Balık uzmanı

While walking over the Galata Bridge this afternoon, I noticed a guy wearing a "fish specialist" jacket. (I would have taken a picture, but I was too busy eating a portakallı kek.) I wonder, is this the kind of thing Turkish housewives buy from mail-order catalogs for their husbands? Kind of the Turkish equivalent of a "Hooked on Fishing" T-shirt? In any event, I bet Mr. Uzman doesn't catch much.

Order vs. chaos

Way back in 2001, I saw my first movie at a Turkish theater--some forgettable war flick with Jude Law. Three things surprised me about the experience: 1) The smoke break intermission halfway through, for which the film was stopped mid-scene. 2) The sloppy squat toilet and all the chic young Turkish women who didn't seem to know how to use it correctly either. 3) The assigned seating.

When I go to movies in Istanbul now, what surprises me is that people actually sit in their assigned seat. The idea of a queue often seems like a foreign concept here--sure, people take a number at the bank or utility office, but then they usually butt in front at the window anyway. But everyone searches dutifully for their sıra and koltuk numbers at the cinema, to point where at a Friday afternoon matinee, with 80 percent of the seats empty, a woman came and sat down right next to me. Why the ticket sellers sold two seats right next to each other for such a scantly attended screening is another question altogether.

Instructional paket

Wow.

This "lavaş" stuff is amazing.

It can be used to make so many different things!

. . .

That all look exactly the same.

Green amid the grime

Though it would be premature to call Istanbul an "eco-city," there are plenty of green discoveries waiting to be made amidst the urban sprawl. I sought out organic markets with friendly farmers, vegetarian restaurants, public-transportation options, parks, running groups, and eco-friendly souvenirs for a PlanetGreen.com "Green City Guide" to my adopted home.

UPDATE: This article is no longer available online. Download my "Green City Guide: Istanbul" as a pdf.

Güven

In San Francisco, there was always a lot of hullabaloo about fare skippers sneaking onto the bus or hopping over the subway turnstile in order to ride without paying. On the bus tonight in Istanbul, I watched two young men board through the back door. The bus was fairly crowded, so it's highly doubtful that the driver could have seen them, but they dutifully handed one bus pass and a small stack of change to the woman standing next to me, who then gave it to the person next to her, and on and on all the way to the front of the bus and then (in the case of the pass) back again. This is a totally normal occurrence. So is having a shopkeeper run off with your money--only to return five minutes later after going to all the other neighborhood stores before finding someone who could give him the proper change. I'm sure there will come a day when this sort of casual trust seems as strange in Turkey as it would in America. I would just hate to be around to watch it erode.

Misery reverses migration

Will the Lou Dobbses and Tom Tancredos have the cojones to herald the financial crisis for doing what neither their demagoguery, nor stricter border controls, nor often brutal working conditions and plenty of out-and-out racism could not -- getting illegal immigrants to stay out of the United States, or head back home?

We've seen a similar pattern here in Turkey, where the culture clash has often been a result of internal migration, as rural Turks moved to the cities in large numbers and brought village ways with them. Like their counterparts in the U.S. and China, they too are getting fed up with the places they once saw as full of opportunity and are looking homeward. The Istanbul municipal seems only too happy to pay their bus fare.

Her zaman bekleriz

"Still waiting," by mission75, on Flickr. Edirne's abandoned Great Synagogue on Maarif Caddesi. My 1999 Lonely Planet guide says it was "scheduled for restoration" at that time.

Relations have not exactly been warm and fuzzy between Turks and Jews lately, so I was a little surprised to read that restoration work on the Great Synagogue in Edirne will purportedly begin next month.

Built in 1907, the synagogue partially collapsed in 1997 and is today an evocatively empty shell, practically begging for use as a symbol of the disintegration of religious diversity in Turkey. It looks like it was once a lovely building, and it would be nice to see it functioning again--as two nearby churches reportedly are--but since this restoration has been "scheduled" for over a decade, I don't think anyone should be cracking open a celebratory He'Brew just yet.

En sonunda, resmiyim!

Sometimes fortune favors the slackers. I spent a good part of last year kicking myself for not getting my act together sooner to apply for official accreditation as a foreign journalist, the cheapest route to a Turkish residence permit. As I finally navigated my way through the piles of paperwork involved in this process, I steeled myself for the purportedly horrific trip to the emniyet, or police department, the deepest darkest heart of Turkish bureaucracy. But, maşallah, said steeling was not necessary. When the time at last came, I had heard from no fewer than four other yabancıs, that as of this year, the eminyet was new and improved, now with actual lines, and numbers, and 100 percent less shoving. Every word of it proved true. I was almost disappointed. Almost.

"Hepimiz Filistinliyiz"

Call me crazy (or, more to the point, boring), but I tend not to want to spout off my opinion when I don't have a good grip on the topic at hand. Maalesef, though I try to keep up with the news, the apparently intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict falls into that category for me. But it seems worth noting that watching things unfold from Turkey is like being on the other side of the looking glass.

As much as American politicians seem sworn to support Israel no matter what its government does or says, Turkish ones have put themselves wholeheartedly on the side of Palestine. Large billboards all around the city, some featuring the prime minister's wife, others bearing hard-hitting religious messages like "You are not the children of Moses" or "This is not in your book," denounce Israel's war and call upon Muslims to support their brothers and sisters in Gaza. Every other shop seems to have a photocopied "We are all Palestinian" flyer in its window, and Palestinian flags join Turkish ones overhead.

Recently, new flyers have appeared calling on people to boycott "Israel products"--like McDonalds, the Gap, CNN, Nokia, and Nescafe. It's hard to say whether the people who came up with this list see no difference between Israel and its American and European supporters, or whether they think their target audience won't know or care.

Overheard in SF

A girl crossing Mission Street, talking on her cell phone:

"I think I needed to have sex with her to see it from her perspective, you know?"

Though it's been disorienting (and sometimes annoying) to be able to once again understand all the chatter going on around me, I have to admit, it can also be quite amusing.