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.

It's all relative

This week, feeling my out-of-shapedness (because really, sometimes only a made-up word will do) especially acutely due to the pending departure of my pilates teacher, I finally got off my butt and went to check out a couple of Istanbul's overpriced gyms, including a hotel spor salonu that promised a fitness center, outdoor pool, sauna, Turkish bath, and jacuzzi. What I didn't expect it to provide was a culture shock.

But there it was, staring me in the face when the blasé young fellow showing my friend and I around opened the door to the sauna area: A man and a woman, lounging in white robes. Together. In the same room. With almost their entire legs and arms showing.

Every door our guide opened seemed a window onto an almost Caligula-esque scene. A man in shorts pouring water over a swimsuit-clad woman inside the hamam. Men and women mingling freely inside a shared sauna. I couldn't help feeling I was violating their privacy, and my own.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a prude. In general, I'm pretty much a live-and-let-live type, donning long sleeves and a headscarf when entering a mosque and doffing, well, pretty much everything at a hippie California hot springs. And I know that Turkey -- especially in Istanbul -- is hardly the world's most restrictive society.

What amazes me is the rapid adaptability of the mind, how bare shoulders and knees and mixed-gender bathing can come to seem, momentarily at least, shocking. And when the norm you've become used to is even more modest, it takes even less to scandalize.

In the book I'm currently reading, Shadow of the Silk Road, author Colin Thubron describes an overland trip from western China to eastern Turkey. After spending a few weeks in Afghanistan, where the women pass by anonymously, fully shrouded under burkas, he crosses the border by bus into Iran and steps out into the northern city of Meshed, where he writes:

"As for the women, framed in chadors leaving the face bare, they seemed scandalously exposed. I stared at them rudely as they passed. They had feathery brows and dark, swimming eyes and lashes. Many were softly beautiful. Some wore a brazen hint of lipstick or eye-shadow. They might have been naked."

* Photo from the awesomely I-can't-believe-this-is-really-necessary-well-actually-yes-I-can "Put Your Brits Away" responsible-dress campaign by the UK travel magazine Wanderlust.

What didn't stay in Mardin

After pointing out the wall crypts, the sun-worshipers' chamber, and the "angel" carvings, the two boys who had appointed themselves our tour guides to the necropolis complex in the ancient Roman city of Dara wrapped up their patter: "Bitti. Başka kalmadı." That's it. The rest didn't stay. Now how about some lira?

Kids seemed to be on the hustle everywhere we went in the Southeast, whether waiting outside each of Dara's sites to follow us through the ruins or tailing us down Diyarbakır's back streets calling out, "Hello, hello, money, money!" It seemed especially pronounced due to the notable lack of adult "buyuruncus," the where-are-you-from-would-you-like-buy-a-carpet-I-have-very-nice-terrace bane of my every trip to Sultanahmet. Perhaps the most persistent was the boy who cornered us outside the Kırklar Kilisesi in Mardin, insisting that we come try some "very nice" wine. ("How would you know?" we asked, seeing as he was all of about 8 years old. He didn't seem to get the joke.) Having been warned about the unfortunately poor quality of this ev şarapı, we still decided -- correctly -- that a family of Christians who make wine in their house were worth meeting.

After begging off buying a bottle with many gracious teşekkür ederiz and empty promises to return after we finished our walking around for the day, we dined at possibly the only real restaurant in town, the much-recommended Cercis Murat Konağı, where the waiters only sniffed slightly at a pair of grubby backpackers settling into a table in an old Mardin mansion with a spectacular view across the desert toward Syria. The house wine there was amazingly good (keep in mind, our standards are low after so much time in Turkey) and the food tasty and different as promised -- what we could get of it, that is. For whatever reason, a good two-thirds of the items on the long, mouth-watering menu were "yok." (Unavailable.) We joked that at least they weren't "kalmadı," to our (North) American ears a strangely passive way of saying "we ran out of that." And then, yep, one of the main dishes we ordered... kalmadı.

We lingered as long as we could at dinner, trying to avoid going back to our ghetto hotel, with its windowless room and dirty squat toilet. Fortunately, a diversion presented itself on the walk back, a musical performance in the town's central çay bahçesi (tea garden). The over-sexualized 8-year-old belly dancer was of course a highlight, but most memorable was the guy who walked up to the stage at (presumably) key moments in the music and threw stacks of napkins into the air above the band members' heads, letting the paper pile up like snowdrifts.

I suspect if anyone tried to buy napkins the next morning at any of the neighborhood stores, they would find that they had... kalmadı.

Taking tea in Urfa

Up until now, probably the strangest place I have ever found myself sipping a cup of tea was a dingy Uzbek roadside chaihana in almost literally the middle of nowhere, a place that looked like it hadn't seen any other customers for a couple of decades but had not one, but three Britney Spears posters hanging on the wall. Well, the pigeon coop in Urfa completely blew that one out of the water.

(Come to think of, the local tire yard wasn't bad either. We had a few nice glasses of çay there while waiting for a fan to be installed in a car.)

Urfa, in southeastern Turkey, is, perhaps uniquely in the country, a city of equal-opportunity head covering, where men and women alike don silk lavender scarves called Yamşah; a city where people adorn themselves with facial tattoos, where a motorcycle is not road-ready without a carpet covering its seat, and where pigeons wear bracelets and earrings. Oh, yes, and it's also the reputed birthplace of the prophet Abraham. But we were mostly there to see the pigeons.

Inside Urfa's old bazaar, where men and boys pound designs into sheets of copper, making gorgeous platters and kitschy souvenirs alike, the courtyard of the Gümrük Han is an airy oasis. Built in 1562, this old Ottoman caravanasari (a place where travelers -- and their camels -- could stop and rest) is shaded by sand-colored tenting wafting in the light breeze and full of men sitting on low kürsü stools drinking tea and playing tavla, or backgammon.

Some, though, choose to spend their leisure time in a slightly less atmospheric location -- a dark, tucked-away room filled with the sound of flapping wings and tiny clinking jewelry and the blended perfume of dust, smoke, and pigeon shit.

Occasionally a man would pick up a bird and examine it, but if anyone was actually buying or selling the pigeons, they were sure taking their time doing so, puffing on cigarettes, sipping their tea, and watching the room's feathered occupants skitter and strut about, just as naturally as Americans -- and, OK, practically everyone in the world now -- hang out at Starbucks.

Çok güzel Türkçe ama...!

I've had this conversation in Turkey so many times--at döner stands and train stations, in restrooms and art galleries--I've begun to feel remiss about not writing it down earlier:

Me: "Afferdersiniz..."

("Excuse me..." and then whatever question I have to ask.)

Them: "Alman mısınız?"

("Are you German?")

Me: "Hayır, Amerikalıyım."

("No, American.")

Them: "Çok güzel Türkçe ama...!"

("But your Turkish is very good...!")

Perhaps knowledge of Americans' general ineptness with other languages precedes us around the world. Or perhaps there are so many Turkish immigrants in Germany that your average German knows a few words of Turkish, like Americans (at least in the West) know "gracias" and "cerveza." Either way, I certainly can't say I don't benefit from the low expectations.