What’s your business?

Last night my friend Elif and her new/first husband convinced me to come to the island.

There are a few islands an hour or so away from the city called the Prince’s Islands. They were at Buyuk Ada (translation: Big Island). I’d never been to the islands and the only plan I had for the next day was to familiarize myself how to work by public transportation so I won’t find myself arriving late on my first day.

So this morning, I woke up fairly early and figured out which bus would take me to Kabatas Iskele (dock where the ferry leaves). Done.

Make it to island in an hour. Done.

Have an INCREDIBLE day filled with seriously serious biking (no cars on the island, just horse-drawn carriages and bikes !), gorgeous views, witty banter, and two remarkable people. Done.

Go back to Istanbul in an hour. Done.

Then I had to figure out where the fuck I was, where the fuck I was going, and how the fuck I was going to get there.

I lost count of the number of subways and bus rides I took. Too many. Too, too many.
These roads make no sense. They twist and turn to places you didn’t know there were places. It’s messy/confusing/intense. Since Istanbul is so old I think they just never planned anything out. They just kept building wherever anything could fit. Then one thing would collapse and lean over and they just kept filling the holes (but you cant just fill holes)

I kept thinking to myself that I am a sad lost little puppy. Over and over again puppy puppy puppy.

And once more I went underneath the city to the subway and found myself sitting across from a puppy in a cage between its owner’s feet.

He was a tiny, super uber ugly dog, so ugly it’s like a joke. And I just kept staring and staring at this other puppy (me being puppy 1& ugly being puppy 2) imagining myself stealing the puppy so we could live ugly lost puppy lives together and how we deserve love too and we could live merrily puppy after. He (assuming it was a he) stares up at me with his buggy eyes and telepathically queried, “What the fuck is your business in this city?”

My giggle crescendoed into a full blown chortle. Done.


Istanbul, day one is done… You bitch.

An Introduction

I leave for Istanbul in two days.

Though it's definately not my first time going to the old city, it is the most excited I've ever been to go. Reason being, I'll be an Istanbulite for 48 days. Technically, I lived in Istanbul for three years but those were the first years of my life so naturally no memory of that is left. This time I will be forced to learn the roads, deal with the 13 million people, and listen to the chaos.

Introducing Istanbul to someone is ... impossible. Its too complex.

Its likely the majortity of my upcoming posts will be all about the gargantuan city because there is plenty to say.

In the last book I read, The Saint of Incipient Insanities by Elif Shafak (highly recommend it), she says this for Ist.

"So the roofs shriek in Istanbul, but it is the streets that talk. It is on the streetsthat life throbs in a mélange of fuming and frustraed, aching and buoyant voices; the squawk of horns splintered by the piercing yell of street vendors, emergency sirens, prayers from copious mosques, and the clangor of distant church bells; a hovering humming accompanied by the constant swish of the sea, as if it intended to wash away this pandemonium once and for all. It is a city of infinite quarrels - between men and men, men and women, and life and death. The hubbub is so dense that even the faintest click fuses with an outcry far away, absorbing therefore, a touch of the overall tune. If you listen attentively, you'll notice there is an underlying rhythm. Streets are cadenced in Istanbul, far more harmoniously than the beat of the lives that slither upon them."


She also does this awesome TedTalk.
http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction.html

Adventureland

Yesterday, I was sitting with Bora and Asilcan discussing our oldest memories.

"Wait a second. Zeynep, how long have we been friends?" Bora asked.

And the three of us started counting on our fingers. Nine years. I met Bora and Asilcan nine years ago. I am nineteen now, so to me thats a pretty big chunck of time.

"Oh man! Has it been that long? How did the time go by?" then Bora turned to Asilcan, "That only means that you and I have been friends for even longer!"

Looking like men, they laughed like boys.

Lately, I have been thinking of the time I have spent here. This summer will likely be the last one that I spend here for an extensive period of time. We've all outgrown these neighborhoods. We've had our childish fun and are ready to move on.


Every year I would look forward the freedom of summer. Lawless, reckless, and retarded summers. Its something I never got to experience in the suburbs.

So we reminisce. These are somethings that I have/havent been apart of since our group has formed...

- Being thirteen (without licenses), outrunning the cops in my friend's father's moped from steep cobble-stoned backstreets.
- Being fourteen, getting drunk, and jumping in a pool with all my clothes on.
- Bora drunkenly crashing the set of a show filming here. He stopped the filming and attempted hitting on the star of the show.
- Bora climbing on the roof of the tinytiny mini-mart (basically a hut) to retrieve a soccer ball and having the owner throw potatoes at him (potatoes?!.. how foreign)
- Going to a swanky club and my friend drunkenly climb the tree inside and jumping off.
- Grown men in their earlier 20s playing drunken hide and seek in an abandoned home.
- Going out on a broken paddle boat fit for 4 people.. We took 9. Got stuck at sea.
- Baby lamb intenstines at 4 in the morn.... Mhmmmmmm
- 4 idiots in 2 cars racing. Asilcan's car flipped 4 times.
......... And so many other things I cant think of.

These mostly root from the lack of law here.

Good run. See you later Ayvalik.

The Cost of Learning

Discussion topic with 3 friends: The price of education.

All four of us are university students and they were curious about the price of education in America.

"I go the cheapest state school in my state, and for a year I pay about $18,000"

Their jaws dropped.

"My sister goes to a private school and hers costs about $50,000 a year," I continued.

"Dollars?!"

"Ha, well of course," I replied.

Normally government owned schools in Turkey are about 1,000 Turkish Lira a year and the most expensive private school in the country is 20,000TL .

So my cruddy state school nears the cost of the top private school in the nation.

Though we were looking at the subject all too simplistically (not mentioning financial aid and what not), Merve asked why a person wouldnt just take that money and start their own business.

I choose to tell her one out of the many reasons why that wouldnt work out well.

Franchises.

America is all about franchises. Its very difficult to keeo up a profitable self-owned business. Unlike the hookah cafe that we were sitting at where the owner is a friend's father, there isnt much of a personal attachment to a business.

Have I ever met the owner of Target, Jewel, Gap, Walgreens, or Chipotle?
No.

Growing up in the suburbs has a very melancholic lonely air because there is nothing unique about the land. Cruising from one burb to another, I've observed the same companies repeat. Its difficult to tell one town from the next.

But walking through town I am in direct contact with the owners.

There is:
- Turan Abi (Abi means big brother) at the photoshop. Eccentric man who sports a ponytail.
- Servet Abi at the sandwich/panini mini-cafe. He has a crappy tattoo from his jail days and calls me his American darling.
- Hasan Abi from the mini-mart. He is a Marxist and named his shop after the famous political activist, Deniz Gezmis, who was killed by the governmnet.
-The guy at the cafe I go to nearly daily, whose name I dont know but always takes the ashtray off my table knowing I am not a smoker.
- Deli Gungor ("Crazy" Gungor) The weirdo ice cream man who has the best mulberry flavored ice cream.


Just the people I come across who own their own modest little business, making modest money, with modest lives. Simple. Likely uneducated. Personal.

Kurdish Issue

At the end of last semester, a friend and I started watching documentary called Iraq in Fragments. I didnt get the chance to finish it but when I went to his room the next day I saw little post its he scribbled down to help him understand the different religious/ethnic groups in the tumultuous country. I couldn't help but find his efforts to better understand on the differences between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds a little cute. When I asked him how the doc ended, he said it was pretty interesting. He added that the Kurds seem to be the most reasonable out of the Iraqi factions.
"Kurds are tight" - He said

and unthinkingly I responded..

"Fuck the Kurds.. Wait. No. Fuck the PKK."

Wiki insert: The Kurdistan Workers' Party, commonly known as PKK, is a Kurdish militant organization which has since 1984 been fighting an armed struggle against the Turkish state for an autonomous Kurdistan and greater cultural and political rights for the Kurds in Turkey. The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization internationally by a number of states and organizations, including the United States. Turkey labeled the organization as an ethnic secessionist organization that uses terrorism and the threat of force against both civilian and military targets for the purpose of achieving its political goal. The PKK leader said on an interview that the only reason they have been put on the 'Terrorist organization' list is due to political pressure from Turkey, who he accuses of falsifying accounts and unfairly demonizing the organization.

My conversation with my comrade had me thinking of everything I know or have seen about Kurds in Turkey. I'm fromt the Western coast and they live in the East so I haven't had much personal interaction.

I kept thinking.. What do I know?

- I remember watching a documentary on the music of Turkey called Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul. A Kurdish woman sang a beautiful song in a language I didnt understand. But she and others explain how they 10 years back, they werent allowed to sing in Kurdish. French, Italian, and English songs were fine but the language of people who actually belong to the land was forbidden. A man explained that in 1990 the law against speaking in Kurdish was removed but expressed his disappointment in the governments reasoning for the laws dismissal. He says that Turkish government only did so to please the European Union and increase their chances of accesion into the western club.

I kept thinking...

When I returned home after the semester, over some post-breakfast tea I asked my mother about the PKK. I asked if they really had faced hardships, whether people were openly discrimitive, why they were terrorists, etc..

Honey, they live in a very difficult area. Eastern Turkey is dry, cold, and poor. Its not just the Kurds that are suffering, it is all those people in the poor villages in the east. Then the PKK comes to these Kurds living in mountains and recruits young boys. They say, youre a Kurd. Youre one of us. You and I are fighting the same against these Turks. Your pain is mine, and mine is yours. We are brothers. But my mother explains that is all the people living in the east that face harship.

My dear, she says, Turkey isnt America. Turkey is not a rich country and cant just open schools and hospitals like America can. Thats what those people need but find themselves going far distances to seek. And since they are uneducated, they are easily brainwashed by the PKK.

---

Then my grandmother and the rest of our family.

My aunt become very rich after her father died, he left her a lot of land and farms.
My rich cousin fell in love with a Kurdish girl that worked oon one of the farms. He wanted to marry her and my family didnt approve. He eloped :)

My grandmother's sister went nuts. She called grandma in hysterics. I thought someone died. No, I thought EVERYONE died. My grandmother was calming her by predicting divorce in a year..

As I was laughing about the ridiculousness of my family over the phone with my mother, shes like its actually really sad. Its even dangerous. She explained that
A. They are going to struggle, its hard not having your family approving of marriage.
B. What if her family doesnt approve either? And she has uncles and brothers? They could kill him.

Sad young lovers..

Poor Little Rich Girl

There's a few lines that keep running through my mind from a Spektor song.

1. Poor little rich boy, all the couples have gone
You wish that they hadn't, you don't wanna be alone

2. You're reading Fitzgerald, you're reading Hemmingway
They're both super smart and drinking in the cafes

3. You're so young, you're so goddamn young

A. I am here alone.
I'm staying with my grandmother until the end of the month and although I appreciate everything from her, I really have a difficult time understanding how we are related. Again, with all due respect, she can drive me nuts with her good intentions. But it is not familial contact that I desire but like any 19-year-old, it is social. Slowly, I am socializing as I usually do but I wholeheartedly miss my friends Americana.

B. Every morning, I face the decision dilemma. What will I do with myself today? Beach or cafe? Usually, it's cafe. Reading Shafak and Maugham in the cafe. Writing here, reading there, drink beer, and inhaling the Aegean air. My time here is so open that I have the privilege to think.. and think.. I may be learning more here than my past semester of univeristy. Larry from The Razor's Edge is in my mind.

C. Fitzgerald's themes of the privileged & youth. I am so damn young. It's a shame that I'm summering while the rest of my friends are desperately trying to support themselves. I do not want to give the impression that I live in luxury but my parents are willing to pay for my everything.. It's shaming.

My difficulty is my boredom.

White people problems..

Visitor

My friend Talia came to visit and we had a swell time. Here are some of her pictures that I stole.

All-inclusive
-Boat trip
-Talia stepping on a sea cactus
-Touching an octopus
-Relaxrelax
-Dancedance
-Greek ruins

Apparently

There is a fine for not voting.

I think that's interesting. I like it.

Election day on Sunday.

Sadly, the party I would like to win is only to get the current party out of power. But that is not likely to happen.

So pessimism all around!

Gentlemen & Comrades

Gentle
Men
Gentlemen
hmm..
My friend Talia was visiting me and we went out. Sitting outside at a cafe with many passerbys to watch I spotted a friend of mine in the crowd. I would have called him over but this year I am a little worried my old friend wouldnt recognize me (funny how much my appearance has changed in a year, the last time I saw him). I asked our waiter, who seemed to know him as well, to stop drooling over my pretty friend and call him over.

Salih greeted Talia and I warmly and invited us to join him and his friends on the boat that they were hanging out in.

After we finished our drinks we walked over.

We got on the boat and the four guys immediately stood up trying to give us the best seats and give their hand for proper introduction. 1.

As the hours passed, I suggested that Talia and I leave before we missed the last bus home.

Batu insisted that he would drive us home (way out of his way). 2.


After an enjoyable evening with old and new friends we made our way off the boat. Kerim offered his hand to guide us off the boat. 3.

Salih even opened our door. 4.

I had to comment.

Sure, I have seen chivalry over and over again in Turkey. My friends (mostly guys) have always been nothing les than thoughtful gentlemen. No, their intentions didnt have alterior motives (most have my friends have been so for years).

Tonight in particular, I was a little culture shocked by this excessive kindness.

I still cant tell if it bothers me or not.

"What gentlemen you all are.." I chimed.

"This is how we were taught by our fathers. If we didnt take care of you, we would be uncomfortable. We take ownership upon ladies," replied Kerim.

THOUGH I dont think Kerim meant ownership like we his property, and the good intentions of his statement were lost in translation the patriachy is still obvious. I know he meant he wants to take care of us. Be good to us.

But cant I take care of myself?

Sure the staunch feminist in me finds chivalry outdated and nearly degrading.. But I hate to admit that I am a little flattered.

Perhaps it is the comfort of comfortable. I dont have to have my guard up at all times. Its a sweet comfort.

Still though, I cant bring myself to be okay with this.

The only way I can convince myself that I can accept this is special treatment is fooling myself that this is not so special. Even to each other these guys are overly hospitable. Or rather its not overly, just more than I am used to seeing. Any friendship here, cross gender or not, is exceedingly thoughtful.

Ok.. I think I am digressing from chivalry to Turkish comradery vs. American comradery. Another topic that I think should be mentioned.

I think I learned friendship in this country. I learned to be thoughtful, and to care. To truly care. To love a person and to show it. In America, I've always felt a cold energy in 90% of my friendships. A fakeness. A greed. Even a rush. People were quick claim a closeness that never was there in the first place. But the warmth of the people here is felt even from the intial handshake.

I think Arundhati Roy said it best when commenting on America in The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy.

Thanks for the assist Google Books.

First Batch

Pictures from my earlier mentioned trip..

Deniz

I am having an affair with the Aegean.