayip erdogan goes, terrorism will go. as best as i could tell, they were advocating action against the pkk and terrorism and saying the pm wasn't being tough enough.

it seems hypocritical of an american to say, "DUDE, very bad idea" but that's what i can't help but think.

as it stands right now, turkish troops have been massing on the border for quite some time. not such a monumental thing, as it happens with regularity just about every year. that's a small fact media keep forgetting to make. this time, they are there, waiting to see if the order will be given to cross over into iraq to find some 3,000 pkk fighters supposedly in the mountain region between the two countries.

turkish officials have demanded the iraqi government turn over the pkk fighters but as iraqi president jalal talabani pointed out, if the turkish military hasn't been able to find or detain the pkk fighters up to this point, it seems a little pointless to look to iraqi officials to find them and hand them over to the turkish government now.

this escalation, with the turkish parliament giving permission to the military to go into iraq to find pkk fighters several weeks ago, seems to swing from imminent to impossible and back again.

one can only hope this swings back towards impossible and the winter will give cooler heads time to find a peaceful solution to a bad situation.

on (ohn), X

so many of the blogs i find are mommyblogs. ain't nothing wrong with that but i don't qualify for that club.

then i thought - but i HAVE a mom. and she sometimes makes me laugh.

mom wrote an email rant about the bigass, don't-care-about-customer-service telecom and cable company in her area. she hates them. they destroyed part of her yard and a bunch of her plants. i suspect she has a long list of other rants about them.

(these are villa luna's edits)

From: (villa luna's mom)
To: (villa luna and her dad)
Sent: Friday, November 9, 2007 1:09:03 AM
Subject: (bigass telecom and cable company)

We are supposed to have (cable company) installed next week, but I'm beginning to have my doubts. Yesterday, I got a form to complete that asks for things like sprinkler systems and invisible fences to be marked on their little diagram. I'm supposed to send it somewhere, but the form does not seem to say WHERE.

I have to call.

This sounds small, but who wants to wade through the interminable phone trees that don't address your question, then get passed from one person to the next? Just to find out where I'm supposed to send that form?

That's exactly what happened when I called (BAD (because mom would never say "crappy" like i would) cable company) to find out where to send the requested information that they seem to think they should get - tomorrow.

I called and kept repeating (for one of those voice activated systems) "I want to speak to an agent" (mom does stuff like that with the exact same tone she uses when someone is walking on very very very thin ice with her - like when she has discovered one of the dogs has peed inside the house). I finally was put on hold to talk to a real person who, when she answered, wanted to know my name, phone number, address and problem but could not help me.

My call got transferred to another person who, surprise, wanted to know my name, phone number, address and problem but could not help me. I eventually talked to 4 people, NOT ONE of whom could help.

Total time on the phone? Over 100 minutes. Shall I send them a bill for my time? Am I confident they will not destroy my garden? Do I want to throw the TV out the window?

Then I looked at the website and discovered I wasn't even going to get BRAVO, Discovery, History or SPEED!!!! The heck with it. The TV writers are on strike, which will soon affect the few programs I like to watch. Besides, pretty soon, TV is going to be all reality shows. Who needs it? I can get the Lehrer Report on public radio. I think I can get a friend to record ER, so maybe I should just get rid of the TV. I guess not - Papa will still watch it. But I don't have to and maybe I won't.

Sorry for the rant. Love, Mom/Me

 

From: (villa luna)
Friday, November 09, 2007 3:30 AM
To: (villa luna's mom)
Subject: Re: (bigass telecom and cable company)

i'm glad you vented and yes, i laughed. (sorry!)

i don't think you should throw the tv out the window. the windows aren't high enough for it to be satisfying and worth the effort. maybe you could take it to a local demolition derby?

i love you.

(vl)

From: (villa luna's mom)
To: (villa luna)
Sent: Friday, November 9, 2007 6:41:11 PM
Subject: RE: (bigass telecom and cable company)

By the way, I have not yet heard back from (massive cable company). The last person promised a call back within 10 hours. It's been 18. I don't think I'll hear anything. Love, Mom

 

 

 

dokuz (doe kooze), IX

mishmash.

a few random things.

1. i have a very good friend who thinks i'm organized because i like lists.


2. just because some women wear headscarves does not mean they are not fashionable or trendy. this morning as i sat drinking my iced latte at starblinks (you know what i'm talking about), i saw a young woman walk by - dressed as a normal teenager and wearing red chuck taylors (converse high tops).


3. i miss so many things being in an office all day. apparently today there were people playing accordions on my street. i'll let you know if i find out what that's all about.


4. something about tr plumbing that i don't understand. sometimes, especially when it's been raining, my bathroom and sometimes my kitchen, smell quite a bit like a sewer. at least what i think a sewer smells like. i don't hang out in sewers so i can only guess. what's the deal?


5. the boy, mentioned in a previous post (i'll figure out how to do links soon enough!), read the post. i only know that because i found super sneaky technology that shows me the origin of where people are logging in. that makes me happy.


6. turkish food, for the most part, is not spicy. red pepper flakes are always on the table like salt and pepper shakers and many meals are served with a grilled hot pepper but the food, on whole, is not spicy. i have more to say about that for a longer post. suffice to say, liking plain yogurt is a bigger help to liking turkish food than anything else.


7. turkey day plans are mostly set and i am excited. if i get the requested two cans of pumpkin goo, i'll be making a couple of pumpkin pies. if not, pumpkin and apple, i guess. lots of apples here.


8. where will the cans of pumpkin goo come from? for that matter, where will the requisite birds for 30+ people come from? i have been told there are a few people coming from the states for this event so they will bring pie stuff and the turkeys are coming from - - maybe from the embassy??? i dunno. it'll be interesting to hear how they get here.


9. a friend is having a margarita party on saturday - providing we can find fresh limes. those should not be confused with the green lemons that can easily be found here.

and that's friday's post. while naBLOpomo is a fun idea, it taxes the mind to think of something to write every single day!

sekiz (sec-ease), VIII

i'm sorry. i'm tired. today's entry is an email to my mom.

slowly but surely i'm learning all sorts of interesting "techy" things about blogging. like last night i figured out how to put a link on my blog so people could subscribe. (fiddling with this blog is what i've been doing in lieu of actually sleeping since nablopomo started and i was suddenly seized by this new obsession.)

you can too!

it's a link on the left column that says something about subscribing.

just click on it and it will take you to a subscriber page. you don't have to enter anything, just click "yes" to subscribe.

then, the icon with villa luna will show up under your search window (that place where you type in stuff the www.whatevers).

whenever you click on it, you can see all the most recent posts and if you see something you haven't read, you can click on it and you go right to that blog post.

and since you probably didn't know that and because I HAVE TWO SUBSCRIBERS, that means someone other than my mom is reading me. isn't that cool? well, it's cool to me. the more i learn, the more luddite i think i've been. that's just sad.

so far, i haven't figured out if i can see who subscribed. if i can, i feel like i should offer them a prize. like a consolation prize or something.

yeti, VII

i had a dream the other night. about what is not particularly important other than to say the person in the dream was someone i haven't seen in probably 10 years. for some unknown reason, he just shows up in my dreams every so often, unannounced and unexpected. before someone goes all psychologist on me, i don't have any unresolved issues with this person. there is no unrequited love. he just is.

it made me think about meeting him when we were in high school in ...errr... right. i am so not going there. suffice to say it was the era of big hair, shoulder pads and leggings. at least i think so. it was so long ago, how can i be expected to remember such horrors?

we went to different schools but i knew some of his friends so i'd heard about him and recognized him the minute i saw him at a party. our first conversation took place in a laundry room with him sitting on a washer and the two of us watching a friend of his eat dog biscuits. yeah... those were the good old days.

our first 'date' a week or two later was actually a group outing to disneyland. my friends and i had already made plans to go so the day after i met this boy, i asked one our friends to invite him. nope. no go. our mutual friend told me if i wanted to ask this guy along, i was going to have to call him myself.

aarrggghh! but i did and he said yes. looking back, i couldn't tell you who was more amazed.

most of my memories of that day have been replaced by all sorts of useless junk but i remember that towards the end of the day, we all rode on the matterhorn roller coaster. this boy and i sat together and when the bobsled came to an unscheduled stop in the middle of the ride, it seemed like a perfect time for a kiss.

i don't remember much about the actual kiss. what i remember so vividly, even today, is how i felt afterwards. there weren't just butterflies flitting about in my stomach - they were doing a full on conga line in there. they were whooping it up, swinging from the light fixtures and basically losing their minds like a bunch of 3-year-olds on a cotton candy high.

do you remember that? remember how that felt? sure, it can still happen as we get older but not like those first times when we were with someone we really, really liked and it was all so new.

so cheers to all 'firsts' when the world is insanely vivid and all you can think to say is, "wow."

and here's to the boy. thanks for continuing to show up in my dreams. i learned so many things from you that you may never know about. i'm happy to have this memory of you.

alti (altuh), VI

still haven't decided if this is cheating but i'm posting before and just after midnight to get two days of posting out of the way.

marathon man is a short story.

the istanbul marathon was on october 28 and i wound up watching from a new starbucks near the end of the course. i saw people run, walk and in quite a few cases, roll by in special wheelchairs. along with the marathon was a 15-km "fun run". (doesn't sound fun to me!)

as i was getting ready to head for the ferry to take me to the asian side to pick up a few things at ikea (yes, the big blue and yellow store), i saw a man who looked to be about 70 or so walking along the course, moving slowly with his cane and stopping every so often to catch his breath. i noticed he was wearing a fun run number on his jacket - just like the other runners.

he looked tired but oh-so-determined and he was so close to the end of the course.

i got a cup of water from the starbucks and i went out and offered him the water. he seemed a little surprised but he accepted it and said, "thank you" in turkish. i smiled and clapped for him and said, "bravo."

he smiled back at me and said thank you again in turkish and then, looking a little confused, said a very hesitant, "thank you" in english.

i'm really not sure who made whose day that morning. i know i'm smiling now as i think about him making an effort to communicate in my language and the look of determination on his face as he kept going between sips of water.

bes (say bechamel and drop the 'amel'), V

it's only day V of nablopomo and i'm wondering if any other lunatics who signed up for this exercise in abuse have noticed yet - the second word is BLO. as in "national (this) BLO(W)s posting month".

enough grumbling.

one of the things i'm still trying to get my head around (so to speak) in turkey is headscarves. seems like such an innocuous thing, doesn't it?

turkey is a secular muslim country much like the us is a secular christian country based on an understanding of the world from a mainly christian perspective. one could argue whether that's good or bad but it doesn't change the fact that that is what it is.

mustafa kemal ataturk, the father of turkey, is known for leading the turks at the end of the first world war in a war for independence and founding the modern turkish republic in 1923.

he also led the new country into the 20th century, trying to establish a modern, and very importantly, secular state. i've read he thought religion dragged the country and the people backwards.

among the many things he addressed was that all children, boys and girls, should have a basic education. he expected women to participate in society and to have the right to work and vote and be elected to office. he also outlawed the fez (not a turkish creation) but stopped short of requiring women to stop wearing headscarves. apparently, he thought they would stop doing that on their own.

to a great extent, at least in urban areas, he was right.

in 1998, the government banned women from wearing headscarves in public institutions. today, women are not permitted to wear a headscarf in any government buildings. that includes schools, universities and parliament. that means that an observant muslim woman who might want to go to university can not attend a public one if she covers her head. that means the prime minister's wife, who chooses to wear a headscarf, can not go to state functions.

while trying to understand this issue, i met an interesting woman last year at georgetown university. merve kavakci was elected to the turkish parliament to represent a central istanbul district. she was booed when she showed up in parliament wearing a headscarf. she wore it when she campaigned and was elected and she expected to serve her constituents while still wearing it. she was not allowed to be sworn in as a member of parliament. she eventually wound up teaching in d.c. she is not married. she does not live with her parents. there is no one forcing her to wear a headscarf yet that is exactly what she does - even now where it is not a part of the culture she lives in.

i think it might be stories like that, and of other women who have been denied a chance to get a higher education or to take a certain job, that partially accounts why there are more and more young women wearing headscarves, something they might not have done just a few years ago. it seems like a way to identify themselves, to be seen and counted with pride, to stand up to the powers that be and say they can't be ignored.

all those things say something to me about the desire and the belief that the turkish women who wear them have about wearing a headscarf. they choose to do it because of their own beliefs, not because it is something they are forced to do.

coming from a western country, this has been difficult for me to understand. women wearing headscarves in turkey are not being subjugated by the men in their world. they are making a costly choice. one that will get them excluded from important parts of public life, including education.

the part of this situation that is hardest for me to comprehend is that wearing a headscarf has become a strong political statement. there are many turks who worry that turkey could a muslim state. ataturk's determination to have a secular state is a belief that is held to by many as faithfully as the women who are wearing their headscarves are holding on to their beliefs.

it's a tough dilemma. how does a government uphold a secular state and ensure the rights and privileges of everyone who is a part of that country?

dort (rhymes with yurt), IV

when i was a kid, there were times when i was accused of being "drifty". it could have been said that if my head weren't attached, i would have misplaced it.

this past week has been a return (hopefully temporary) to that same driftiness. my brain is elsewhere, although where, i couldn't possibly say. (as a side note, i am suddenly reminded of one summer break when i was in elementary school when i announced my brain had gone on vacation. it wasn't entirely clear where it had gone - definitely overseas, possibly somewhere in africa - but it's exact location was a mystery - even to me. shades of things to come, no doubt.)

i mentioned a couple of days ago that i lost a pair of jeans in my flat, which is almost catastrophic since i LIVE in my jeans. more to the point, HOW could i lose a pair of jeans??? i hadn't been on any trips recently (confirmed by looking at my passport) and i'm pretty certain i would notice if i came home from work or an evening out without them.

i looked everywhere - closet, laundry, washing machine, under my bed (where i have a healthy herd of dust bunnies that seem to be multiplying like... well, rabbits.), even the kitchen and balcony. this bugged me for days.

until one day i looked at the 2 pairs of jeans folded and stacked on a shelf in my closet. i pulled them out and sure enough, one was the "missing" pair.

don't ask me because i can't explain it; i really can't.

then friday night, i decided to go out in the stairwell of my apartment block to find this mysterious electricity fuse switch. as soon as i turned and shut the door behind me, i realized, "ah noooooo... MY KEYS!" the door automatically locks when shut.

good holy moly! i haven't locked myself out of anything since 1990 or 1991 when i locked my keys in my car - three times in the space of one week.

while the roommate was home, he didn't hear my knocking, kicking and banging on the front door.

what to do?

i wound up going upstairs to the landlord's where the family invited me in, laughed at my day (this was the same day i spent the morning at the electric company) and landlady mom kept bringing me food - cay (tea), pears, grapes and little biscuits. after a nice little visit, they called the flat phone repeatedly while i went and banged on my door for a while until roommate finally heard me and let me in - looking very confused - why was i knocking on our door?

saturday morning i was getting ready to go out when i realized i had no idea where my purse was. none. not the vaguest idea. my stomach turns to think i may have lost all that stuff - and a not inconsiderable amount of money as i was about to pay my rent. i've either lost it, left it at work, it got stolen at the grocery store or it's hiding wherever my jeans went for two weeks (possibly the same place my brain went on holiday all those years ago).

let's just hope it was just part of a bad case of drifty and it's sitting in my desk drawer, twiddling it's imaginary thumbs, waiting for me to come rescue it.

i'm thinking tomorrow i should go out with a tag that has my name and my address on it. just in case.

uc (sounds like ooch), III

, i'm wondering if it's cheating to do one blog entry a little bit before midnight and another one a few minutes after.

ah... who cares?

just as i decided last night to go bunkie and read for a while, the electricity went out. but wait, the people in the other building have lights. and a look onto the landing in our block confirmed my building had electricity.

so why not chez luna?

didn't i just pay the past three months of electric bills? (at the bank - but that's another post.) the electric company didn't just shut off my power at midnight, did it?

errr... at that point, i figured it was too dark to mess around with the fuse switches - even if i used my cell phone screen as a little flashlight. so i just crawled into bed to deal with it in the morning.

unfortunately, my hope that if i just ignored the problem, it would resolve itself, didn't pan out. still no lights at 7:30 this morning. (at which point, i briefly considered i might "need to save the icecream" and eat it before it completely melted.) fortunately, my neighbor, mother of the carpetdogs, gets up early so i called her for directions to the electric company.

which, as it turns out, is not too far from the metro station at taksim. and when i finally got there, turned out to be a building i'd been past at least a few dozen times.

at the first counter, the woman was happy to take my money but couldn't seem to get across to me what i had to do when i said, "electrik yok" (there's no electricity). fortunately, a german standing in the next line translated that i needed to go upstairs where i found a guy sitting at his counter, smoking. uh-oh. not a promising sign. but he seemed ready and willing to help me right away.

unfortunately, while he understood my "electrik yok," he couldn't explain to me there wasn't a problem. instead, he walked me up and down the stairs from one office to another, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.

finally, he deposited me with someone who has about as much english as i have turkish except he couldn't explain why i was left sitting in the dark last night. finally, i was taken to a basement office where a man sat at a desk with piles and piles - absolute heaps! - of old electric meters all around him. we called my landlady (not the crazy one mentioned the day b4 yestrday) and he explained to her they would have someone from the electric company at my apartment to fix the problem right away. ("i'm sorry. i don't think i understood that. could you repeat - RIGHT AWAY?? did you say 'RIGHT AWAY'? like today??" clearly, i'd fallen into that alternate universe where everything is the exact opposite of this one.)

however, it turns out the landlady was able to go to a panel by the front door to the building and flip a fuse switch. (one i obviously didn't know existed.) we were back in business instantaneously.

but the best part was the guy in the meter room. as i said my thank yous and tried not to swoon with thankfulness and amazement at the unbelievable service i'd been given, he told me that if i got home and the electricity wasn't working, i could call him and he would send someone RIGHT AWAY to fix it.

please, do me a favor? don't tell anyone that the folks at the electric company at taksim are so amazing! i want to keep them all for myself! maybe i can clone them and send the copies to replace those cranky folks at the electric company office in bucharest on calea mosilor. (the ones who scared me so much i would beg my friends to pay the bills for me at the office across the street from my flat (which theoretically should have made bill paying about as easy as putting a check in the mail).)

well i'll be double-dog-danged! what appeared was going to be a monumental headache turned out to be a lesson in the bounty of turkish helpfulness.

iki (icky for you gringos), II

i know this ain't much back in the land of tivo but it just makes me giggle every time i use it here. with cable (so cleverly named 'digiturk'), you can use the remote control to click on a listing of all the programs on all the channels - complete with a program description.

but that's not the point. what i love is that if there is a program coming up, you can click on it and then watch something on another channel. when the program you picked is on, a little screen comes up and asks if you want to change channels. evet and you're on your way to another episode of nip/tuck or the tudors or mad men. choosing hayir lets you keep watching whatever crap you got engrossed in while waiting for the other program to start.

good thing i know the difference between yes and no in turkish. i don't even have to think of my little trick to keep them straight in my head any more. for the longest time, whenever i was asked a yes or no question, i would have to think..... hayir (which oh-so-conveniently sounds like higher) means... no. as in "no, i don't want to go higher." so evet is yes. . . .

what was the question again?

bir (just like beer), I

things i think i want to talk about -

1. my new afghan carpets
2. jeans i lost in my 2-bedroom apartment
3. the marathon man
4. how some things have not changed in turkey since 1969
5. the crazy former landlady (and her sidekick, the insane flatmate)
6. how number 5 has led to lunatic behavior
7. insulting turkishness (yes, really, you can go to prison for insulting “turkishness”)
8. door/line etiquette – or how I’ve learned to shove with the best
9. kedi sokak (cat street)