Bu sana ibret olsun

Us yabancıs often find Turkish warning signs amusing, in large part because there are so few of them -- Want to fall off our ancient castle? Feel free! It's not like we're going to put up a railing or anything -- and because those that you do see are largely ignored. Case in point: The admonitions to wait for the gangplanks to be laid down before leaping off the ferry. As if.

But two signs I saw this week on a trip to the Princes' Islands particularly jumped out at me. The first, inside the St. George's Monastery on Büyükada (roughly translated from Turkish):

Do not write your petitions on the walls or the icons.
We have a box for petitions.
Write them on a piece of paper and put them in the box.

Who knew there was such a problem with monastic graffiti?

And the other, along the island's shoreline:

Yüzme bilmeyenleri denize girmek tehlikeli ve yasaktır.

It is dangerous and prohibited for those who do not know how to swim to enter into the ocean.

Why, that's practically right up there with "Caution - contents may be hot" on a cup of coffee. Who says Turkey isn't getting more Western by the day?

Can I have a power outage with that pizza?

Their timing may be unpredictable, but power outages--and the dropped Skype calls, suddenly cold showers, and fumbling around for your cell phone to provide a little glow since you couldn't possibly be expected to keep a flashlight and batteries on hand, now could you? that go along with them--are a reliable fact of life in Istanbul.

And though far too localized to create city-wide community spirit--it's not at all uncommon for my apartment's electricity, water, and/or Internet connection to go out while that of my neighbors, whose house I could hit with a rock if I had any kind of arm at all, stays on, or vice versa--our mini-blackouts do knit us yabancıs closer together, as we load up our laptops or bathrobes to use the Internet or shower at someone else's house. They also somehow seem to lead to ordering pizza.

After a cranky day at work today, a chance phone conversation led me to invite a friend over so he could use the Internet while his power was out, which in turn converted an evening with no plans into a nice one of drinking wine and ordering from Domino's (I know, I know, but they have a two-for-one deal)--a "tradition" initiated one time when our electricity went kaput, though only after much befuddled wondering how in the world we could order take-out without the Internet. Ah yes, that little thing with the numbers and the buttons and the ring, ring, ring. How quaint.

Just another day

Maalesef, I did not get to run around getting tear-gassed this May Day, instead "celebrating" Worker's Day by... working. (After going to much trouble to get to the office in the first place, since so many of the roads in my neighborhood were blocked off.) My friends report that it was "boooring" compared to last year, despite the workers' historic return to Taksim Square. And they're not the type to say that in order to make me feel better about missing all the fun.

Just a few photos, then, of the morning scene, captured on my way to work:


Union members laid red carnations in memory of the 37 demonstrators killed on May 1, 1977.


At this point in the day, the police were doing a lot of standing around.

And in a brilliantly photo-op-ready PR move, they even handed out the flowers.

In-flight oenephiles

Cruising altitude is no place for connoisseurs. Even for an, uh, aficionado like myself, the alcohol served on international flights really only has two virtues: it's plentiful, and it's free. But somehow I managed to recently find myself seated--not once, but twice--by people who seemed to have mistaken the economy section of an Airbus for the plush lounge of a wine bar.

En route to Lisbon last Thursday, the man sitting in front of me called the stewardess over and handed the bottle of wine she had previously served him back to her, explaining in stilted English that the wine was French. And he wanted Turkish. (I know what you're thinking, and he was clearly not a Turk.)

Returning on a connecting flight from Geneva this weekend, I heard the stewardess patiently responding to the (alas, unheard) questions of someone sitting behind me that the wine was "from California... it's a blend of grapes... it's dry, but it's very nice."

But, apparently, not too nice to serve with a BBQ chicken hot pocket.

(Photograph by the great William Eggleston. Untitled, from the series Los Alamos, 1965­-1974)

Feeling estúpido en español

"You're not in Turkey anymore," this sign may well have read, and indeed I wasn't, spending a stellar 10 days touring southern Spain with a pinch of Portugal thrown in. While I exulted in many of the differences--there aren't many major Islamic monuments you can follow up your tour of with a heaping plate of cured pork--the change of language was a source of constant frustration for me. Here I was, traveling in a country whose native tongue I had studied for 5 or 6 years back in my high school and college days and I could barely spit out a "hello" or "thank you."

"Merh--er, ah, buenas dias."
"Teşekk-- uh, uh, gracias."

Though I never got past being completely tongue-tied, I realized after a few days that I could still understand a large part of what was being said to me (or, more likely, in my general direction, since my travel partner spoke Spanish well). Better yet, finding myself completely incompetent in one language reminded me that I had actually achieved competence (fumbling, bumbling, funny-accented competence, but competence nonetheless) in another, as I continuing found myself thinking not "I wish these people spoke English," but "If I was in Turkey, I could handle this, no problem."

So, sad as it was to bring the vacation to an end, I happily sank into the backseat of the car taking me home from the airport last night, relieved and pleased to be able to chatter away with the driver about how the weather had been in Istanbul, his theory that the city was hiding artifacts found during the building of the Marmaray tunnel so as not to hold up construction, and Topic A with Turkish cab drivers (and a not un-favorite one of my own), "Aren't you so happy about Obama?"

Seçim zamanı

I recently had a gig helping arrange some logistics for an NGO that was bringing a group of Arab politicians to Turkey to see how local elections are run here. When I met the coordinators, I joked, "The first thing you've got to tell them is that the guy with the most flags wins."

The streets of Istanbul are so festooned with election banners these days, from some spots you can barely see the sky. "Dream big!" one party exhorts; "Taking action for you!" another promises. While the strings of flags represent an alphabet soup of political parties -- AKP, CHP, DTP, MHP -- it's never been clearer to me how much an advantage the incumbent party has in advertising itself. The ruling AKP can distribute thick, glossy catalogs touting the "315 projects in 5 years" it's conducted in my neighborhood, Beyoğlu. It can put massive billboards bearing an image of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, his coat dusted with snow and a huge crowd gathering behind him, advertising the party's final pre-election rally in the area: "In snow, in winter, in rain, all of Istanbul on its feet!" And, it can trot out the biggest, baddest campaign vehicle around.

While supporters of other parties circle Taksim Square in battered cars with dragging bumpers and megaphones duct-taped (OK, I might be exaggerating on that part -- but only that) to the roof, the AKP has a gleaming white tour bus with wrap-around advertising and a matching, concert-ready speaker system on top. All crank out campaign jingles as loud as they possibly can, the sound ranging from ear-shattering to merely deafening. While most find this aggravating, and rightly so, I can't help but get a laugh out of it, and strangely, a bit of nostalgia too. Istanbul is undoubtedly a noisy city, but music -- however painful -- blaring out of cars is something I don't hear much, certainly not the way I did in the Mission district, when the thumping of a low rider's overtaxed stereo, not the call to prayer, was the soundtrack to street life.

Waterpalooza

I got to pretend like I was a real foreign correspondent -- which apparently means downing unlimited Nescafé and cookies in the media center, where a sign said that computer use was "for the pressman only" -- last week at the 5th World Water Forum, a slightly mysterious, but certifiably enormous, week-long event held here in Istanbul.

As at any large conference, the sessions ran the gamut from tedious to fascinating, and sometimes a little of both. Though I probably should have attended some of the talks on financing and infrastructure, just to get a better sense of whether the forum's organizers really are evil corporate interests hell-bent on bottling and selling every last drop, my bleeding-heart tendencies drew me mostly to the panels on things like traditional cultural uses of water, migration and conflict, and women's issues -- the latter of which I wrote up for The National, an English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi (pictured at right).

I also blogged about each day's events for TreeHugger:

• What is this 'Big Water Meeting'? Day 1 at the World Water Forum
• Linking Water, Conflict, Gender, and Migration: Day 2 at the World Water Forum
• Accounting for Every Drop: Day 3 at the World Water Forum
• Images of Inundation: Day 4 at the World Water Forum
• Understanding the Sacred Value of Water: Day 5 at the World Water Forum
• 'Another Water Management is Possible': Day 6 at the World Water Forum
• Is Water a 'Right' or a 'Need'?: Day 7 at the World Water Forum

And if you read all that, you'll be as water-logged as I am now.

Now 'tweeting'...

Count me among those who don't know exactly what the Twitter fuss is all about, but I've been hopping on Web bandwagons since 1996, so I'm not going to miss the chance to try and post some amusing observations and thought-provoking articles in 140 characters or less... Don't worry, I'll go light on what I ate for lunch.

UPDATE: I liked Twitter so much I opened a second account specifically for Turkey-related content, which has become my main account. Follow me @TheTurkishLife

Twilight of the Turkish repairman

When my friend Kelly said she was taking her broken TV to the "television hospital," I laughed. But she wasn't kidding. Her Istanbul neighborhood is full of TV repair shops called just that.

One of the things I love about Turkey is how readily, and cheaply, it seems you can get almost anything repaired. But just as Americans and Europeans are starting to (re-)warm to the idea of fixing things up, the spread of throwaway culture to Turkey is threatening repairmen's livelihoods....

Read the rest over at TreeHugger, my other blog home*

* Experimental blog cross-pollination alert

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.