Türkleşiyorum ya...

We yabancılar get plenty of comedic mileage about what we see as the superstitiousness of Turks, especially when it comes to weather, health, and children -- from the waiter who solemnly warned my friend that she shouldn't let anyone other than herself or her husband kiss their baby on his face lest he develop allergies to the otherwise intelligent-seeming woman who was convinced that walking around barefoot while pregnant will result in a gassy child. And of course there are the old favorites about air conditioners giving you colds and sitting on bare ground freezing your ovaries.

But when I recently rearranged my furniture and then woke up the next morning with a stuffy nose and a scratchy throat, what did I blame it on? Having moved my bed so it was under one of my leaky windows. Now that's assimilation in action.

A discussion a few months ago about these types of beliefs led, as so many discussions often do, to some Googling, which revealed that there is indeed a scientific link, if not a full underpinning, to such ideas. While exposure to cold cannot technically give you a cold, British researchers showed that it can cause someone with a latent infection to develop symptoms:

When colds are circulating in the community many people are mildly infected but show no symptoms. If they become chilled this causes a pronounced constriction of the blood vessels in the nose and shuts off the warm blood that supplies the white cells that fight infection. The reduced defences in the nose allow the virus to get stronger and common cold symptoms develop. Although the chilled subject believes they have 'caught a cold' what has in fact happened is that the dormant infection has taken hold.

Now perhaps I am indeed becoming too Turkish, but this distinction pretty much seems like a semantic one to me. If I "have" a cold, but am not sniffling, sneezing, coughing, or any of the rest, well, for all intents and purposes, I don't actually have a cold, now do I? And if avoiding catching a chill keeps from developing those symptoms, well, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do. I'm not moving my bed back, though. One has to draw the line somewhere.

Kış geldi...

I must admit that living in a half-assedly developed country seems like a lot better idea when it's not -4 degrees Celsius (25 F): when the beautiful view from the windows of the lovely old apartment with no heating system is not obscured by snow and of much less importance than the wind blowing through the cracks in said windows; when the periodic black-outs that were such a laugh when you could weather them drinking wine on the porch don't mean waking up in a cold room to no space heaters and no hot showers; when the charmingly cobbled, rutted, and uneven streets are not slick with ice; and when two guys in a pickup truck don't throw dirt at you with big shovels as they drive past. On the plus side, there's... uh... there's... sahlep?

Bunny Sunday

Although I like to refer to my workplace as "the copy factory," many of my desk mates prefer the moniker "copy jungle," in reference, I assume, to the thick tangles of copy we have to cut through each day. Today, for the first time, the copy jungle was inhabited by an actual animal -- the bunny rabbit that one of the page designers apparently decided to bring into the office for the day.

Aside from providing an adorable distraction from the drudgery of a Sunday at work, our fuzzy visitor also prompted the revelation from one of my fellow yabancı co-workers that she had no idea what the city's fortune-telling rabbits were all about: "I thought people here had never seen a rabbit, so they were paying to pet them!"

Multilingual malapropisms

Honestly, I try really, really hard not to giggle at the Turklishisms -- humorous manglings of English written by Turks -- that I encounter on a daily, nay, hourly, basis working as a copy editor. At least, not outside the confines of the copy desk. I know I couldn't write half as well in Turkish as our reporters do in English and I have, in fact, been laughed at for my attempts to do so.* But some things just tickle my funny bone to an impossible degree. Yesterday, for example, a short news article about a Turkish ship fending off Somali pirates contained both of the following malapropisms:

"According to a statement in the official website of Turkish General Stuff..."

That would be, of course, the Turkish General Staff, which oversees the country's armed forces. But, you know, a website of Turkish general stuff would be awfully helpful as well.

"A machine equipped with global poisoning system was seized in the boat as well."

Those crafty, malevolent pirates! You can't put anything past them. Not even Poisoning The Entire Globe. Just wait until Hollywood gets its hands on that story.

* As I said, I've been on both sides of this joke. Early on in my stay here, I needed to request permission for an interview and photo shoot at a museum and was turned away with the official letter I brought from the magazine I was freelancing for in the States because it was written in English. I went home, painstakingly translated the letter as best as I was able, and brought it to the museum, where I presented it to the director (who spoke no English) and his assistant (who was helping us communicate). They looked it over, and then chatted briefly in Turkish. I didn't get it all, of course, but I did understand: "Where did this letter come from? Ankara? It's kind of funny..."

At that point, I had to interject. "I translated it," I said in Turkish. "Oh! Well, that's alright then," they responded, charitable as always to those crazy foreigners.

Mutlu Noel!

By this time of the year back home, I'd have long been good and sick of Christmas carols and Santa Clauses and all the other holiday trappings I'd have been smothered with since Halloween. But when you haven't heard "Feliz Navidad" for a whole year -- and can feel pretty confident that you won't hear it again for another annum -- it actually sounds awfully nice. It sounds like home.

Walking into my friends' house for a holiday party last night, I was surprised at how giddy I felt to see one of them hanging red ribbons and ornaments from a chandelier, to smell the glögg warming on the stove, to hear some cheesy Christmas classics freshly downloaded from iTunes, and, best of all, to be able to unfold the "branches" of the tree into a proper-ish shape. (Not much in the way of real trees here, but this one even shed some of its fake "needles"!)

Besides getting to experience holiday spirit not diluted by overuse, spending the Christmas season abroad also allows you to enjoy everyone else's traditions too: Eating turkey curry (a U.K. fave) and then some Danish Æbleskiver with jam and sugar, watching the movie Germans apparently watch at holiday time each year in place of "It's a Wonderful Life," and whipping up an ensalada de Nochebuena to represent California by way of Mexico since my family's traditional pot roast would be a bit hard to contribute without an oven. All that was missing was the tamales.

The most wonderful time of the year

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that we were trying to be too clever by at least half. With the time to renew our press accreditation and residence permits fast approaching, another journalist friend and I decided to get a jump on the process by making appointments using the handy-dandy "e-randevu" (online reservation) system recently installed by the İstanbul Emniyet Yabancı Şubesi (Police Headquarters Foreigner Office). We weren't sure when our first set of paperwork from the press office would be ready, but it wouldn't hurt to make an appointment, right? After all, right below the "new appointment" button, there was a "find/cancel appointment" button. What could possibly go wrong?

The square stone wheels of Turkish bureaucracy turn slowly, of course, so we found ourselves needing to reschedule our appointments for a later date. I logged on confidently and clicked the "find/cancel appointment" button. The system found my appointment, all right. But when I went to cancel it, this message popped up:

To cancel your appointment, you must recourse to the police headquarters.

The verb used for "recourse" in the Turkish version was müracaat etmek, to appeal to. I pictured a crowd of foreigners on their knees at the Emniyet, begging to be allowed to change their appointments as a tea-sipping functionary steadfastly ignored them. But an appeal could also be made by telephone, couldn't it? No dice. I called up and was informed that though my desired operation could not be handled over the phone, if I came into the Emniyet, they would be happy to cancel my appointment. (OK, maybe, I added in the "happy to" part.)

So, basically, the Emniyet instituting an online reservation system is the equivalent of a bank setting up an ATM where you can make a request for a withdrawal at the machine, but have to turn up at the branch to collect your cash. Hm. I'd better not give Yapi Kredi and Garanti any ideas.

Spor salonunda (At the gym)

After nearly two years, many things remain mysterious to me about life in Turkey, but the one that's been perplexing me recently is how the heck it's possible to get undressed, shower, dry off, then change clothes, all while remaining completely covered.

With all the attention that's been given over the years to the "exotic" Turkish hamam, Westerners might be forgiven for assuming that Turks, once in the safety of a single-gender environment, spend their time lolling around in the nude, languidly washing each other's hair, free of body issues and social stigma.

Au contraire. Women at my recently joined gym seem to magically be able to change from street clothes to workout clothes and back without showing an inch of skin. Nor do they ever allow their towel to separate from their body while drying off after a shower -- a shower that they walked into wearing their bra and underwear, at the very least. (My spies in the men's locker room tell me it's essentially the same story there.) Of course, that's not the only way in which gym behavior varies greatly from what I'm used to in the U.S.

"Working out" is apparently a relatively new concept in Turkey and it's clear that even gym-goers are still figuring out what it means. A pair of girls will come to swim in the lap pool and each paddle along with one arm, keeping their heads entirely out of the water, chatting as they slowly make their way down the lane. Ninety percent of people on the treadmills will spend their entire session walking at a moderate pace, while the occasional young jock will hop on, run full-tilt for five minutes, and then hop back off again.

When I first joined up, I asked the woman working in the fitness center if she could help me figure out the automatic programs on the treadmill -- the English-language text said they were available, but there was no instruction for how to set them up. She came over, looked perplexed, we each pushed some buttons here and some buttons there, and eventually kinda sorta figured it out. When she asked if it was working OK, I said yes, and she responded,

"You know, you're the first person to ever ask about this!"

Istanbul in an Urban Age

For someone who loves cities like I do, it was nothing short of fascinating to spend two days listening to the big thinkers – architects, planners, academics, and activists from around the world – that Urban Age brought to Istanbul this past week for the ninth in its series of globe-trotting conferences on the future of the planet's mega-cities. (The stunning, Bosphorus-side setting at the Esma Sultan Yalısı, a thoroughly modern interior re-imagining of a gorgeous wreck of an old mansion into an airy event center, didn't hurt – nor did the decadent amount of tasty food served.)

The event also marked my writing debut for the local English-language newspaper the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review, for which I filed two stories, an overview of the conference ("The future of cities in an Urban Age") and a look at some imaginative architects' ideas for re-envisioning parts of our often chaotic and under-planned city ("New design visions for Istanbul neighborhoods").

Istanbul by the numbers

People who haven't been here often ask me to compare Istanbul to other cities; having been to sadly few of the world's largest ones, the best I can usually muster is a "Uh, it's kind of like New York, except I think even bigger?" But now, armed with some data from a conference I recently attended on the future of cities, I can confidently say that:

• Istanbul has more people than London, New York City, or Mexico City, and quite a bit fewer than Shanghai.*


• It is growing faster than Mumbai or São Paulo, going from around 1 million people in 1950 to some 14 to 15 million today. (The image at right shows the dramatic growth in the city's developed area between 1950 and 2000.)


• In its central area (where I live), Istanbul is denser than New York and more than twice as dense as London.


• It is more polluted than Mexico City, and not far behind Mumbai.


• Its residents are very worried about crime, even though the murder rate is less than half of that in New York.


• Its quality of life (according to the U.N.'s Human Development Index) is considered higher than that in Johannesburg, but lower than that in São Paulo or Shanghai.

Of course, numbers don't say anything about which city's views are the best, or whose street vendors are the loudest, or any of the other things that make urban life interesting. For that, you've just got to see for yourself.

* We're talking city proper here, not metropolitan area.

Cadılar bayramınız kutlu olsun!

There's nothing quite like wandering home covered in glow-in-the-dark stars, bedecked in wig and beauty-queen sash, or toting eight plastic baby dolls* -- and knowing that 99.9 percent of the people you pass on the street have absolutely no idea what that crazy foreigner is up to now.

Like McDonalds and Starbucks, though, Halloween is (yavaş, yavaş) beginning to franchise itself around the world. We have a friendly neighborhood kostumcu (costume seller) on İstiklal Caddesi, and the vendors in the Balık Pazarı scatter some scary masks among their evil-eye beads this time of year. Employees of a Turkish firm even showed up at this year's party in elaborate outfits -- apparently as a colleague bonding exercise -- and the local zombies doing the synchronized "Thriller" dance were second to none.

As a Turkish friend recently said, "Why do foreigners get to have all the fun holidays like egg painting and Christmas tree decorating... and we get to slaughter sheep?"

Still, celebrating American holidays abroad never fails to remind you that you are indeed far from home, as the things needed to celebrate properly are generally hard to find and/or expensive. But we make do.

The forward-thinking pick up costume accessories on visits to Amerikastan, while the crafty among the group invite the rest of us over to paper-mache mummy and Frankenstein heads and cut bats out of poster board. And who really liked all that candy corn anyway?

* Yes, a friend dressed up this year as the Octomom. Turks didn't get that joke.