I'm never coming home. For now, it's Istanbul.

3am

2009-11-14T18:15:00.001+02:00

Eminem's song 3am deals with the darker side of life. At his very hours I am also dealing some of the more troubling aspects of my personality.

Over the previous three weeks, as I become more adept at freelance work and the inclination to wear a suit and tie in an office job slowly but unquestionably dissipates, my body clock is adopting a new, rigorous and unsocial rhythm, allowing me to think most lucidly and work more productively at hours which are simply, well, wrong.

I hesitate to say this without a medical opinion, but I feel insomnia is becoming a new partner in my life. Since I've always been an early-to-bed, early-to-rise-and-consume-lot-of-caffeine kinda guy, the frustration I feel at remaining alert at deeply nocturnal hours is real, disturbing, and hopefully not demonstrable of new life-long habits.

My need to be awake during the same hours the sun's rays hit my side of the planet has been a constant, unmoving feature of my life until now. Apart from a brief stint as thesis-writing student way back before Twitter and non-carbonated energy soft drinks, sleep has always come to me at the same time at the late night news. In fact, it's because of Channel 9 programming that my mother was able to establish my sleep routines as an adolescent.

Where most youth railed against their parents at the thought of getting under the bedsheets when the sun was still on day shift, Australian television programs, and more likely, the personalities fronting them, induce so much rage within me that the safest outcome was to remove me from the living room, out of harm's way and far from the mental pollution emanating from the screen. A Current Affair is like Stilnox, though perhaps a poor analogy as I became exhausted after first shouting insults at the screen.

Eminem likens, or imagines himself a serial killer in his 3am track. I often imagine myself a serial killer when watching Australian television, whether at 3am or not. It's just that is actually is that time at the moment, I'm not watching television, but I still want to main a TV presenter.

Life's funny like that. I can't sleep, not a televsion in sight, and yet I still want to kill a TV presenter. Insomnia is not going to be a benficial addition to my lifestyle.

Guidos: Men who like to groom and preen.

2009-11-13T08:08:00.005+02:00

You Tube is both a rich source of information and provider of humour.

Today, after half an hour of diversion surfing, I stumbled across this. The creature in the video is known as a guido, latterly applied to ridiculous, muscle-bound, steroid-munching people with a penchant for tight-fitting clothing and a culture based around the fierce application of artificial tanning solution, hair gel and hair removal cream. Apparently the species predominates in New Jersey, USA.

I've just come back from the beach. I love living at the beach, provided I don't spend too much time there at the weekend. Bad thoughts ensue.

You see, my neighbourhood increasingly attracts an Australian incarnation of the American guido, yet the phenomenon stills lacks a name. If a decade ago this look was found almost exclusively within the confines of the Australian-Lebanese community, today the obsession with deformed musculature, eyebrow tweezers and latent homosexuality is reaching epidemic levels and possesses little in common with it's Middle East heritage, as can now be witnessed after spreading successfully though citizens of Anglo-Celtic and Mediterranean origin. There is a growing number of eyewitness report that suggest we'll soon see this trend emerging in males Australians with East-Asian heritage. The Indian community remains immune to further mutations of this phenomenon since guido-ism appears deeply ingrained in middle class Indian society for a number of decades. Just look at any male Bollywood star.

I have to ask. What is it that makes a heterosexual make devote so much of his time to the pursuit of vanity? Why is it that males have bought into the formerly and specifically female domain of wanton self-adulation? Since the trend of spending hours in front of the mirror with pomades, unguents and ointments has previously been the realm of the stupider of the female species, why is it that males are happily risking the jeers and chiding of people like myself, wallowing in a pool of cleansing mudpacks and exfoliating dermabrasions?

My beach is being ruined by these people; walking themselves, their colossal biceps and stretched-Lycra white singlets up and down the promenade, taking up the space that should rightly be reserved for normal people.

And what is it with these tattoos? I have a theory that, in celebration of his ten and twelfth birthday, every one of the species receives respectively, a hair trimmer set permanently at number one, and a gift voucher redeemable for a hideous ink stain based loosely on 70s wallpaper designs? What is with all those swirls?

Frankly, I'm too old for this. I want the families, the dogs and the elderly people in budgie smugglers back. It's time to reclaim the sand and surf, and ask these people gently to get back into their modified cars and drive out West.

Madness sets in.

2009-11-12T01:48:00.002+02:00

The picture to your left has nothing to do with this blog entry. Nevertheless, if you remove the inane smile, replacing it with the expression of a man filled with a special, growing and increasing hatred of celebrities, then you'll form a better image of who I really am.

Nothing special happened today. However, I did spent twelve hours in front of a computer and drink eight cups of percolated coffee.

Since I made the decision to abandon the business world, throw in the suit and tie and lead the adventure-filled life of a footloose, full-time, freelance sub-editor, I've noticed two distinct phenomena develop.

First, due to the increased amounts of proofreading, reading, editing, writing and periods of time spent staring at on-line and hard-copy text, my blog posts have become more numerous, the writing more voluminous, the spelling and grammar more prone to error. My cafeine intake has soared.

The greater the time devoted to reading, writing and other assorted verbs that describe dealing with masses of text, it is with less care and precision that I apply the same collection of verbs to my own work. This may be the opportune moment to score a syndicated blog with the Sydney Morning Herald.

Aside from the appearance of inaccuracies in my own writing, the second phenomena I've become acutely aware of is money. I have never had less of it in my life, and quite frankly, I've never slept better. If no money lessens my stress levels, then I hope my landlady is excited about this as I am. She often appears anguished.

On another note, I've thought more about my Death to Celebrities game/variety show. It's coming along well and I think I've just about completed the pitch. Australia alone will be able to supply an almost bottomless pit of talentless garbage for the entire first season. I'm planning on a thematic approach for individual episodes. Something along the lines of 'Episode 1: Pointless, unintelligent over made-up slags on commercial TV','Episode 2: Female celebrities whose voice makes me want to remove their larynx', 'Episode 3: People who either are or remind me of Bert Newton and Daryl Somers', and so forth. I have a funny feeling this is a program that might yet be syndicated across the globe.

Mt Tomah Botanic Gardens, Blue Mountains

2009-11-11T14:43:00.005+02:00

Today the lovely Simone and I drove some way from her town of Lawson in the Blue Mountains to visit the Mount Tomah Botanic Gardens. The site is about 1000m above sea level and was established in 1972 to house cooler climate species that would struggle to survive the the warmer climes of the Royal Botanic Gardens situated just east of the city's central business district.

Mount Tomah is just off the Darling Causeway, that leads from the Great Western Highway and we from each side of the road, between the ever-present eucalyptus, we could peer into magnificent ravines, down sheer cliff faces, perhaps viewing areas of the world where human feet have never yet stood.

Though we spent upwards of three hours among the various themed gardens, we still didn't have enough time to amble about the adjoining Lady Nancy Fairfax Gardens, supposedly one of the most easily accessible rain forest walks in the Blue Mountains. That'll be for next time.

A time to rant

2009-11-10T13:55:00.000+02:00

Cheers for that beer...

Yeah, well, anyway, I'm sick of this left wing conspiracy to de-industrialise the first world. All this made-up nonsense about climate change. Nothing. The only rising temperature around here is my own after listening to that glib and smug self-righteous claptrap from the media-mafia that is the ABC. A bunch of namby-pamby eastern-suburb dwellers that wouldn't know a day's hard work if they came across it. I've just about had it up to here with those chardonnay-swilling Gucci sunglass-wearing pack of losers in their Muslim-loving neighbourhoods. Christ, woman. Get me another beer.

Anyway, like I'm saying, the whole country's going down the toilet, and it's not just the towel-heads dragging us down proverbial S-bend. These heathen types with their elephant-headed Gods and cooking that stinks to high heaven. You know, my mate Jacko, he's got a bunch of them living next door, slaughtering sheep all hours of the day and night and rolling about on rugs fifteen times a day, bobbing their heads up and down and wailing some unfathomable drivel. Not only that, there's thirty of them to a single room, sleeping in their own filth, coming and going and all hours and then complaining to the government every time they don't get exactly what they want. Well, I ask you, where's the justice? Max tripped over an uncovered drain hole in the middle of the street last year and the way home from the pub. And d'ya think he got a cent in compo? Nothing. These bloody so-called international students come pouring in through our borders, filling up our schools and universities and keeping our own out, and then whingeing about everything; so much so that Rudd, the gutless pollie that he is, goes begging to India's number one towel-head to be forgiveness.

Still, like the wife says, without them we'd still be on meat and three veg five nights a week. I'm quite ok with them running the odd curry diner, but I'm not happy having a doctor who acts like he knows more about the side-effects of binge-drinking than I do - especially when Ekim, well, that's what he says he's called - has never touched a drop in his life. What kind of man is that, I ask myself?

So, like I was saying, Maz tripped up and injured himself and then smacked his Chinko wife about about a bit when he got home. The ungrateful visa-thief that she is packed her bags and knicked off at the next opportunity. and now Max's in front of some judge who wants him to pay compo to her, plus go on some anger management course for the next three months. no doubt a course sin by some do-gooder homo who's got nothing better to do than sit in a room full of blokes and stare. So, no, I'm not happy about current immigration levels. But what can you do. I don't even bother voting anymore 'cos my candidates got a Greek name and you know what that means. I'm over politics, makes me sick to the pit of my stomach. When my folks arrived in in '45 I can tell you they understood what it meant to do hard work and they knew how to assimilate and learn the language. Not that they needed to 'cos of course English had been imported earlier which was just luck, I suppose. They would've learnt Swahili if they'd needed to - it's not the point of my argument anyway.

Mate. Yeah, I'd love anouther schooner. This country has well and truly gone to the dogs. Me own son Nick's hanging about with mates called Ahmet and Bilal and his girl's called Malika. Why the hell can't he just find a nice type called Narelle or Rachelle or Sharon or something who knows how to cook a lamb roast and whose parents drive around in a Ford Falcon?

I consumed too much coffee today. I feel kinda... anxious

2009-11-09T11:51:00.003+02:00

As I often do when the world gets me down and I need to stay inside for fear of taking an axe to humanity, I browsed through some of my photos and came across this little number taken in Uchisar, a natural rock citadel and the highest point in the Cappadocia valley.

However, I'm come to the conclusion that I am defintely lacking in dress sense. I don't care for fashion, and would in fact support the Taliban is they collectively rid the world of Karl Lagerfeld and everyone within his two-degrees of separation sphere - can you just imagine a world without vacuous fashion publications and the stupid people who buy them? - though my problem here is that I simply don't even know how to dress myself.

Red hat, maroon shirt, green shorts and orange trainers. This outfit probably attracts a fine in Milan.

I loved Cappadocia.

On another note, I've thought up a new reality show in which the celebrity contestants are actually not eliminated from the program until they are killed. The public will help eliminate and kill the celebrities. I'm just working through the finer details of the project but am planning to send the pitch off to the larger channels soon. I'm thinking Unspeakable Celebrity Torture (a working title) will fill the timeslot after Rove, which I imagine will soon be removed from our screen as people grow to understand that he's just not funny, even if he does constantly chuckle at his own jokes.

Lots of coffee today. Might lay off it tomorrow.

Cihangir, Istanbul

2009-11-08T09:26:00.004+02:00

“But you only just bought milk yesterday.”

“Yeah, I’m eating a lot of cereal at the moment.”

My neighbour Perihan Hanim was disconcerted. “That’s why you’re so thin. And single. You need to eat a proper Turkish breakfast.”

Now, I shouldn’t read much into my daily neighbourly chatter with the apartment block doyen, who tutted and smiled wryly in equal measure as I wedged open the building’s security door. George, the apartment building’s dominant male feline, lounged languidly on Perihan’s kitchen window ledge, eyeing me with suspicion. No doubt he’d later climb the balconies and terrorise my cats into forgoing a portion of the sustenance I’d dished out for them.

“Eat more sucuk. You’re too thin.” I promised Perihan that I’d increase my mid-morning intake of sausage and even include boiled egg, hopefully easing her concern about my inadequate dietary habits and too-svelte frame.

As I reached the second floor common deck I realised I’d forgotten to call in my cats from the neighbouring mosque garden. Awoken from their afternoon slumber among the graves in the small cemetery, Shish and Kebap sneaked furtively through the gate and made their way from the grounds of Cihangir mosque, distancing themselves from George’s filthy temper and violent claws.

The Cihangir mosque have given its name to one of Istanbul’s most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods, possessing a hazy boundary incorporating all or parts of the Purtelaş Hasan Efendi, Kurtuluş, Gümüşssuyu and Çukurcuma neighbourhoods. The existing building was constructed in the mid-19th century after the original structure went up in flames. Three centuries previously, the area was a forested hunting ground belonging to the Ottoman royalty during the time of Suleiman the Magnificent.

Suleiman, attributed magnificent in the West, he was known to Turks as Suleiman the Lawmaker. Capturing vast swathes of land that increased both the length and breadth of the Ottoman boundaries, the Sultan was responsible for the empire’s golden age, enacting fiscal legislation and instituting social and educational reform. The skyline of minarets and domes visible from Cihangir mosque’s garden is due to Suleiman; a patron of culture and the arts, it was he who gave the architect Sinan a blank slate on which to create the most wondrous of Ottoman edifices.

Twenty-first century women’s’ magazine writers would have loved Suleiman, or more specifically, the sultan’s wife Hurrem Sultan, since by all accounts she was quite taken to spreading malicious, unfounded gossip and thrived on intrigue, stratagem, plots and the peddling of influence, rather similar to the sluttish whores who today riddle the women’s publication industry the world over.

So Suleiman married a girl from the school of hard knocks, some pointless Ruthenian tart who had managed to get herself into the harem and succeeded in capturing the lingering glances of the Ottoman monarch. Like Beckham after him, Suleiman failed to realise his paramour was a nothing more than a talentless wench who looked good in clothes, and he married her. Roxelana, as this devious, treacherous slapper is known to history, became the envy of the social A-set and possibly set the standard for unintelligent women the world over for centuries to come, ensuring that six hundred years later that we live in a society that celebrates back-stabbing and self-pimping on a scale not seen since the mythical times of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Roxelana was not wife numero uno. However, she did give birth to three of the sultan’s four male progeny who managed to survive well into adulthood. This of course fuelled her desire to underwrite her bloodline’s future by placing one of her offspring on the throne. Since succession in the Ottoman Empire was by anyone’s reckoning a tale of bloodlust and stupidity that allows us to see Jackie Collin’s novels in the tradition of Zola, Roxelana had her work cut out.

A wannabe sultan needed to ensure his other brothers died quickly, silently, and in the most barbaric way possible. Daughters of a sultan had no need to fret, since it would be centuries before women counted as anything more than chattels. Any male within a sniff of the royal seat risked garrotte or death by strangulation.

Mustafa was being primed as inheritor to the Empire, and was (unluckily for him) the only son not of Roxelana’s blood. Her lads, Selim, Beyazid and Jihangir, were somewhere in line, living life with the incrementally increasing fear that, sooner or later, Mustafa would send in the eunuchs for a fatal demonstration of knot-tying.

History is replete with tales of deceit and treachery, not unlike conversations in the marquee on race cup day. Roxelana swept into action. Mustafa was not to become sutlan. Centuries-old dirt informs us that she conspired with the Pasha to work her evil, leaving the Sultan festering over a story that Mustafa was looking to become sovereign of the imperial house a little earlier than Suleiman would have liked.

In accordance with tradition, and like so many people so close and yet so far from absolute power, Mustafa managed to get himself strangled by the aforesaid eunuchs at some point in time, clearing the way for a son of Roxelana to become sultan. She must have breathed a massive sigh of well-deserved relief.

It is said that Jihangir died of grief over the loss of his half-brother, though being in absolute fear of your life probably didn’t do much for his blood pressure and sleep patterns. When Jihangir passed away two months aftr Mustafa's murder, Roxelana probably knew she was in some way directly responsible for her own son’s death too. But just like the senior editors of women’s magazines, the Sultan's worse half also felt she was in no way accountable for the grief and destruction she wreaked upon others. That’s life in the public sphere. Build a bridge. Get over it. Move on. Whatever.

Entirely unsure what Suleiman felt, losing two sons in the times it takes to publish eight editions of New Idea is undoubtedly tragic, so like all good patriarchs possessing the will, the means and the ability to get whatever he wanted under pain of death. he commissioned an edifice. Sinan, the architect whose Armenian heritage seems lost today on the Republic, designed a wooden mosque to sit on a hill slope in the hunting grounds, affording a view over the Bosphorus that takes in from the Prince’s Islands to Seraglio Point.

Today the forest and wooden mosque have been replaced with Istanbul’s love of concrete. Jihangir mosque, no longer among trees, became Cihangir under Ataturk’s language reforms and namesake of the neighbourhood. Cihangir is the heart of Istanbul, and my cats love it.

Me too. Though naturally, all these centuries after Roxelana, I’m still wary of women who appear to know too much. My inner voice tells me that Perihan is acquainted with my comings and goings at every hour of the day and night. It’s not just my milk purchases that capture her attention. Since those who ignore history are bound to repeat it, I tread carefully with my neighbour. You just never know what a Turkish woman might be planning. So I buy her chocolate often, to stay in favour.

Son of a Lion

2009-11-07T05:28:00.003+02:00

Somewhere between Peshawar and Gilgit, in the Northwest Frontier Province

I have just watched a very pleasant film.

Son of a Lion is set in the North West Frontier Provinces of Pakistan, principally in the towns of Darra Adam Khel and Peshawar. The former is a town which lives almost completely from the earning of the production and selling of weaponry, a fact mentioned any time the town's name appears.

There is much kudos in the backpacking world for having visited the Darra Adam Khel, though it's about as dangerous as getting on a bus with a lot of hirsute men in Peshawar and then alighting with them an hour or so later. Sure, it has the look and feel of a frontier town, but the Pakistanis are so friendly that it's not really a hair-raising experience.

Regardless of this, the film is a lovely peek into the lives of the Pashtun people in a distinctly beautiful region of the world. What is admirable about this production is that it happened. I cannot fathom the organisational skills needed to produce such a film, so from that perspective I think the film crew achieved a real success.

I imagine that there are few films available to Westerners that allow us insight into the lives of people in this region of the world. For that reason alone the film is worth viewing, its narrative as slow-paced and languid as the daily life of the people it captures. I suppose I watched it more as a documentary than a film; my interest was held by memories that came flooding back of one of the most spectacular parts of my travels in one of the planet’s most misunderstood regions.

The film's worth a look if you have the opportunity.

The Walls of Istanbul

2009-11-06T04:37:00.001+02:00

Once, every town-dweller was born and lived and died within city walls. Paris, London, Rome, every historic city of significant importance built and maintained enormous, strong and resilient stone fortifications, which protected its inhabitants and kept the enemy at bay. Soldiers posted at watchtowers perched high above cobbled streets would be on alert for marauding tribes that might be thinking to conquer a richer, more plentiful society. From the fortified towns of Mughal India to the famously impenetrable citadel of Aleppo, the uncertain and ephemeral nature of peace in eras past meant ubiquitous defensive walls and forts, and in particular the main gate, was the first port of call for foreign traders and dignitaries.

Hangin' with my posse in Balat, Istanbul

To protect his new city of Constantinople from attack by both land and sea, Constantine the Great surrounded the entire prized metropolis with massive defences. Less than a century later construction began again further west, as Emperor Theodosius II needed to enclose to a burgeoning population whose dwellings were already forming hamlets and towns outside Nova Roma, as Constantinople was then known. Once seriously damaged by an earthquake that occurred roughly at the same time Attila the Hun approached with his pillaging armies, the defensive walls were swiftly repaired in a matter of months. Attila tried, but failed to make an impact. The walls stood proud as the last great fortifications of Antiquity, and no army ever broke through.

The walls of Constantinople have not guarded the Byzantine Empire for many a century. Last bastion of the Holy Roman Empire, Byzantium gave way to the early Ottomans, who, before finally conquering Istanbul in 1453, were still unable to breach the Theodosian fortifications. Instead, they laid siege to the diminishing Byzantine power, cutting the city off from its supplies, and literally starving the last of its citizens. Still no-one could breach the city’s defence.

However, since the founding of the modern Turkish Republic last century, rapid population growth has forever relegated the walls, towers and gates to an architectural anachronism. And if sections lining the Marmara Sea and the banks of the Golden Horn no longer stand as proud - and indeed have been misused, abused and pulled down in places - they still often serve a function. Where soldiers and Ottoman janissaries replete with ferocious steel armoury may have once hindered your entrance to the city, today you are more likely to encounter an elderly gentleman seated on a small stool, chatting briefly with passers-by and feeding the pigeons. The walls themselves long ago became less a concrete and more an abstract reality, as pragmatic and forward-thinking Ottoman citizens, be it Muslim, Jew, Armenian, Greek or Rom, absorbed the ancient city’s defence system into their own kitchen and bedroom walls.

Today, within the stones that once demarcated the world’s richest and most powerful city between Portugal and China, lay historic Byzantine and Ottoman remnants. For tourists, Aya Sofia, Sultanahmet Camii (aka the Blue Mosque), the Grand Bazaar and the famous Cirağaoğlu Baths are old leftovers and ancient miscellany, along with tombs, Topkapı Palace, and wooden Ottoman houses that range from the dangerously decrepit to those operating as chic, boutique hotels.

Divan Yolu, once a wide, colonnaded thoroughfare dividing public squares and decorated with Greco-Roman statuary, now hosts the light-rail transporting thousands daily in each direction. International visitors pass near-invisible sections of the ancient city walls as they head towards the old Ottoman palace, guidebook in hand. Dowdy women from working class neighbourhoods descend on Eminönü, Istanbul’s largest, most atmospheric and ramshackle market, to purchase Turkish dietary staples, and though they’ve probably lived in the city their entire lives, they remain unaware of the scattered wall fragments protruding here and there.

Within the easternmost portion of the Theodosian walls, probably the most impressive, and certainly among the best-restored portions of their entire length, sprawl two of this city’s most fascinating neighbourhoods: Sulukule and Balat. Unlike Istanbul’s other inner city regions and far removed from the cosmopolitan feel and shopping precincts on the opposite bank of the Golden Horn, these two neighbourhoods make for a stroll quite unlike any other in this town. ‘Belle époque’ facades of the buildings on İstiklal Caddesi, photos taken by almost every tourist, are absent from an area inhabited strictly by traditional Turkish families and one of the world’s oldest Rom communities.

As you pass through an enormous gate in the walls, you leave behind the roaring, unrelenting traffic of the modern city and enter a quieter, calmer way of life. In Sulukule - Water Tower in English - an impromptu assembly of gypsy children will instantly appear, grinning confidently. Everyone is younger than ten. Each girl carries a smaller sibling, each boy a plastic toy gun. Shoddily constructed abodes of vivid, garish colours stretch higgledy -piggledy up and around narrow, twisted lanes that are unsuitable for motorised traffic. Many homes have ingeniously incorporated the old city walls into their structure. Why build anew when the tried-and-tested product sits unused? Sulukule contains an endangered way of life that is disappearing; with plans to rehouse the Rom in generic and unforgiving and unsightly tower blocks already underway, the gentle character of the area is about to change forever.

A little further north and you arrive in Balat, another old world contained completely within the walls. The smell of fresh bread and sickly baklava dominate, and entire streets overflow with children playing football or simply chatting in the middle of the road. In front of the barbershop sits the stereotypical, moustachioed male, idling away the days over tea and simit, the pretzel-like bread ring smothered in sesame seeds. Balat is poor as Sulukule is forgotten, and within these 1500 year-old walls are protected a way of life that will probably not endure.

Whether you favour official government statistics or taxi drivers as your source of information, Istanbul counts among its inhabitants either ten or twenty millions souls. Balat and Sulukule would have once been the outermost district of a prosperous, medieval Byzantium, at a time when it was indeed ‘City of the World’s Desire’. Today, these former outer districts could not be any further inner-city, and the desire of both government and private developers will soon bring in architects of the banal and characterless, as bulldozers reduce the area to a blank slate. The famous walls of Antiquity can no longer protect all within its bounds. However, they will naturally continue to stand, long after the inhabitants of Balat and Sulukule move into their new tower blocks, and are forgotten.

Living alone

2009-11-05T01:09:00.003+02:00

It’s a guaranteed behaviour pattern to permanently engrave counterproductive habits.

I haven’t lived alone for an extended period since 1993, when I was completing my Bachelors degree and spending untold hours in front of a blank off-white wall containing three hairline cracks, searching for motivation to finish any number of essays on French language and literature. If I thought I’d won the battle way back then of talking to myself, then I need to think again. Just shy of a six month solo stint in my apartment at the seaside suburb of Coogee, the outcome on the war against my relentless mono-conversational habit is far from clear.

In fact, along with a plethora of undesirable character traits, I am under siege in my abode against the my most malevolent customs; of verbalising the logic of my own fatuous arguments, chastising myself when displeased about my inability to advance in my career, and habitually giving myself a very hard time indeed about procrastinating. Living alone brings out my deepest anxiety, that of going quietly, incrementally, irreversibly non compos mentis. Just like people of faith.

Staring fixedly at my secretly blinking laptop screen for the greater part of the day assures me that all is not well. At times My Dell delivers indeciperable dispatches from the technological ether. It communicates in a language of blips and frozen browsers I fail to understand, try as I might. My phone might ring once, perhaps twice in a space of 24 hours, hardly enough to keep my faltering space within the kingdom of the social animal. I leave the house for a my first coffee sometime before midday, stroll along the beach in search of inspiration to write, then return to the house where I trawl online news services to obtain that sinking feeling that can only come from second-hand eye witness reports and rehashed releases of press agency hacks. I search the entire world to remain up-to-date on current affairs, and yet my physical existence plays out in a space of 15 square metres. Hardly verysensible.com.

I’ve given carte blanche to my unconscious, to nurture and grow my feelings of inadequacy, impotence and sense of underachievement. The resistance to the 9-to-5 workathon is admirable in principle, but the rent is due three days hence and I am sorely lacking in ammunition with which to hold back the landlady.

Somehow the rampant, inextinguishable resource of common sense among the female members of my family is almost absent in the males. I have the beginnings of common sense but I lack practicality and pragmatism. I can’t seem work out how to do what I love and make a living from it.

Still, perhaps it’s therapeutically beneficial to work through these issues on the laptop. I’ve no doubt that is cuts down on shaving time since I definitely spent fewer minute in front of the mirror this morning, barely argued with my reflection, and splashed my chin clean of shaving foam without once doing a Taxi Driver-inspired rant.

I undoubtedly need a solid, interactive social experience. And I’m well-pleased my mates have invited to join them at Quiz Night this evening.

I may just briefly return to the shaving mirror to go over my opening lines of conversation for this evening.

Crucifixes are not a symbol of history, culture and secularism.

2009-11-04T08:41:00.005+02:00

The European Court of Human Rights today ruled against the presence of crucifixes in Italian classrooms, stating that such displays violate religious and education freedoms, rejecting Italy’s arguments that the crucifix was a symbol of culture, history and secularism. Nice one.

The facts in Lautsi v. Italy were thus: Referring to a Court of Cassation judgement of 2000 which found the presence of crucifixes in polling stations contrary to the principles of secularism of the State, Ms Lautsi had written to her sons’ school on the matter of the display of crucifixes in classroom. In response, The Ministry of State Education issued a directive to all head teachers recommending that the crucifixes remain where they were.

Following a number of previous decisions regarding religious garments and symbols in the public area of secular nations, the Court unanimously ruled against the Italian state, failing to understand how a symbol associated with Catholicism could serve the educational pluralism that was essential to the preservation of a ‘democratic society’ as that was conceived by the Convention. Further, the Court recommended the State refrain from imposing beliefs in premises where individuals were dependent on it.

Director of the Holy See Press Office, Rev Federico Lombardi, naturally, as only a theologian can, claimed that the cross and crucifix are not solely religious symbols, but additionally represent European humanist values, and that the Court has no jurisdiction to proclaim on such a profoundly Italian matter.

Well, the act of torture that is nailing a living a human to a cross and leaving him there until such time that he expires has never been a symbol of humanism, but rather of humanity at it most brutally cruel, ignorant and intolerant. The Christian deity so loved that the world that He gave us His only son. And did nothing to save him from a violent death.

To remain impassive while His child was murdered in the most barbaric and reprehensible manner is an act that only the unquestioningly idiotic could interpret as paternal, tender loving care. Try that very same act today and see where it lands you. I’d suggest a life-time of reflection in a psychiatric correctional institution. We’ve moved on from Middle East schlock-horror tales as a system of moral guidance.

Secondly, the Reverend is wrong to think this an Italian matter. The ongoing parliamentary inquiry in France on the burqa and, more importantly, the off-again, on-again debate in Turkey about the headscarf in public office show to what point secular values need to be reiterated and be given legal weight against the insidious creep of religious indoctrination. State and religion were long ago forcefully separated so that humanity could drag itself from the ideologies of fear disseminated equally during sermons from pulpit to minbar.

The rhetoric of delusion has not yet been silenced, however, the European Court of Human Rights offers hope that students of Italian state schools might benefit from a little more effective insulation and protection against the ill-wind that hosts the unstoppable, constantly-mutating bacteria of religion.

The Italian State plans to appeal.

I'm hot.

2009-11-03T05:24:00.005+02:00

If you need to discover anything at all regarding time, calculations of time, dates, the movement of planetary objects, calendars, or simply the current weather conditions at Kingsford-Smith Airport in Sydney, http://www.timeanddate.com/ is the place to look.

I only had to step outside this morning to feel the heat, but the website confirmed that it's just hit 38 degrees this afternoon.

So I'm posting this photograph to remind me of a time I really felt rather cool. And relaxed.

After two days in Gilgit, a town in the far northwest of Pakistan, for the umpteenth time I had squeezed into a minivan for an uncomfortable journey to the Kalash Valley, home to a non-Muslim culture with polytheistic beliefs.

The accumulated dust and grime that built up in every possible crevice of my achingly tired body was soon washed away in the torrent of water that came direct from the Hindu Kush, a miniature waterfall among the gentle fields of corn and sunflowers, its waters so bitingly cold that I suffered cramp when I eventually decided to stand up again.

My smile is genuine. The northern districts of Pakistan boast the some of the most spectacular and dramatic scenery I'll ever witness.

However, it doesn't resemble other dramatic scenes instigated in murderous fashion by the forces of evil that exist within Pakistan. The almost-daily tragedies now visiting this beautiful region are making their insidious way closer and closer to the capital, Islamabad.

Yesterday's bombing of the Shalimar hotel and shopping complex in Rawalpindi that claimed 35 lives is a stark reminder to the military forces, both Pakistani and international, that there must be a solid and continued undertaking to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism.

There is no longer a need instill fear in a other-worldly inferno of fire and brimstone when certain groups of militant religious extremists have created a highly successful version of Hell here on Earth, terrorising and killing innocent civilians with absolutely no respect for human life.

The trauma inflicted upon the people of Pakistan is something beyond the imagination of most of us, a perpetual series of terrible and horrific events that will leave the nation in a state of shock. That the Pakistani offensive has been able to gain a reputed Taliban stronghold of Kaniguram in South Waziristan yesterday is perhaps a welcome piece of news.

I don't want extremism, I reject fundamentalism, I condemn proselytising and I think it's time to abandon religion - it has no place in this world. If only an ideology could wash over on the planet and clean away the poisonous filth we have created in our own minds. I think there's a double-action cleaning agent that will admirably to the job. It's the combination of science and atheism.

Sculpture by the Sea 2009

2009-11-02T10:53:00.003+02:00

Scuplture by the Sea is in it's 13th season this year and runs to 15 November.

Against the gorgeous backdrop Sydney's eastern seaboard, sculptures large and small crowd the cragged landscape with form, texture, light and colour.

With over a hundred creations lurking in crevices, under and over precipices, standing on concrete, stone and sands, the outdoor gallery invites the imagination and brings together works from scultpors of diverse backgrounds and cultures.

However, I've had to post the photographs on to my flickr account, since for some reason blogspot allows me only one image per post before it decides to completely spit the dummy.

heliocidaris tuberculata, by Kelly Ann Lees

Halal. In praise of religious slaughter.

2009-11-02T05:45:00.011+02:00

I think I might like this woman.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Princess Alia bint al-Hussein of Jordan, sister of the current monarch, has written to Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, questioning the validity of standards employed in the abattoirs to provide halal meat for the Middle East export markets.

Notably, she states that "killing without stunning is unnecessary under Islamic principles," and that her opinion is based on extensive talks with Islamic authorities, which I'll assume here are theologian or scholars rather than imams, mad clerics or those claiming to be in some way closer to a non-existent supernatural force because of retarded adherence to a book of captivating, murderous myths.

I'm not quite sure whether, given 21st century technology, the Old Testament deity would have supplied Abraham with a stun gun so Isaac might have suffered a more humane sacrifice at the hands of his other father. but hey, this isn't the the pre-EnlightenmentMiddle East: So what is the Australian government doing by allowing exemptions to federal animal slaughter guidelines to fulfil export contracts?

I commend Her Highness for bringing the Australian public's attention to the plight of such animals, though I reject the necessity to quote any religious authority in order to put forward a logical argument.

Mr Burke, Minister for Agriculture fearlessly affirms: "It is not for [the] Government to adjudicate over these differences, but it is our role within the spectrum of faiths in Australia to promote the most humane practices."

That appears to be the case unless in conflict with fantastical demands of worthless religious garbage. I demand that my government provide the most 'humane' death to all animals slaughtered for human consumption, and assert that religion has no say whatsoever in how these practises are determined.

It is the government's responsibility to ensure this. Religious expertise is not required here because religion has no role to play.

If the majority of Muslim countries accept the practice of stunning animals before slaughter, who exactly are we catering to here? The Saudis? I'd love to know more about these contracts.

Ministry of Agriculture, how would I like my steak? Atheist thanks - and hold the double standards.

Montara Oil Spill and the Kimberley

2009-11-01T03:37:00.001+02:00

This photo unsettles me.

Is was taken today, 1 November, over seventy days since the oil began to spew forth. And now the rig uncontollably belches fire and flame.

I possess scant knowledge of the oil and gas industries. I fail to appreciate the differences between sweet light crude and refined black viscous goo. I have know idea why unleaded petrol is better for engines than other fuels, though environmentally aware enough to comprehend humankind's need to move away from our polluting oil-based economies to something remarkably and radically different, before we make the planet unable to support us as a species.

It disturbs me that an oil leak has been belching an estimated 400 to 500 barrels of oil and gas into the Timor Sea. Each and every day since the 21 August this year, when the well head accident occurred on the West Atlas Rig owned by PTTEP Australasia. The thing is, no-one seems too concerned.

Since a barrel holds approximately 160 litres, my reckoning is that about four and a half million litres of crude oil are now failing to mix with the waters off the Kimberley coast, already having entered Indonesian waters. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) most updated release as of 26 October states that, to date, roughly 350,000 litres of oil and gas has been recovered.

PTTEP Australasia has acknowledged that the leak is going to be difficult to plug. A fire on the rig would - I'm guessing - in all likelihood make the undertaking somewhat more troublesome.

I just finished subediting a magazine last night for which one the this editions featured stories is about the Kimberley, one of Australia's last great wildernesses. As to be expected, the photography is mindboggling; of vast, untamed landscape ravaged by water and air over eons. It's remoteness from Industrial Age humankind has kept it pristine even into the 21st century.

Two months ago the oil slick was reported by the AMSA as being 170 kilometres from the coast of Western Australia, and moving closer. How far from shore it is now is impossible to say, since neither the Ministry for the Enviroment, Water, Hertiage and the Arts nor the AMSA has provided recent updates on this issue.

While I have good faith in the serious undertakings by Australian government departments and agencies to bring the leak under control, clean-up the spilled product, care for injured wildlife and monitor the environmental damage in the long-term, I cannot see how this story has failed to attract more media attention.

I worry equally about the apathy of my fellow citizens, the discriminate nature of the media, and the fact that that the story about the Kimberley might need some addenda before the print layout is sent to the press.

Let's hope the leak is plugged and the oil recovered quickly, rather than it being used to lubricate the machine of spin and recrimination, should the spill ever deface Kimberley wilderness.

The burqa debate continues in France

2009-10-31T08:25:00.000+02:00

Several months ago a number of French députés called on Sarkozy’s government to launch a parliamentary enquiry, with a goal to determine the place, if any, that the burqa has in French society. Not so long earlier a Moroccan-born female had been denied French citizenship, on the basis that wearing the head-to-toe all-encompassing Islamic garment put her at severe odds with the values of a fiercely secular society.

The debate on the burqa continues to fan public outcry in the French republic, as the parliamentary enquiry around a subject that hits the core of the French republic: secularism, or laïcité.

France outlawed the wearing of any conspicuous item in the public schooling system in 2004. Education should be secular, and as atheists and humanists have already stated, there is simply no such thing as a Muslim child, a Christian toddler or a Jewish teenager.

Children are indoctrinated first by their parents, and later by official religious teaching. The argument runs: I am a child of Christian parents and I am too young to have made any decision governing my convictions. The argument is without flaw and the lawmakers were judicious in banning religious garment and symbols from the school ground.

Nevertheless, if we put aside woman who are coerced into donning the burqa, which present an altogether alternate set of issues, what about the woman who chooses to do so? Is the French republic so scared of a backwards-looking minority sect that it would introduce legislation to ban it altogether?

There is no place for fear and ignorance in the legislation of the world’s greatest democracies. Prohibition rarely works.

Still, France does have a minority of Salafists, those who follows the pure ways of the earliest descendants of Mohammed. Salafism is the uglier face of ‘them and us’ religion; reactionary, exclusivist and degrading to women. Sects are by name unable to integrate and indeed reject society as a whole. Salafism equates with obscurantism and its spread should be arduously watched for by other nations.

France should not ban the burqa. It should simply take a step back and think about who it is letting into the country. The country with Europe’s largest population of Muslims should acknowledge clearly that the majority of that population are peaceable and originating from northern Africa, where the burqa is equally seen as a sectarian anachronism.

Banning the burqa puts all Muslims in the same pot, when they are clearly as varied as any other faith.

Peshawar

2009-10-30T04:07:00.004+02:00

Peshawar is a frontier town, capital of the North West Frontier Provinces (NWFP). The NWFP share much of its western border with the even more syllabic-challengingly named Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a thin strip of terrain nestled among gnarled mountains, and an area over which the Pakistan government holds only nominal control. Peshawar lies close to the fabled Khyber Pass, and the borders of Afghanistan can be reached by car in about one hour.

For readers of newspapers who can no longer follow the almost-daily explosions and attacks ripping apart this part of the world, the latest car bomb three days ago in Peshawar just seems but another event in a long string of lawlessness that undermines Pakistan.

The bomb was shockingly effective. While the dust floats back down onto the street and pavements of Meena Bazaar, there are now over one hundred confirmed casualties and two hundred injured. After a string of attacks in recent weeks as the Pakistani army leads an assault against Taliban militants in the FATA South Waziristan Agency, this city of three million must be living in constant fear.

According to the BBC, Hakimullah Meshud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, the car bomb was the work of US and foreign security agencies. Hilary Clinton, in a speech delivered in Lahore, mentioned the women and child victims of the horrific blast. Regardless of age or gender of the dead, and irrespective of the Meshud’s words, the Taliban has to be removed. No serious secularist, here or in Pakistan, can trust the insane fundamentalist ideology of a savage bunch of cowardly murders.

The Taliban must be eradicated. With or without hard evidence to find the instigators of the Peshawar car bomb, the terror has got to stop. It’s going to be a long haul, and that the American Secretary of State pledging US$ 45 million towards higher education in Pakistan, it’s a very small step in the right direction.

Obama has iterated his desire to strengthen relations with a nation that, strategically, remains of vital importance in the region. Let’s just hope not a rupee of that foreign aid goes into the hand of religious teachers, but to secular learning based on humanist principles. The Taliban must be defeated and in the long struggle to do so it’s important that the opposing side worries less about being on the right side of some supernatural god and more about preserving values common to all of humankind.

'Cos it's true... I do, I do, I do, I do, I do...

2009-10-29T14:37:00.006+02:00

ABBA’s lyrics have resonated in another way since I attended Keysar Trad’s talk on polygamy last month at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas here in Sydney. Arriving sodden at the steps of the Opera House one languid and drizzly Saturday morning, I collected my delegate pass and wandered over to the Studio theatre to hear Mr Trad; first speaker of the festival, former interpreter for the outrageously divisive Sheik Taj El-Din Hilaly, and founder of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.

Entitled Polygamy and other Islamic values are good for Australia, it is not within the realm of common sense that Mr Trad felt he would gain acolytes on this occasion. Indeed, the Festival’s organisers might have just been cunning in placing him as the first speaker on the first day, since almost anything with Islam in the title is sure to hasten disparagement and denigration in our irreligious, secular and promiscuous society. With the amount of media vitriol previously directed at Mr Trad, he must also have known he’d walk onto that stage a marked man. Unlikely as it was that a middle-class crowd of Sydneysiders would become openly hostile, question time assured a few heated exchanges.

The premise was as follows: In a society that protects all forms of intimate relations amongst consenting adults (excepting incest), why do we criminalise a branch of those legal relations when a person seeks to make a formal commitment? Such relations are only criminalised if one seeks to formalise them, if not, they are perfectly legal whether as boyfriend(s)/girlfriend(s) or de facto or as casual intimacy, they are only crimes if we make the commitment of a formal partnerships.

Regrettably, the proposed evidence for the argument was, putting it diplomatically, inadmissible.

After a significant swathe of precedents originating almost exclusively from scripture, it was put to us that polygamy should not be ridiculed as long as prostitution exists in the West. It’s tedious and tiresome to hear the holy texts quoted, and scant credence can be given to the claim that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Who believes that? And should the early Jews, Christians, Muslims or followers of any other faith have practised polygamy a millennium ago, that is hardly logical reasoning to continue any cultural tradition. As to prostitution, no civilisation worth its mettle has not had sex-industry workers toiling for the greater good alongside its politicians, scholars, scientists and artists.

Metering out anecdote and personal opinion does not constitute a sound method by which to influence and persuade. And for the majority among us, holy texts are anthologies of the fantastical, the fabulous, and the simply untrue.

As for "societies that practise monogamy and clandestine relations", they are demonstrably not, as Mr Trad, put it,"delusional." Monogamy is certainly not a perfect modus operandi for all. It is a manner in which millions of people with different beliefs and values take on, for better or for worse, with or without official sanction of the church, temple or mosque. Besides, a single fertile male and a single fertile female are the minimum ingredients required to procreate; if begetting children was the sole reason for our existence, mathematically two provides less relationship permutations that three, four and more. Further, no proof was offered that infidelity is less present in polygamous than monogamous relations. Why complicate the recipe by adding unwanted complexity into the mixture? Keep it simple.

After attempting to explain the shortcoming for one-on-one liaisons, we learn that Mohammed came upon the solution: polygyny. Quite naturally, the audience must’ve felt duped. Polgyny, the act of a male entering into conjugal relationships with more than one woman, was the only real thing on offer here. Its counteroffer, polyandry, where a woman possesses more than one husband, was not on the agenda. The reason for this? Scripture. More like bollocks. Further, apparently there are medical reasons that women should be disallowed from entering into polygamous relationships. What they might be, well, we weren’t to discover.

There are too many educated, independent and free-thinking women in today’s society to really bother any further with the remainder of Mr Trad’s speech. It was supposed to be a dangerous topic, however, inanity wasn’t what the audience had looked forward to. Well, maybe just a little.

As Mr Trad dug himself a deeper hole with the shovels of illogical anachronism and ancient mythology, he didn’t seem too bothered. Digging a small trench along the way, he even suggested the sexual proclivities of men predispose them to polygamy, and that women lose their libido if left to languish in monogamy. You had to wonder if the man remembered that question and answer time would inevitably follow.

But it should be stated: there is a sound, ethical argument for polygamy. Better still, polyamory, having a number of sexual partners at the same time, appears the egalitarian and just path down which to stroll. There might just be enough love to go around, without anyone belonging to another by law.

Keysar Trad's full speech is here: Supporting the right of women to choose

[It's worth noting, Keysar Trad is no fire-breathing monster. There are certainly attempts in the Australian media to cast the man as totally objectionable and offensive, which often detract from what he actually says. His ideas are more nonsensical than offensive, and it doesn't pay the smug, the highly literate and the University-educated to denigrate him. In public he has a warm smile and is approachable. He does believe what he puts forward, and since very few of us would show the courage to stand by our convictions under such scrutiny, I'll at least give him the benefit of an open mind. Even if I did have the odd wry smile myself during his speech. Vive la difference, I guess - just don't elect the man into office.]

Moving forward

2009-10-27T07:01:00.001+02:00

It's been a full eight months since I last wrote anything on this site.

Partly due to laziness and partly owing to my unexpected and unsatisfactory re-insertion into Western society, I've found time, patience and motivation wanting as I passed weeks and then months back in the corporate world, replete with mistruths, amoral hyperbole, mind-crushing conservatism and a sycophantic, uninspiring and delusional desire for social status.Frankly, if it weren't for my friends, I would certainly have gone off the rails by now. And there is certainly a small group of my acquaintances that has undoubtedly come to the conclusion that I have veritably digressed from the path of social inclusion, to a shady world where my loud opinions promise a life of misery and exclusion. I have a sneaking suspicion that my current path, while allowing me once more to sleep soundly at night, is forever making me incompatible with living in general, polite society.

You see, I've just about had it with the values and concerns of the place I presently call home. However, I know the problem to be me, and not the society I'm living. It's just not possible that everyone else is wrong. If the majority of people wake up five days a week, don suit, shirt and tie and head into an office to work an inordinate number of hours, I am not here to decry it. My dissatisfaction with my own life is entirely my own doing, and I am to blame for letting it get so out of control that I almost sunk permanently into a deep well of delusion.

I'm disgusted with myself; that I didn't have the courage to speak out sooner and face my fears. That I sold my sold to a devil I don't even believe in. It genuinely pains me that after four years where I had the fortitude to do what I want and construct a life that was moral and worthy of living, I gratified myself with the trap of Western work life.

None of it counts for anything. I see unhappiness wherever a person's goals direct only his ascent up the ladder of social acceptance. Misery behind hundreds of thousands of closed doors, houses in which inhabitants lead a life of self-absorption and slow suicide, where people venerate illusion and sweep anything that might hint at truth or visceral emotion under carpet, forever held down by upholstered Chesterfields and giant plasma screens bleating the latest garbage masquerading as newsworthy events.

It feels good to breathe again.

Sydney. You ought to be happy here.

2009-04-26T14:44:00.004+03:00

Sydney inhabits a geography that gives it a massive and unfair advantage alongside other cities of comparable size and population.

The country's largest metropolitan conglomeration has more beaches, bays, inlets, sensuous curves, crests and cliffs that any other city I've yet visited. The dense, built-up areas between the central business district, from Bennelong Point which supports the magnificent Opera House, through to the rocky and wild cliffs facing the vast Pacific, house the middle and upper class in apartments and houses that take full advantage of the city's natural beauty. And, at least in the eastern stretch of the city, water is everywhere.

The harbour flows out to the Heads, a turbulent neck of water that announces the grand and vast Pacific Ocean, with seas that glisten and waves that smash with unnatural force against the weathered sandstone on which the city is built. The water is alive with a myriad of sea-going vessels, from the thousands of pleasure craft clogging the waterways on the weekend to the green and gold ferry carrying commuters from the centre to the furthest reaches east and west.

The city has magnificent parks and even patches of quasi-wilderness that line the foreshore. The Botanic Gardens are perched on the edge of the business district; many stroll through it on the way home from work.

Sydney is clean, its air fresh. It has sunrises that cast an orange glow across the eastern suburb, sunsets that cause the downtown skyscapers to glint, the bridge standing proud. The quality of life enjoyed by the majority of its inhabitants is unrivalled in many countries, even those of the western world. Access to good food, clean water, transport, health care, social welfare; it makes most people incredibly smug to live in a city like this.

But I just can't settle in.

Whither?

2008-12-28T07:50:00.011+02:00

These are my current possessions:

10 year-old backpack in need of a replacement zipper
green JanSport daypack

two pair of jeans

black Nike sweater

brown cable-knit wool cardigan

maroon and white check wool jumper

brown button-up wool jumper

multi-coloured wool scarf

two Quicksilver T-shirts; one chocolate brown, the other dark blue

chocolate brown Quicksilver long-sleeve short

two pair of my own underpants

one pair of underpants stolen from Athens International Youth Hostel

a brown belt

five socks

laptop

2GB flash drive

digital camera

pocket English-Turkish dictionary

keys to an apartment in Istanbul

a nazar boyuncu to protect me from the Evil Eye

two books; Salonica - City of Ghosts and Paradise Lost, Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance

Clearly, everything one needs to re-establish one's life in Sydney. In the middle of summer.

It's now time to bring a halt to feelings of self-pity and medium-level despair that have enveloped my world-view over the past few weeks. It's time to recognise that forces beyond both control and comprehension have landed me back in the Antipodes, that I must accept a temporary full-time existence in The City of Sin, that for some time I shan't be requiring most possessions strewn across my attic bedroom.

After a life dedicated to avoiding responsibility, work and meaningful personal relationships, I have just received a Victoria Cross, of sorts. I have no job, no abode of my own - my world fits in a 70 litre backpack.

A good thing. Challenging. It's freedom at its most frightening. I have no plan, no idea of what to do next, and, aside from anguish of being wrenched from my city, friends and cats, the upcoming year is a blank slate.

I'm going to do as I damn well please.

This is my chance to do it again, to do it properly, to chase a few more dreams. To spend more time ambling around the globe, to reacquaint myself with Sydney, with friends, with supermarkets, footpaths and greenery. I'm going to read everything I want. That 'things to do before I die' I compiled on the terrace of some filthy hovel in Delhi in 2003 is going to be re-written. I can even mark as completed a few things too.

Most importantly, I promise that I am going to complete my travelogue of Istanbul, commenced way back in late 2005 and never finished. I'm going to start today.

These people just hosted the Olympics, didn't they?

2008-12-13T14:55:00.015+02:00

According to every erudite scholar educated in the Western tradition, the city in which I have passed the last two weeks gave birth to our civilisation. Though these days Athens looks more like an afterbirth.

However, that's not to say I dislike Athens. In fact, I like filth, sleaze and louche. When travelling, I love ambulating in cities which carry a higher-than-recommended degree of personal risk. Well, at least I enjoy a titillating frisson of fear every now and then. If the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade squeal about security in a particular region, then that's probably where I'd like to be. But I'm no adventure traveller, don't get me wrong. I'm just attracted to people who look as though they might cause trouble and places where I might get hurt. I have no quarel with that type of backpacker who aches to tell of his perilous 52 hour journey from Uttar Pradesh into the Tibet strapped to the back of a mongoose. I'm happy to arrive by plane and just enjoying hanging out with the undesirables.

I am a voyeur. I love to watch. For someone more or less stuck in the city for nigh on two weeks, there are worse places I could've been. Athens has provided the cheapest, non-stop supply of human parade. Hours passed sitting in squares, half-heartedly browising a novel but feasting upon the plethora of souls. Athens seems overflowing with defective beings.

To be fair, I suspect that during the last two weeks I have displayed signs that make other move away from me. That far away unattached looked in my eyes that seems to trouble others. I might be weirding people out too just like those leering men in the street facing the hotel.

So central Athens is a kaleidoscpoe of the down-and-out. Omonia Square, undoubtedly a former shopping district of some worth, has swapped consumer for bench-sitter. And it's crammed with men, most immigrants clearly struggling to make a new life in Greece.

The Pakistanis and Afghans are distinguished by dress - I don't think the shalwar kameez has much been worn in these parts since Ottoman times. According to the locals, Bulgarians are here for drugs and prostitution (Man, it's like the whole ex-Communist rabble are labelled the same the whole world over). My source of local information tells me that the immigrants are legal, and generally harmless - except of course the Arabs who naturally are the arse-end of the world's genetic make-up. (Why is it that Arabs induce scorn, almost without exception?) West African are also numerous, and unique among the immigrants as both males and females walk the streets.

Anyway, there are few Greeks in central Athens. Just a mass of immigrants, drug addicts, down-and-outs and piles of fairly unsightly buildings. These people could do with a few more trained architects.

The staff of the Acropolis has been on strike since my arrival and riots have broken out sporadically across not just Athens, but all major cities in the country over the past week. Smashed windows, burned out buildings and vehicles and the proliferation of graffitti will be my most vivid memories of Athens.

I have a feeling it might be more pleasant on the islands.

Athens has been a good place to wander and think. Questions have arisen and my little brain has been surprisingly up to the task of finding answers. It's good to know that approaching forty I'm no closer to achieving material success, and yet I feel a smug satisfaction at how lucky I've been up until now. Being refused entry into Turkey had never been a hypothetical situation, it was a fait accompli that Istanbul was my home. Appropriate mental adjustments have been made.

Only sixteen days out of Turkey, my brain has wandered far from my neighbourhood of Cihangir, mainly to the vast spaces of South America that I'm yet to explore. In the meantime, I look forward to being among friends again in Sydney. And I'll finally get that meat pie I craved several months ago on another post.

The last post

2008-12-07T20:24:00.010+02:00

If I weren't stoically Anglo-saxon then I might be given to an emotional outburst here.

Unbeknownst to them, they are about to begin life again out on the streets.

Today I conceded defeat and made the decision - it's time to return to Sydney. Ten days away from home and I realise how impermanent everything is. My apartment will go, my possessions boxed up and stored until some such time as I can afford to send them to my next destination, my cats back out onto the street and my lifestyle appears as much as it always has - unstable. In fact, the only stable thing in my life is instability. I can at least count on that.

It is with grande tristesse that I'm having to bid adieu to Istanbul long before our affair came to a close. But still, we always lose what we love and it's better to have left perhaps before the magic turned to familiarity and thus changed to complacency.

Istanbul still retains her mystery and charm, and in a way I prefer to leave it like that. Three years is not long enough to know well a gargantuan city the size of old Constantinople, less still did I have enough time to discover all the hidden neighbourhoods and backstreets.

There are many things that I will miss and I want to write them down before they begin to fade. My memory has never been strong and I'm recording this so in a year or two I can sit down and relive some souvenirs of this city... instead of wanting to rise up against the Turkish bureaucracy, as I do right now.

Here then is my list of what's worth remembering and savouring in Istanbul - the good, the bad, and the other bits.

Generosity You ain't experienced nothing until you get the Turkish treatment. Turks are hospitality personified, almost annoying so. When you're stuck arguing for the umpteenth time over who's going to pay the bill, just laugh - the Turk will always win. Let them, they are known to turn violent and many a guest has been seen clasping his own innards while squriming on the restaurant floor after being knifed by a Turk who wanted to pay the bill... Man, if I were re-born, I'm come back as a Swedish woman and live in Istanbul. Men, as macho as they are, never let the woman pay. Luckily for me, my female Turkish friends are very modern indeed.

Cats See it to believe it. I leave many friends in Istanbul but my only two loyal bedpartners were the lovely Shish and Kebab. I am really, really going to miss you guys. Be good to each other and don't let George give you grief. Fight back. I miss you both very much and hope you understand I never meant to abandon you. It's just that a complete prick at the Turkish-Bulgarian border decided to ruin my life.

Bayrak No idea why, but I love the Turkish flag. It does nothing for me emotionally but it doesn't have to. I'm indifferent to Australia's, and detest the boxing kangaroo thing that gets pulled out at sporting events. Jesus, give me a break. It makes me cringe. A star and croissant, I mean, crescent, is kinda sexy. It looks tough, for the kinda people you wouldn't want to fight with.

Footpaths I dunno, but I must have some kind of obsession about them. There is no city outside of India that has worse footpaths than Istanbul. My feeling is for the last eighty year footpath contracts have been won by the same company that has then proceeded to pocket 90% of the designated funds and instead builds somethng that the majority of residents will trip over at some point in time. The man who wins these footpath capital work projects undoubtedly lives in a very big mansion. It is not possible in the city centre to find 10 metres of footpath that does not have some freakin' flaw, it places an activity like, well, walking, into the realm of extreme sports. You have no idea how many times I have gone a**** over t** in this town. History is no excuse, the Italians can build footpaths and look at how corrupt they are.

Lies Turkish children lie to their parents. About almost everything. They think it stops them worrying. Think again kids.

Tutting The first time it happens you stare incredulous. After a few years you have also adopted the habit that would have made your grannie slap your fae. The Turks tut at every minor grievance but it's not ill-intended. It does take some getting used to and I hope not to do it when passing through customs at Sydney airport.

Chewing gum Until arriving in Istanbul I thought only Americans and people who wanted to look American chewed gum. But no, Turks definitely don't want to look American and the average Turkish male even chews with his mouth open. Quite frankly, what is the point of gum? It's not fun, it's not healthy, and it makes an even bigger mess in a city which barely has footpaths, let alone ones wide enough deal with take the onslaught of discarded gum. Singapore, stupid nation of Lee Kwan Yew (sic) arse-lickers that it is, at least got one thing right. Ban the gum.

Headscarves Let's allow Turkey to work this one out for itself, shall we? Whatever my own view, it's clear that this politically charged non-issue expends intellectual resources that would be better used focusing on more pressing issues in the country. Anyway, if God had wanted us to wear a headscarf he would have said it in the Koran. Which he didn't.

Black Turkish people couldn't get dressed in the morning without it.

Bread I have no idea how much of the stuff I consumed over the last nine hundred odd meals.

Gesticulating and warmth Man, I have to go back to a land where the handshake is about as much physical affection as people allow. Gone are the warm hugs, the kisses, the friendliness and ease of the tactile Turk. I have to return to talking without use of other limbs. This also depresses me.

Grooming Turks dress well. Rich or poor, the Turk loves to look good. These are more hairdressers and barbers per sqare inch in The Greater Istanbul City Council than at a Vidal and Sassoon Annual General Meeting. And Turks are an unbelievably well dressed race, notwithstanding that Middle East gangster is not the look for everyone. The male Turk is almost beyond metrosexuality. Perhaps one of the only things I won't miss about Istanbul is the vain male sporting a ridiculously manicured beard and ostntatiously preening himself in any mirror available. They have no shame and do it even in public places, and again, I'm sorry, but I think that's wrong.

Of ya! How the rest of the world is yet to adopt this phrase is beyond me. So handy when you really, really need to whine.

Orhan Pamuk A pleasantly political choice for the Nobel Prize for literature. Either I'm not clever enough to understand his work or his sentences are so tediously long that I lose the will to live; either way, I admit after all this time that I've read only three of his works.

Moustaches No-one, but no-one beats that Turk. Gotta say though that I do look kinda sexy with a handle bar number myself. This is one sport in which you will win all medals (with The Pakistanis coming a close second, India third). It's just that the championship hasn't been organised yet.

Turkish muscle Don't be dirty, I'm talking beer gut. Every male in the nation, either upon marrying or reaching 35 years of age, will develop a certain rotundity fast. But since I man without a belly is like a house with a balcony, I've grown fond of mine too, because I've always liked a balcony.

Attention It's narcissistic to say but at least I'm honest - in Australia no-one will notice me. In Turkey I look foreign, sound foreign and probably still act foreign. It made me stand out, and yes, I liked that. I'd never felt so exotic.

Guns Too many of them. Turkey, guns don't make a society safe, they make it paranoid. A nineteen year-old wielding a semi-automatic weapon down Istiklal Caddesi during peak hour does nothing for my peace of mind.

Turklish I'm now a fluent speaker. I hope to regain fluency also in English over the following few months. I have a terrible feeling I'm going to continue uttering broken phrases in graded language until someone punches. That'll take a week.

Beyaz peynir When I first sampled the bleached white tasteless rubbery substance passed off as cheese, I spat it out thinking I was chewing on the plastic wrap. Now, I can't live without it, but may well have to.

Politics Tricky one. It's time to ditch the leader of the CHP. Your only serious opposition party is run by a suspect megalomanic who can only scream on camera and doesn't seem to want to share power. You need fresh blood or you're going to be stuck with the AKP for a lot longer yet.

Turkish males moving fast This is both unnatural and quite probably against the law. Watch a Turkish man run. It's hilarious. I can't explain why but you have the impression that it's perhaps the first time he's realised his body could achieve such a thing. Complete lack of co-ordination. I dunno, but this always amused me.

Inhibitions (the lack thereof) These people get up and dance and sing without drinking alcohol. It's very, very unnerving.

History If there is one thing I will miss about Turkey, it's Istanbul's timelessness. In Sydney there's little chance of wandering about and thinking 'who lived and breathed and worked and loved and fought and died in this place 1500 years ago?' This thought depresses me. I love Istanbul above all because it is a town that lives with it's rich past so very well.

French If you speak it, your Turkish vocabulary increases by 300% overnight. Handy, but doesn't help you one iota to comprehend the unfathomable grammar.

Kiro Take a lanky youth. One tub of hair gel. A tight fitting lurid-coloured shirt with only three buttons (or you only need three as the remainder won't be buttoned). Eyebrow tweezers. A necklace your grandmother got in 1926. Genital-squishingly tight dark demin jeans. A white belt. White shoes. Mix and voila. For variety, try the less-than-90-IQ-and-snarl look, or go with the more popular brood-at-everyone-even-though-you're-the-one-who-looks-like-a-complete-twat. Slink around a lot with your less than intelligent mates and use your mobile phone at every given opportunity. I tried it and failed as I've too much grey hair.

Barbers A trip to see Cemal and his uncle was often the highlight of the fortnight. Why I actually allowed someone to poke a burning stick into my ear was beyond me, however, the head massage was as close to Nirvana as I am every likely to reach. After losing my cats, obstructing access to my Turkish barber is reason number two to hunt down and torture Mehmet the border control officer at Kapikule.

Menemen The world's best breakfast food that I became a specialist at preparing. Looks repugnant but so does Roquefort, toad-in-the-hole and daal. In fact, most things in life I like tend to have a disgusting edge to them.

Altaic linguistics No explanation is plausible, no comprehension foreseeable.

People I guess I should call them friends. Some of them were also students. I fell in love with Istanbul because it is inhabited with exactly the kind of people I want to live among. Irrational in the extreme, emotional to the point of queeziness, giving, sharing, caring, thoughtful, frustrating, exhausting, tiring, dependable (except pertaining to time managment), affectionate in just the right amount, inquisitive, and cok yaramaz. Turks taught me lot of things I needed to learn, and some things I shouldn't have. From the taxi drivers to the tantuni seller, from my adorably undisciplined 6th grade students to my wonderful neighbours, I love the Turks.

In a way it's perhaps preferable that I never had the opportunity to say goodbye. It means I never left.

Nostalgia, or 'Three years later I have learned nothing'

2008-12-06T20:34:00.005+02:00

Now, this is cheating. I've ample time on my hands so decided to clean up my in-boxes from various email accounts. I found a few emails I sent long ago, when I had first arrived in Istanbul and was unware that almost four years later, they wouldn't let me back in.

I knew I was in love with the city then, and I still am. Strangely enough, visas were already an issue way back... I never learned.
_______________________________

February 2006

Well, I’ve now turned into that sort of person I’d said that I’d never become – I’m sending a collective email. After several months kidding myself that I’d eventually get around to writing to all of you individually, I’ve had to eat humble pie and admit that it’s just not going to happen soon.

I have no valid excuse, so I proffer none. I’ll just get on with regaling or appalling you with details of my little life in a big, busy metropolis. Some of you are already privilege to the events recounted herein. You therefore have a perfectly valid reason not to continue further, but instead to make better use of time by ironing, cleaning the oven or maybe just falling asleep.
Let’s start with work life, mainly since my sad tales of woe ought to provide you with enough reasons to stay in your current position and stop moaning about whatever it is that annoys you in the workplace.

As an illegal worker, I rely enormously on the goodwill of my current employer to do what’s required to keep me being physically removed from the country. Sadly, my current employer has no goodwill, but happens to be a lying, cheating pig-eyed sack of shit who spends his day hunched over a laptop, staring at Christ-only-knows what and, in my mind, possibly searching in the keyboard for any sign of his brain matter which has clearly leached from his cranium during recent months.

New to the world of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, I knew I’d have to make a few adjustments to my varied ways of thinking; that I’d encounter a steep learning curve and need to put in a lot of work for the first few months; that I’ve have to remain flexible in my outlook, enthusiastic in my approach; in short, I was in for a few surprises.

What I didn’t factor into my thinking was the pathetic bunch of lies that I would be confronted with from the start, and to which I initially remained oblivious. Over time things would happen that just didn’t make sense. Things weren’t adding up. Different responses to the same question from the same person in too short a space of time for the situation to have changed. When you finally realise that lying is an acceptable part of your corporate culture, you either play the game of you don’t.

I have chosen not to join in on the fun, not because I have higher morals than anyone else, but simply I rely on work to pay me money to stay in this city. Recently staff have not been paid on time and in fact, small amounts of money are sometimes passed discreetly into our palms, like a adulterer might placate a enraged mistress – ‘Go on, treat yourself to something nice, we’ll settle this little tiff later’.

More disconcerting is maintaining a valid tourist visa, something that causes undue stress on numerous teachers in my school.

The ‘system’ works thus. You supply the school with a copy of your passport, ten suitably sized photos, a standard bureaucratic form with personal details. The school uses its contact in the Foreigners Police Office to obtain a Foreigner Resident Permit. The permit expressly prohibits working, but it does allow you to stay on an extended tourist visa. It’s a case of you-know-that-they-know-that-you-know-but-we-all-say-nothing-and-somewhere-someone-makes-a-stack-of-cash-out-of-all-of-this. So I did know what I was getting myself in for when I decided to teach here. what I didn’t anticipate was lie upon continual lie, compounding each new difficulty and blurring the contours of reality so often and so well that I frequently ended up believing the sincere bullshit that constituted answers to my simple questions.

However, a benevolent ray of sunshine appeared. Five weeks ago I landed a job opportunity that seemed too good to believe. In comparison with my current situation I would work fewer hours for twice the money, have a driver transport me back and forth, work only weekdays between eight and four-thirty, and benefit from long paid holidays. I sailed through the interview, charming everyone with reach of my smile. It worked. They had me sign an pre-contractual agreement before I’d even finished my third cup of tea. I left feeling fabulous and treated myself to a new pair of burnt orange Adidas™ trainers on the way home.

Over the following days I rummaged about filling in new forms, getting signatures on documents, requesting academic transcripts, thinking about a new wardrobe and whether there was anything in the new contract about sporting a beard. I was on a high, and handed in my resignation to my current employer, giving an ample five weeks of my intention to cease employment.

Some time later my boss, already under financial pressure and perhaps reeling from the fact that on average a teacher leaves the school every month, took it upon himself to make some unilateral changes to the work contract. Notwithstanding the fact that my visa had expired at the beginning of June and that I will continue to work here until the end of next week, Ahmet informed his administration staff that they needn’t pay for my visa extension. No-one bothered to tell me, which, I feel, was a shame.

The school has long had all the papers it needed to renew my visa. Indeed, my papers have been sitting in a draw, along with my passport, for the better part of two months. During a highly-strung moment of complete and utter rage last week, I vented my anger downstairs and demanded that someone process my visa. I threw the necessary money on the desk and stormed off. I am still waiting for my Foreigner Resident Permit. and of course, I am quite angry.

My current employer is effectively jeopardising my new job, as my new employer needs to see my visa before they in turn approach the Turkish Ministry of Education – the latter, in some bizarre twist, is exactly the power that can both regularise my visa and extradite me from the country simultaneously… Christ, does any of this make sense? Also, I cannot leave Turkey, since without the Foreigner Resident Permit I have only a passport containing a visa that expired last year. Well, let me correct that. I can depart, but will be made to pay a hefty fine.

Such is my sad life. But I do have very fashionable burnt orange Adidas™ trainers.

And aside from work, I’m still loving Istanbul. Here you can see it all, even if you really don’t want to. I usually get an eyeful of it every day on my way to work.

Istiklal Caddesi, probably best translated as Independence Street and formerly known as the Grand rue du Péra in times gone by, is a two kilometre pedestrianised stretch linking the heart of the European side of my city, down to this historic quarter that I call home, Tünel.

The streets is lined with all the normal consumerist crap, though the Turkish take on fashion makes for some fairly outlandish window displays. I’m not sure whether words or phrases like subtle or understated elegance have equivalents in this very difficult of languages, methinks not.
As with all peoples of the Mediterranean, less in not more. Only more is more. More stitching, more embroidery, more bits of useless material dangling off God-awful designs, most of which have disturbingly large bit of gold and silver on them. Fabric in Turkey comes only in two shades – vivid and glaringly-vivid. To be fair, in a shop window I can easily divert my eyes from such vulgar displays of tastelessness and continue up the High Street knowing I look great in unironed jeans and a T-shirt that’s probably as dirty as the Shroud of Turin but… just look at the people who wear these clothes.

If there was ever an investment opportunity in this country, then Hair Gel is where the money is at. These people are quite likely the worlds’ largest consumers of that greasy sludge, trowelled on in quantities that could support the weight of a four-storey building on the average seventeen year-old’s head. At thirty-six, I’ve lost touch with fashion and it’s quite possible that across the planet today’s youth adorns itself with massive blobs of the stuff that is then sculptured into styles that defy both gravity and common sense. Whatever the mode actuelle, I’m certain that Turkish men account for a disproportionately large share of hair product consumption.

Fashion here is so, well, busy. You cannot purchase anything plain, everything sports some garish pattern or additional thing or bit that you’d rather it didn’t have. Friday night in Istiklal Caddesi is my absolute favourite people-watching hour. Scores of restless youth pour in from the suburbs to hang about gaping at foreigners, women and whatever else seems to be on the street.

The passing parade is not soon forgotten. A blind man clacks his stick over another example of mismanaged infrastructure, and as he stumbles over loose pavers, his lifeblood of cheap lighters scatter in front of him. Veiled women clothed in black shuffle past with their regulatory disobedient sons, while the odd transsexual glides past on roller blades, pinching the buttocks of an outraged posturing wannabe Casanova, his shirt so tight it might actually be causing permanent lung damage.

The wannabes lurk in doorways, ogling each woman who passes as though she were the first of the species they’d set their eyes on. To other men they simply furrow their brow, contemptuous that any male might be tougher, more handsome or able to get away with a shirt exposing more chest themselves.

The odd conservative religious type wanders past, the type media like to portray as the bomb-throwing fundamentalists, but personally, in this town those who do most damage to the environment and are a general affront to my well-being are well-heeled females – the fairer sex and money do not a gracious combination in this city make.

Turks are a good looking race of people. Why the women destroy their looks with badly bleached hair, heavy-handed make-up, collagen-fuelled lips and Paris Hiltonesque haut-couture… well, I just lost the train of though in that sentence.

Gipsy kids try to pick-pocket you and louts eagerly entice you to visit a nice Russian dancing girl in a bar ‘not too far from the street’. Ooh, yes please, I’d love to sit on the lap of some sad prostitute while you ring up a tab on my credit card then muscle me into paying one thousand dollars for a beer…

Among the natives are the throngs of slovenly-dressed backpackers, kids from the village in the big smoke on holiday and strangely enough, huge numbers of families who seem to enjoy being thrusted this was and that across a street by perhaps a hundred thousand souls.
Bewildered tea-quaffing, rosary-clacking mustachioed old timers sit on miniature stools, no doubt bemoaning the fate of the country and biding their time until nationalism raises its head again to shake the country to its senses. Arthouse type try desperately to look dangerously aloof and cool, somehow forgetting that Sleepless in Seattle is years past its prime, and, let’s be honest, who really ever gave a shit about grunge and Winona Ryder? A small punk contingent hangs out the famed Galatasaray Lycée, something in their dress and countenance makes me wonder how soon they’ll swap the mohicans for side parts and the rags for Armani as their bourgeois backgrounds weigh down on them in years to come.

Down toward my neighbourhood is where the musos are to be found. Someone seriously needs to tell these people that Metallica is dead. Long straight hair may have look good on Crystal Gayle and Carly Simon, but it’s a hardly sensible look for men in the first decade of this century. Black is not the new black.

Lastly, if the shops don’t bedazzle with their window displays, there are always the hagglers on the street. Personally, I like to buy my Nike and Adidas socks for one dollar - who cares if they’ve fallen of the back of a truck? Yes, I love day-glo light displays. Oh, yes, please, sell me anything, as long as it’s made of plastic and as long as it’s from China.

And that small wind-up fluffy chicken that barks like a irritated Rottwieler? Only $2.50. Please, I’ll take two of them. I plan to insert them both painfully into my boss when I leave the school next Friday.

This is the face of an exiled cat lover

2008-12-05T19:26:00.007+02:00

He is not a criminal.

Man, Athens is splendid. Today I again overdosed on the wonders of Western cilivilisation and pondered for hours over the dedication required by some people to scratch around in the dirt for clues, for history, and for meaning.

I too have been scratching around for a little meaning, to my life, mostly giggling at my current absurd situation.

Today I received official notice that the Turkish Embassy in Belgrade is also unable to assist me further.

It's incredible how philosophical I've become. The same incident several years ago would undoubtedly led to the death of many. My rage would have been fierce, unlimited, vengeful. However, Turkey is now the cause of both my frustrating situation and present state of mind.

At least I can finally join the ranks of those who describe themselves as 'patient'.

The Feast of the Sacrifice had begun throughout the Muslim world and the very earliest I can return to Istanbul is after the expiration of another seven days. While everyone who's anyone will be out slaughtering an innocent animal in the name of Abraham, I'm stuck here with Souvlaki & Co. Still... I'm lovin' the Greeks.

But I must bid farewell to the Mediterranean and head for the Middle East proper. I'm going to try my luck in Dubai, and perhaps do a little duty free shopping while I'm at it. I could do with some clean undies.

Turkey, I am coming back. Your obstinacy is no match for mine. Besides, I'm pig-headed. You can quote me on that.

Try as you might, but I'm coming back to my apartment and my cats. If you don't let me, I plan to make an international incident out of it. And you'd be best to avoid any negative press. I mean, you do still want to join Europe, right?

Not Istanbul

2008-12-03T19:56:00.009+02:00

Well, haven't I just had an interesting week?

Intrigued?

I think you might be.

I thought I'd add this post to reach the maximum number of friends and family members to elicit the optimal amount of empathy, or sympathy at the very least. For those who know me, please read the following with my sense of humour firmly clenched between your buttocks and in your mind. For those of you who have had the pleasure never to meet me, I'm in no way the miserable, curmudgeonly, cantankerous fool you will soon believe me to be. It's just that I happen not to come across as an aimiable chap in my written ramblings.

Anyway, I've had an interesting week because I am in Athens and I don't want to be.

Now, don't get me wrong. The Hellenistic peoples have given much to the world and, under more pleasant circumstances, I would be happy to munch on yiros and idle away the hours among naked marbles in the Archeological Museum.

However, I should be feasting on doner kebabs and sitting with my cats on the couch in my apartment. Fortune has turned on me and it's going to require a Hell of a lot of charm to get Her her do a 180 for me over the next few days.

You see, I, in the company of a couple of Frenchies, left Istanbul on the 10:00pm Seltvelgrad express (or something like that), destination Sophia. Laurent, Thibaut and myself chatted for a while, wondered if the train would actually even reach the end of Istanbul, or whether indeed Istanbul would ever end, and finally fell asleep around midnight in the comfortable, if not a little chilly, sleeper wagons of the Turkish National Railways.

At 04:00 we arrived at Kapikule and jumped out into the mist. I could smell the Communism, I swear. It was ripe in the air as we crossed the platform, passports in hand, and proceeding in an orderly fashion to the Turkish customs.

Third-to-last in the line, Ahmet asked me why my father's name wasn't in my passport. For those of you who are wondering, in many parts of the world one of the two necessary people present during conception is required to appear in your travel document. Strange, yes. But hey, I'd been asked the same question before, however, it seemed odd this time since Turkey sees thousands of foreigners and I'm sure this guy had seen an Australian passport before. And although I felt certain he probably couldn't sign his own name, I kept it to myself.

I was moved to the end of the line with the resounding word, 'problem'. Jesus. When I was the only thing left in the queue he began to skim through my passport, scanned it, and promptly told me I had overstayed my residency permit.

Except I hadn't, because when I returned to from Spain at the end of August I re-entered on a tourist visa. My residence permit was due to expire so I checked with the issuing office at the airport and took a tourist visa to avoid the need to exit the country within the following three weeks. I thought I was good for ninety days.

Nope. Ahmet hated me on sight. Which is hard to do, I'm sure of it. (God, the guy next to me just asked if I'd heard the world was going to end sometime during December 2012 - they really should start being more selective about who they allow to stay in these International Youth Hostels). Anyway, Ahmet wasn't interested in listening to my tale of woe.

Suddenly, I wanted to extend my hand through the gap in window, grab him by his shirt collar that his mother had undoubtedly ironed for him, and pull him forward so abruptly that his cranium would smash instantly against the bullet proof glass. I envisioned blood, all if it his, covering the linoleum counter as I somehow, after a show of exceeding strength and ruthless brutality, managed to remove his bleeding pulp of a head from the now-lifeless cadaver and kick it far into Bulgarian territory.

I kept my cool. I'm proud of myself. I seethed but remained polite, unmovable. Sometimes it's good to be a Protestant. We may not have glamorous churches or dance very well, but neither do we gesticulate wildly like the rest of the planet when something goes wrong.

Ahmet took one hour to fill out a form that required his name, my name, the date, and the amount of the fine. While he clearly had difficulty using the modern ball-point pen and perhaps it was asking too much to spell his name correctly, again I thought better than to offer help.

It did feel bad to know the entire train was held up because of me, but hey, it's Ahmet they should have been angry with. Even when he filled out the form and I sprinted to another building 300 metres away to pay the fine, I was sent back because because stupido Ahmet hadn't filled the stupido form out correctly.

By that time I was laughing out loud.

My newly discovered enemy of the Turkish customs service stamped my passport. I told him what his mother did in Hell in French and left the building, only to be screamed at as soon as I opened the door.

'Run! run!'

Honestly, Ahmet the spastic takes an hour to ruin my life and I have to run 10 metres to the train... Still, I did at least canter, if not gallop. The Frenchies were almost asleep in their compartment but I made sure I woke them properly to whine a little.

'I told him I have two cats in the apartment and he still wouldn't listen.'

I think the boys needed to sleep.

The next day we arrived in Sophia. The Turkish Embassy was unwilling to help me and I thought, 'you know what, maybe it's time to go to South America.' Then I remembered I had almost no money and that Buenos Aires was maybe dreaming a touch too wildly. I had only two t-shirts, a jumper and three underpants in my backpack, so again, South America was not an intelligent choice here.

And then I discovered a short hour later that what bank balance I had was now out of reach. Despite the fact I specifically called the bank before I left Turkey to ensure I would be able to access funds from machine displaying the Maestro symbol... Well, guess the end of that sentence.

And at this point, it's worth mentioning that Murphy's law was possible first uttered by a Turk. Or at least by someone who had a lot of dealing with a Turk. But then again, I don't know any Turks called Murphy so it might originally have been Mehmet's law, or something similar.

Sophia was lovely and we ate a lot of pork. To pass the time I began to play the role of a spy behind the iron curtain who has to sneak past the authorities. In my head I'd already envisioned how Ahmet the border guard would perish, so I moved on to bloodier scenes involving mostly me fighting and maiming Turkish customs employees. I doubt the film version would be a success, but in my head I was having an award winner.

Less than two days later, with 100 Euro in my underpants and my French friends heading back to Istanbul, on the advice of a friend I headed to Athens. The woman sitting next to me on the bus force-fed me peanuts and finally we arrived at Ammonia, or some such place at six-thirty in the morning.

I felt like rubbish and looked like a big pile of it. I made it to the International Youth Hostel, necessarily located in a seedier Athenian quarter. To be fair, it looks more like Peshawar with a dash of North Africa and Bangladesh thrown in for good measure. Everyone speaks English or French and quite clearly no-one in this neighbourhood is Greek. The restaurants serve halal food and a lot of people are just lurking and leering. I love it and am already thinking of renting an apartment.

I've been twice to the Turkish Embassy, donning a clean shirt on both occasions. I almost had an involuntary bowel movement, when, after explaining my situation, the woman at the counter said,

'Well, Australia is a nice country too, but if I want to go there I have to respect the law and..' By this time, in my head, she was dead from two short, sharp slaps to the temple.

I truly don't think I've done anything wrong. In my life I've done a lot of wrong things but this is not one of them. And what about my cats?

I love Turkey and I adore Istanbul. I've finally managed to get a good grip on the language. I have friends there. My two cats remain ignorant of the whole affair. How are they going to react? God, my apartment contains the last three years of my life and I can't get home.

Now I wait. My pleading email has reached the office of the Vice-Consul and a decision will be made soon.

Turkey, let me back in. Please. I'll be good.

A very Istanbul day

2008-11-06T11:58:00.007+02:00

'Mr James', my wonderful ground floor neighbour whispered as I exited the building.

Perihan's kitchen window is right next to the apartment entrance. Nothing, but nothing, escapes her.

'James, come. I spoke with your landlady last night.' They are good friends.

'Oh yes, I'm late two days with the rent. I know.'

'I told her your fridge is broken' (It's not).

'Well, thank you.' This is Perihan's way of looking after me. She keeps in contact with the landlady and over tea and baklava reminds her what a good rent-payer, charming person and superb cat-lover I am. And then she works a few angles to further populate my apartment with furniture I don't need.

Truth is, my freezer doesn't really function so well these days. It ices up. I'd never noticed it or, at least, it had never bothered me until Perihan one day let herself into my apartment to move a pot plant that another neighbour suggested I'd placed to close to the edge of the balcony. I guess Perihan must've had a peek around because she then went on to admonish my cleaner for such oversight. I rarely even use the freezer and bought Swiss chocolate for the cleaner to let her know I wasn't bothered about the chunks of protruding ice that keep my ice-cream squishy. That was weeks ago.

I thanked Perihan for the possibility of new white goods and then remembered the actual conversation I'd had with the landlady daughter a few days previous.

'I want to talk with you about painting the apartment (it's beige), changing the light fittings (no word in any lexicon can appropriately describe their hideousness), and install new floor covering in the bedrooms (previous tenants have introduced questionable marks and a nice iron print). Oh yeah, the curtains have got to go (my cats have kind a ripped then into an Alexander McQueen monstrosity).'

After placating her gently, insisting I was more than willing to pay the costs, she promised to get back to me with a decision.

This afternoon I received a text message requesting I ensure keys were with the downstairs neighbour since two hefty lads with a wheelbarrow were on their way to deliver a bed.

A bed is not a fridge and is not a general passe-partout for minor renovations.

Puzzled? I think I was.

Returning to the apartment later in the afternoon, Perihan had already been informed of the new mattress.

'Don't worry, go and teach your lessons James, I'll be here to collect it.'

Which is great because this woman could single-handed re-organise Middle Eastern affairs and is possibly the very reason Arab and Middle Eastern countries are so frightened of pursuing equality among the sexes. If this octogenarian is anything to go by, women should actually be in charge of the entire region.

My lesson completed, I fell down some stairs and returned tired, bleeding and sore to the apartment, anticipating a minimum eight hour slumber on my new firm spring-loaded sleep-inducing mattress.

Disappointment was total. I sat down but recognised the stains immediately. This was my mattress (and that of many previous tenants, none of whom bothered with a protector sheet). I went downstairs.

'I know my dear. I was waiting here for hours and they never showed up'.

It turns out that Perihan, running late for her husband's own appointment at the hospital, stayed back until it was clear: something was amiss.

'I called your landlady. She was in a cafe... I said, what are you doing sitting in a cafe Ilknur? I'm waiting here for the mattress for this lovely boy James and I have to get Muharrem to the hospital'.

Well, it appears that while sipping her latte somewhere off in la-la land, she simply forgot. Forgot. So today the fridge I fleetingly hoped for, the painting, floor coverings and lamp fittings I requested became the mattress that never was.

I sank back onto the suddenly old, stained and sagging bed to nurse my aching elbow and knee, glared at my offensive light fittings and wondered 'why do I bother?'

I'm definitely, definitely paying the rent late this month.

I did it again.

2008-11-06T10:00:00.006+02:00

There doesn't appear to be a simple Turkish equivalent of the term 'expatriate'. While this is of no concern to my cats, one of which has been sniffing the same spot on the couch for half an hour, the other chasing a small shiny metallic object about the hallway, I find it problematic.

In English, the word conjures up opinions and thoughts numerous enough to fill a couple of tomes. Good, and not so good anecdotes come to mind.

To face the not-so-attractive reality, we, the expatriates, are everywhere. And I, one of them, seem to have issues with some of the others, who recently, count themselves among people I'd like to maim in a painful manner. Damn, that's two sentences commencing with a conjunction... What kind of language teacher am I?

Have you ever walked down the street in a culture fairly dissimilar to your own, where the natives act, look, dress and generally go about their daily lives in a manner different to your own? Of course you have, since we've all travelled at some point and even a trip from the suburbs to the centre of town can bring the out-of-my-comfort zone sweat stains and accompanying unsightly rash.

And while making your way down that very same avenue, have you ever crossed paths with another from your world, your own culture? You can spot it in the eyes. When you've travelled a decent amount you can spot the tourist, spot the native, spot the lost tourist, spot the evil person with a moustache who is going to scam you, the person who needs help with directions, the pesky unavoidable thing who's going to ask you for some spare change. Nothing wrong with any of that though.

In Istanbul, I can spot Antipodeans easily. First, there are few of us in Turkey. Secondly, we generally dress appallingly. It seems to us that if you walk around in un-ironed garments and clothing more suitable for the beach, we hope that others will think us relaxed and easy-going. It's not for me to explain what my Turkish friends really think of they way we dress, but hey, it's not that complimentary.

Anyway, we expatriates are a sometimes funny breed. We come in contact with another of our kind and immediately look away. We did not see each other. Why is that? It's impossible to blend fully into the Turkish fabric for most of us, and what should that matter anyway, we're here to absorb the culture, hopefully learn the language and make a few friends along the way. I'm not the only expat in Istanbul and I couldn't care less about it. This is not a competition.

I passed another of my kind on Sıraselviler Caddesi this morning, an untamed, ramshackle thoroughfare with the world's most hilarious excuse for functioning footpaths. The expat guy looked at me and straight through me. But it was immediately preceded by that flicker or recognition, that you-look-just-like-me-and-that-makes-me-less-special-now. Yeah, go away quickly.

I'm not putting forward the idea that we should shake hands each time we run into another expat. I mean, granted, most of us would probably not get along to well if we were on our own soil. What's amusing here is the conscious decision to be annoyed with someone after making eye contact with them. for no good reason. I guess, chances are that expats engaged in conversation are often just moaning about Turkish food/currency/housing costs/weather/traffic/disorganisation ad nauseum. So, sure, move on. Just why the obvious displeasure in your demeanour?

I've even been guilty myself of acting the moaning expat. Hey, sometimes it is hard to live away from your native culture and, while I'm positive Turkish norms are not so different from what might be branded Western culture, there is language, customs, mores and morals that certainly differ from those which many of us grew up with. I'm sure I'd even suffer from culture shock in the United States, least of all because they('re about to) have a black president...

Anyway, expatriates do tend to hang out together because we sometimes need a dose of the familiar, and if living outside Australia has taught me one thing, it's that humour rarely translates gracefully or successfully between cultures. My apartment has known both Irish and American flatmates with their respective humours, and while we chuckled along quite well together humour often fails when you have to offer alternate cultural elements that can be summed up otherwise in a single word or short phrase.

I remember crying with laughter at a recent Australian mini-series or mockumentary or whatever the ABC was flogging it as, which naturally failed to impress or leave much of an effect on the flatmate. And I guess that's the very reason why so many of us do eventually suffer bouts of homesickness; we miss laughing. Well, I do.

So why completely ignore each other now when chances are you'll be at the same party in a few week's time? Just we just accept this town is big enough for the two of us?

The second part of the now overlong post deals with the nastier expat. There are quite a few. Those who consider themselves superior or inferior because a) they've landed a great job that pays them seven hundred times more that the average Turkish wage and have no need for you, b) they still haven't bothered to acquire even the most basic Turkish after an embarrassingly long period and believe after seven years that every Turk is still out to scam them, c) they're French by nationality or d), they can't live in their birthplace because they are hated by everyone, possibly already belonging to group c).

Man... today I was in the bank and that was already stressful enough - I loathe those institutions. However, this was going to be exciting for me as I planned to deposit instead of withdraw. Took my ticket. Waited in the queue. Over the next fifteen minutes, as I slowly lost the will to live, a tall man with hair that can only be described as a gross error in judgment twice jumped the line and decided that he wanted his customer service now.

In principal, I'm not against queue-jumpers, provided they offer the obligatory 'I'm sorry but (insert reasonably lame excuse) and have to get this done before my head falls off'. For example. During his second approach to the counter I politely demurred and asked what might be the issue, prey tell? I questioned him in Turkish but since he looked both blank and irritatable I understood French was the way forward. His response?

'This is not Paris. Things are done differently here.'

What the $%#* is that supposed to mean, other than my French accent is damn impressive?

So of course, I decided to let him know that basic rudeness is hardly culture-specific and all he had needed to do was ask if he could move forward in the queue. Basic politeness demands this.

And then he did something that he shouldn't have done. He moved his index finger to his mouth in a teacher/parent manner to silence me. He really oughtn't have done that. I think. I rather lost it, in fluent French fashion.

It all turned out satisfactorily, though designating him un clochard instead of un connard took something away from affair's general sucess. I don't think he cared that I called him homeless tramp instead of a #$%head, though with his haircut not all the effect was lost. Sometimes my savoir-faire amazes me.

Then he called me tourist - a little rich considering his Turkish made my French sound worthy of l'Academie francaise.

I uttered something very, very rude.

This evening I have a wallet stacked with un-banked lira. I guess it's back to Anger Management classes and the local branch tomorrow.

More comical yet, me and the Gallic turd will undoubtably cross paths at a party in the near future. Let's hope he's had a hair cut and wearing non-staining, inflammable clothing. I'm not going to shake his hand, and I will look right through him.

Menemen! For single men!

2008-11-05T10:00:00.003+02:00

I've never been a fan of the English breakfast. The vision of so much scorched flesh writhing on an overloaded plate hardly inspires the palate at any hour of the morning. The traditional English fare was always enough to send me back to the bedroom for another two hour's sleep, and if breakfast is supposed to prepare you for day ahead, well, I'm hardly needing gargantuan quantities of protein required for toiling in the fields, driving cattle or installing lifts in the tower of Babel.

My days consists of approximately three hours working on a computer, four hours reading and taking notes, and four hours talking.The most important meal of the day needs to provide only enough for these activities, plus sufficient reserve at the end of the day to feed the cats, load the washing machine and climb under the covers.

And while the traditional Turkish breakfast deserves a post all to itself, there is one dish of Anatolian cuisine that I am superbly excellent at preparing: voici menemen.

Yes, it is a silly name.

In the Western part of the country lies a small district of the same name, but not its namesake. There are even two events, the Menemen Massacre of 1919 and, eleven years later, the Menemen Incident. The incident in question was a distasteful affair during which an anti-secular Sufi and self-proclaimed prophet (aren't they always the latter) rode into town with his mates, and, with the goal of reinstating Islamic law in the newly secular nation, attacked a garrison, killed it's lieutenant and paraded the unfortunate's head about town on a stick. I really, really hate fundamentalists of every ilk.

Anyway, the whole incident probably put all the citizens off their breakfast for quite some time, though this doesn't really matter since there appears to be no connection between the town's beheaded lieutenant and the dish itself, which mysteriously looks like mashed up, decapitated head. Quirky.

According to another group of people I detest - purists - memenen has to contain egg. It also has lots of diced tomatoes and green pepper, onion and parsley. Season to taste. I like to add cheese and sometimes sucuk, lightly spiced but often yucky Turkish sausage, and here the purist would also interject.

Recipes state that you should score, peel and de-seed the tomatoes. Who the Hell has time for that? I simply cut the tomatoes and pepper into small bits and leave out the onion because we all know what effect that noxious bulb has on our bodies. Fry it all, add the cheese and egg (if you must), season to taste.

There are a number of menemen purveyors in my neighbourhood but, even as a part-time smoker, I object to scoffing breakie while inhaling a truck load of other diners' cigarette smoke. At nine in the morning. Turkey is the only place on the planet where men are truly addicted to nicotine on this level.

I also prefer to make and eat menemen at home because I can eat brown bread and not the poor white substitute offered in restaurants that contributes to the Turkish male's, and my belly. A close friend tells me the the glycemic index of white bread is startlingly high, so it's off the menu for good.

Anyway, breakfast is more fun when the cats join in and try to crawl over my plate, repeating the routine daily even though neither of them like hot food, nor any of my cooking for that matter.

Lastly, I saw this on a website:

This is a quick, fix dish for breakfast in Turkey. Menemen is commonly
preffered (sic) by single men since it is easy and quick

Yep, if a Turkish man's mother, girlfriend, sister, grandmother, aunt or any other female with tenuous filial link isn't in das Küche, he ain't gonna be taking long to cook. In fact, he'll go to join his cigarette-chuffing mates at the restaurant I mentioned earlier.

Turkish men don't cook. I guess they're right too. Moustache with apron has never been a fashion fad.

Does it make me a bad person?

2008-11-04T10:00:00.008+02:00

For me, homesickness is practised in much the same fashion as religious observance. Half-heartedly. Sporadically. Non-committedly.

Prayer is reserved for time of need, times of admonishment for a life hurtling down the wrong cul-de-sac on a skateboard without brakes, for moments of dubious grievance. I'm not what the Pope might call a practising Catholic, and that naturally is because I was born and raised a diluted Protestant. Still, my point here is to demonstrate that I seem to think only of family and friends at home when my Istanbul existence has intermittently sapped me of the required energies to get out of bed and face another day in a city that never sleeps, let alone closes its eyes and dozes during a World Series Test Match on Easter weekend.

Like a un-Catholic guilt-ridden Calvinist, I think it rotten that I'm so self-involved, forgetting birthdays, bypassing anniversaries, avoiding milestones that in our age of instant messaging appears irrational and mean, self-centred and ungenerous. Unlike my grandmother, extensive lists for sending celebratory greeting cards have no place among possessions cluttering my desk and I have metamorphosed into the kind of brother who often cannot instantly remember the precise age of his siblings. When I sense a birthday, I call a third party for assurance, hang up after delivering sycophantic praise and then make the call that keeps me in everyone's will.

I think it does make me a slightly less-than-admirable humanistic type.

Homesickness rarely presents itself. I think I might even be a bad Australian. I don't miss the place, just its inhabitants who count themselves among friends and relatives. I almost envy people who miss their family home, mother's cooking, time spent with relatives, childhood picnic on white, sandy beaches. Unluckily I'm just not made that way and I long ago gave up hoping that by thinking I was, I would become somehow, well, more sensitive, more nostalgic.

Perhaps the ability to communicate in so many new and inventive ways allows all of us to indulge less in homesickness-type feelings. Maybe I'm never really out-of-touch, just never really rushing to buy a ticket back home for a visit.

And the saddest truth of all is the only thing from home I actually crave is meat pies.

I think it's time to look within. Personal development may be what the psychologist would have me order.

Sakin oldum

2008-11-03T09:00:00.002+02:00

I'm mellowing. Anger Management Classes seem but a distant memory.

Why, I can't fathom. Perhaps age is finally teaching me that exploding aortas and bursting jugulars fail to keep me in a good state of mind.

I've never been proud of my temper, which, until age thirty, lay dormant like the pre-1883 Krakatoa. Family values instilled in me ensured I always smiled, no matter the situation and regardless how offensive, rude, barbarous and ignorant the person in front of me might be. Elder family members were the height of English hypocritical politeness, and from them I learned always to say nothing at the required moment but wait until, cup of tea in hand, complaints could surge forth vociferously around the kitchen table. Highly constructive.

At high school I never once remember losing my temper or speaking out against those who had wronged me. I was too meek and mild for my own good and can't imagine how much of a wimp I must have appeared to those around me. I was never in a scuffle at school and used to avoid anyone I found aggressive or threatening.

Then of course, as it always does, something snapped. Not in the kind of way that a North American might crack, leave the house, buy a gun and randomly shoot any living creature along the way. I learned to focus my anger like a guided SCUD, and rarely missed my target.

As the staff in the ANZ Bank Market St branch one day discovered, asking me to collect my new credit card and then not having it ready for the aforementioned collection was poor customer service. In hindsight it certainly wasn't acceptable to threaten to return with a sawn-off shotgun, and with foresight the whole thing might have been taken a lot more seriously had the event occurred post the Two-Big-Buildings-Come-Down-And-Governments-Retract-Civil-Liberties era.

Further, I'd like to remark that while intimidation and menace are hardly attractive in themselves, I've never since experienced garbage customer service at the hands of the Australian and New Zealand banking peoples. They always smile after swiping my card and I can't help but think there's something flashing up on the computer screen to caution them.

And the urologist deservedly had it coming. How special can a specialist doctor be if, two hours after the appointed time reserved one month before you are still sitting in a corridor wading through last year's TIME and Vogue and National Gun Association Family Excursion gazette? Out of patience, I remember knocking on the doctor's door and, receiving no answer, barging my through demanding an explanation for such tardiness. Unfortunately for him, telling me the first thing about being a patient is to be patient was not the desired rejoinder, so I told him where to stick his homonyms and the gathered storm clouds let forth a sub-continental downpour. It rained expletives.

Long after I was punching backpacking partners while ambulating through holy towns in India, throwing electric fans across hotel rooms in Vietnam, shouting at inhospitable hospitality staff all around the world and generally acting like an Israeli recently released from military service.

However, I've calmed right down. As I teacher of children I still need to raise my voice every so often. But the death threats and possible grievous bodily harm has come to a halt. I can maintain a calm state of mind, lucid thoughts and logical arguments when angry. Even when confronted by a repentant and terrified eleven year-old.

Istanbul is my medicine.

First, it is not possible to survive in a city of this many millions if you are going to throw a wobbly. To cope with the endless traffic and teeming, swarming crowd, you just have to chill. I learned this early on after discovering the average Turk cannot walk in a straight line. Exiting a shop, a Turk rarely looks neither right nor left to see if a person might cross his path. Taxi drivers are responsible for so many social faux-pas that to let it bother you would spell your doom. Turks do not say please or thank you easily and irresponsibly. And I've eventually beat my entrenched prejudice that my mother's way of dealing with the world was the only civilised one.

I've had to change my perceptions. Friendliness is conceivably even more important than politeness, though for a long time it was politeness, and the way I perceived it, that took the upper hand. I now believe them to be two separate and distinct things.

Naturally, particular aspects of la Comedie humaine still really do my head in. A few weeks ago, when the imam refused to open the mosque that my cat could escape and return home, I definitely uttered some atrocities under my breath about him, religion, and religious people, all regardless of denomination. But I didn't shout and my cat returned home safely the following morning, looking a little more ecstatic than usual.

And of course, I've become my own boss. This, more than anything else, has contributed to my state of chilled-out well-being. I don't have to attend any meetings, perhaps humanity's most pointless achievement.

Personally, I think the proof is my inability to cuss in Turkish. As an Australian, and according to transformational grammar theory, I would have been born with an innate capacity for swearing. And I was. In Paris I successfully managed to upset a lot of Frenchies too with Moliere's tongue but foul Turkic terms do not flow easily from my mouth.

Maybe these people are just a lot nicer to me.

The little park that was no more.

2008-11-02T01:37:00.001+02:00

A week or so ago, I woke up. As I do most days. However, this time, rather than to the wailing call to prayer, brawling felines, chamber music or my cleaner coming through the door, the dulcet tones of heavy machinery filled the air.

Crashing sounds followed by more things breaking, falling apart, and then crashing again.

Occupational Health and Safety are probably best defined in Istanbul as two nouns, an adjective and a conjunction. Town Planning could also be adequately interpreted in simplified terms. Someone got approval to initiate something but no-one can actually explain or be bothered to enlighten you about what they intend to do in the once-functional space that now resembles a disused quarry.

Welcome to my neighbourhood park in Cihangir, or as we clever Turkic-comprehending people might articulate, Cihangir Parkı. Home to well over the legally acceptable limit of cats, truant children and people who never pick up their dog's faeces, the park was previously the crowning glory in a neighbourhood of which other Istanbul residents were clearly jealous, in a metropolis where verdant foliage appears as frequently as drag queens at a brick-laying convention.

My thoughts are this: What in Allah's good name are they doing to the park, the only green space within spitting distance and beyond?

I've scoured the newspapers for information, hoping to discover the the park will be refurbished, refurnished with playground, lacquered benches and maybe one of those little metal contraptions that dispense plastic bags for all the selfish dog owners of Cihangir who think it's fine to allow their animals to defaecate in the park so that it might slowly putrefy and let the rest of us suffer and the park look and smell more like a sewer than an area where residents should be able to relax without smelling foul heaps of dog dung. I'd like to see one of those installed, pronto.

To no avail. The only iota of news suggests that the multi-story car park upon which the park lies is riddled with concrete cancer and presently unable to withstand an earthquake. At this I rudely chortled. Man, the day an earthquake hits this town we're all going for a long, fatal slide into the Bosporus.

So people with moustaches and yellow trucks moved the gate, or more correctly flung it about three metres from where it stood. All trees have been uprooted, and in my opinion, ransacked for firewood. Fencing from the basketball courts sits huddled and unloved on smashed concrete slabs. It looks miserable.

The people with moustaches and yellow trucks have moved on, probably to wreak havoc elsewhere and sell firewood to poorer inhabitants of Istanbul, and the Cihangir Park gate sleeps uncomfortably in its shallow grave. For two weeks now, nothing.

In another country someone would trip over the wreckage of the gate, sue the municipality and then get a massive stack of cash. Back home you'd make sure you were really intoxicated before you stumbled over it ensuring your negligence case would be rewarded even more generously.

In the neighbourhood life goes on. Dog owners continue to allow their pets to soil the grass and people care even less about it than they did(n't) before. And maybe they're right.

My cynical self even thinks the whole thing was done so that the park might appear a suitable backdrop to the burnt-out car that has stood next to the park entrance for the past three months.

Good Mourning Istanbul

2008-11-01T10:06:00.000+02:00

Today the sun was positively shining, a blue, cloudless sky burst forth provocatively to 16 million Istanbullites and I excitedly popped on my regulation shorts and T-shirt before trotting off to endless hours of traffic jams through fifty-three neighbourhoods on public transport to teach some English.

This week, me and the kids are focusing on irregular forms of the simple past. In English, this requires discarding notions of logic and modern teaching methodology and instead resigning oneself to memorising a rather tedious list of verbs.

Deciding against to forbid and to beget among others, my eyes soon glazed over and I leaned against the bus window to examine instead the faster-moving world outside the 42M Levent-Bahçeköy un-express-yet-clean-gas-powered otobüs. Black. More shades of black. This is not Saudi Arabia or pre-war Sicilia, so why the fascination with wearing a colour that makes you look like a dirty rotten gangster?

I'll never understand it. Growing up in sunnier climes, I never, ever remember wearing a single garment the colour of death and mourning my entire childhood. To be honest, I cannot recall donning once a Grim Reaper-inspired number for any occasion, no matter how sober the event.

Turks love wearing black. Far too much.

I've never worn a tuxedo. I've never dressed as a Carmelite nun. I've never wanted to wear a hue I associate with depression, gloom and nasty, ominous things. Black looks good on evil omens; the crow, for example. It's a great colour for ink, a pentacle, and also, in my opinion, computer keyboards. But on people black looks, well, dark. Gloomy. Shady. Mafia-esque. Alla Camorra. People from Naples called Carlo and Donatello are supposed to wear it brazenly. But for me, black belongs in funerals, on over-ripe bananas and up chimneys.

There's clearly a link here between the Turkish addiction to melancholy and their choice of garments. In a nation where ninety percent of citizen's hairs waver between ebony and soot, ninety-five percent of moustaches charcoal and all five o'clock shadows jet-black , the all-encasing chador-wearing women of the city's more conservative neighbourhoods just look a little too over-the-top.

I just checked my wardrobe. No simple cocktail dress. One black item. It's a belt, and that's more correctly classified an accessory than a garment.

Someone needs to explain to me why people choose to wear this hue. I mean, think about this: when someone wearing lime-green Prince of Wales check shorts and a dark blue Quicksilver T-shirt (for example) smiles at you, you're going to return the warmth, right? While someone smothered in funereal garb doing the same, well, it's not smiling - it's a leer, a sinister warning, an I-know-what-you-did kinda oblique look that makes you turn away in fear and cross to the other side of the road.

And another thing. Have you ever wondered about a stange yet likely correlation between those who wear black and missing teeth? I have. And it makes me shudder.

The rain in Spain...

2008-10-31T21:27:00.005+02:00

Tonight I sank to a new linguistic nadir while cruising the aisles in the local Carrefour supermarket.

Browsing for mayonnaise, I accidentally de-shelved a jar of the stuff. Splat.

The Turkish verb for spill wasn't forthcoming and when I finally ran into a staff member, I managed to mumble something about squeezing the mayonnaise jar onto the floor. Except, I didn't mutter squeeze.

Let's just say that by inserting an open vowel in place of the required closed one (or was it the other way around), I informed the rather pallid-looking Carrefour employee that I had actually made love, albeit in a very coarse way, to the unfortunate mayonnaise. The bit about on the floor came out fine. Lucky me.

It kind of reminds me when, freshly arrived in this city, I politely cautioned an elderly woman to shut your damn mouth when she innocently questioned me about a lump of nasty looking cheese.

In fact, keslan, as I was made aware of not no long after, is rarely used for please wait a moment (while I locate my friend who can speak Turkish). In fact, it shouldn't be used at all.

Another reason that after three years, I ought consider enrolling in formal language classes.

The verb for spill in Turkish is dökmek. Now I remember.

Good news

2008-10-30T13:19:00.010+02:00

It's often too easy to be dragged down into a state of depression and hopelessness after reading the headlines in Turkey.

As an expat, it occasionally seems better to remain unconcerned with events that happen in and around Turkey. Though after three years I've built relationships here, and since I still choose to call Istanbul home, it's getting harder to remain impartial to all the ups and downs in the region.

The Ergenekon affair, a supposedly anti-secular government, controversial decisions made by the country's Constitutional Court that promise action from the more nationalistic parties, the tiresome headscarf issue that diverts attention and resources from Turkey's more pressing woes, the supposed creep of Islam into the Education sector the never-ending pointless and murderous actions of the PKK... It requires ample time to stay abreast of the news here.

And if I were Turkish I'd be prone to feel rather depressed.

So when I read today that a group of Armenian and Turkish academics were meeting in Yerevan with the goal of moving towards reconciliation, it felt like people were taking a step in the right direction.

Academics grasp mantle of peace

The shared history of the Turks and Armenians is a long one, with many bitter memories since the unclear events of 1915. It's a story that it difficult to unravel as rhetoric from both sides makes it almost impossible for the outsider to grasp any point of view that if free from bias or prejudice.

Any move that will bring about some form of mutual understanding will be welcomed by moderates in both countries and beyond. I hope the discussions will be used to better inform the peoples of both nations. It will be a sign of great political maturity if the two nations can finally work towards peace.

Conspiracy (groan...) Numero Uno

2008-10-17T22:07:00.003+02:00

One of the saddest things about growing up is having to enter the real world, a place inhabited by ruthless, power-hungry politicians, belligerent war-mongers, fanatics of all creeds and people who think fashion is an acceptable conversation topic in polite society.

I've realised that, yet again, I've let the real world slip quietly past and have of late not been keeping abreast of the political and social turmoil that appears to be tearing Turkey apart. Or of the people who threaten to do it.

It's time for me to introduce, in order for me to understand, The Ergenekon Case.

Since Turkey can appear at times to be a highly confused and confusing nation, this might take a lot of my time and what remains of my patience. However, my hope is that by understanding the Ergenekon case I might finally comprehend what's really goes on in the world of grown-up people. Hell, I might even find it interesting - for according to the media the saga contains every imaginable element needed for even the most tedious, unintelligible and perplexing TV series.

OK. We need a touch of history here. Ergenekon, the stuff of legend, is an inaccessible locale in the Altay mountains of Central Asia, birthplace of the Turkic peoples. Think Romulus and Remus, substitute a grey wolf, and you're on the right track.

In today's environment Ergenekon is the name of the deep state operating within Turkey, containing members of the judiciary, military, business world and the all-too-spooky mafia, who essentially think that ultra-nationalism is the way forward and whose current goal is to topple the incumbent government. Very, very secretly.

I don't believe in conspiracies because, quite frankly, I haven't got the time. And they all sound so freakin' childish.

Ergenekon is perhaps the largest and most complex conspiracy I've ever encountered, making JFK and Marilyn look like a more uneventful episode of the OC.

If you believe the incessant press, the state within the state has operated more or less as a group of untouchables at the highest levels of national government for quite a long time. And I guess it would have to, since bringing down a democratically elected government requires large quantities of money, influence, time and manpower. And plenty of will.

The storm had already been brewing for quite some time when in July 2007 a house in Ümraniye, known to me only because Istanbul's first IKEA opened there, was found loaded with all manner of ammunition. In a nation where 3000 people die by gunfire each year, I can imagine even a cursory inspection of my neighbourhood would unearth more. We could start with the imam across the way - he's been looking particularly and evasive shifty of late.

Anyway, The Turkish National Intelligence Organisation confirmed that it's been aware of the Ergenekon group since 2002 and the case is now being conducted by the Istanbul Court of Assize for Organised Crimes and Terror Crimes. Almost 86 people have been charged with conspiracy to overthrow the State. That is a lot of people for me to remember, especially when 1 in 10 Turks are called Mehmet and the rest, Ahmet. It's difficult to distinguish everyone.

The sheer number of people involved make it almost impossible for the foreigner to follow. The length of the indictment runs to over 2500 pages. Quite frankly, do you have the time for this? An interesting comparison was made with the Nuremberg Trials, whose indictment totalled 70 pages. But then, Microsoft Word has made all of us rather more verbose and probably less loquacious. When was the last time you read a 2500-page document? War and Peace? Proust? Let's face it, no-one reads articles or novels of that length unless you want to appear as a pretentious wanker by confounding others with facts you're not all that clear about yourself.

Hence the role of today's lawyer.

Anyway, the trial began on Thursday 16 October. I'm going try to get myself up-to-date, so I can keep you, the reader, in touch with the latest adult-like going-ons in this wonderful world of ours.

And on a personal level, notwithstanding the outcome of the case, some of these people should be indicted solely for their outrageously unacceptable moustaches.

The moral of the story is...

2008-10-16T20:19:00.001+02:00

It was a cold, dark and stormy night.

After returning to the neighbourhood from English lessons I was too late for the corner shop and even too late for the other corner shop. I was ravenous.

The cats were catered for as there was plenty of the outrageously expensive food I buy for them. They ate contentedly while I systematically probed the refrigerator for something to sate my hunger. Nada. Equally, the kitchen shelves, while hardly bare, promised only dried pulses, farfalle pasta, a sad motley assortment of Asian condiments and a tin of green beans that has maintained its current position for two years.

And then I spotted it. Thank you Damon, ex-flatmate and procurer of fine German food stuffs. Lyoner canned meat from die Schwarzwald. Over the years I've learned that the Teutonic peoples manufacture all manner of excellent product. Cars, whitegoods and a lot of wurst.

The tin winked and gleamed and flirted with me. Greedily I snatched it. Within an immeasurably short space of time I'd defeated the ring-pull and was devouring the can's contents. In between mouthfuls the phone beckoned.

Naturally, I left the can long enough for my cat to wander onto the scene. Whilst I chatted with someone I can't remember about something no doubt of little significance, Kebap savoured the finest Bavarian fare in the town. He wasn't even hungry. And he didn't even bother with a spoon.

Still gabbling, I returned to the kitchen and resigned myself to sharing the wurst. I kind of spoil my cat. In turns we both ate from the same spoon, since if I was going to catch something unpleasant from my cat it would've happened long ago. Besides, I already scratch more that he does.

And, in our quest to get as much of the quality German victuals down our respective gullets we failed to notice our elderly neighbours looking down on us from the opposite balcony.

As I looked up at their horrified expression, the best I could stammer was '...but it's not cat food'.

Well done me.

Komşularım

2008-10-15T13:28:00.001+02:00

An image that has nothing to do with the blog entry. Though the balcony is relevant to the story, the cat is not.

As a teenager I well remember my younger sister laying on the living room floor, head propped upon elbows, watching the sitcom that would launch lots of people with dubious talent into the world of cinema, television and, principally, English pantomime. Neighbours. And what a show it was. Classy stuff.

Although I too lived an Australian suburban existence, I never remember the six marriages, eight deaths and fourteen divorces happening on Knightsbridge Avenue, Valley View, as they undoubtedly occurred each season on Ramsey Street. However, I do remember bubble skirts, ugly knitwear and Kylie Minogue before botox and her ever increasingly bizarre buffed forehead. Yep, I'm that old.

Anyway, the point I'm making here is that my neighbourhood didn't really resemble Channel 7's interpretation, and Cihangir, Istanbul is a little further still from the mind-numbingly catatonic pall that hung over my early years growing up in a city that remains memorable only for murdering and dismembering pubescent boys. Oh, and it's pleasant wine growing region.

I survived Valley View, grew up in a house and now I live in an apartment, the latter something I swore I'd never do many eons ago. I thought people who inhabited apartments spoke with harsh Irish accents and practised domestic violence instead of playing board games. We threw dice and moves our checkers, they coughed blood and hacked up molars onto a checked vinyl kitchen floor. Apartments were for people who smelled of boiled cabbage and in which everyone over the age of three smoked copiously, soaking the whole depressing dwelling in a scent of Marlboro that permeated even the deepest recesses of the obligatorily stolen, torn, faux-leather furniture. I think I might've been prejudiced.

Australia is so full of space that you have no option than to grow up abnormal. 6 billion people on the planet (a slight increase from the estimated 3.5 around the year I was born), and yet at twilight on a Sunday evening in Valley View I was actually spooked if I saw anyone on the street. The fact that a predatory group of child murderers was frantically scouring my city for victims may have made a notable impression on my teenage vision of my very suburban upbringing. I was the perfect age to be drugged, raped, decorated in barbed-wire and placed into several shallow roadside graves. I'm sure I equated man-on-street-whose-face-I-know-not with 'Oh, this might be quite bad for me. Don't take eat those boiled sweets'.

In any case, I was never really at risk as I've always preferred savoury foods, and thus little chance of me being led astray with humbugs or lemon sherbets. You can't really imagine a killer pedophile enticing a would-be victim with hot chips, and yet such a scenario could have led to my downfall. I think I've digressed.

So, Valley View was as quiet as most of Cihangir is not. My part of the neighbourhood even has it's own name, Purtelaş. I'm sure there's a story behind that name just like there isn't one behind Valley View. It's not even situated in a valley. My building faces the mosque, within whose gardens sits a Little-House-on-the-Prairie type dwelling housing the imam and a ragged collection of children. The cemented courtyard in front of the mosque is their playground and football field, in which impromptu afternoon matches are held between the calls to prayer. A bunch of sly looking street urchins usually join in the game, often asking me to move my motorcycle from the cemetery wall, which I refuse to do because it's not my motorcycle. During game practice I'm normally enjoying my cup of tea on the balcony, chatting with cats and real people in equal measure. Below me lives the extraordinarily youthful Perihan Hanım, doyen of the cul-de-sac, de-facto administrator of the apartment building and tormentor of the man who sells fresh breads from a wooden pallet on top of his head.

'Fresh bread, fresh bread...'. 'Why are you screaming like that? I'm trying to watch (insert appalling Turkish day-time soap opera title)'.

'I've been coming here for twenty years, every day, selling these breads'.

'And I've been asking you the same thing every day for twenty years'.

You get the idea. I'm too scared to buy his bread, but Perihan Hanım likes me and says 'You're a good boy. Don't leave Istanbul.' So I'm also kinda afraid to leave the city too.

The neighbour with whom I share the second floor is a fabulously glamorous and elegant dame, owner of a local art-house cinema. She is immaculate. She speaks a broken but charming English and oozes style. Her hair wavers between maroon and vermilion, always perfect. She makes me drink coffee that prevents me from sleeping for 36 hours. I seem to quaff a lot of her liqueurs, and always leave drunk.

The building that faces opposite is a five storey affair, housing as many generations of the same family and their radically insane Golden Retriever. Nazlı Hamın is 82 and the best evidence you can have that travelling is the way to spend your life. She's tramped through thirty-five countries. You know; Libya, Uzbekistan, Georgia. Places that travel guide publishers rarely get around to covering even at this point in the century. She keeps an eye on my flowers and tells me if I need to water them, how my cat behaved when I was out this morning, and why I shouldn't wear short in windy weather. All very helpful advice.

It often happens that English-breakfast tea time coincides with Perihan's admonishments, Pervin's coffee break and Nazli's balcony-sweeping hour. And so we chat. And it's a simple thing like neighbourly conversation that makes this city unleavable.

Everybody needs good neighbours. And I have them. They even offer me sweets and candies which I accept. I fear nothing here.

Sterotyping 1: The Geek

2008-07-16T19:08:00.000+03:00

India, land of great diversity and variety, entices an equally eclectic mixture of visitors. Many who have never travelled beyond the clean, the well organised and the Western cannot fully appreciate the numerous tribes descending upon the Hindu lands year after year, in search of the historical, the religious, the cheap, the illicit.

Partly through chai-quaffing sessions at the local tea stall, partly though conversations in free-fall, I feel both obliged and privileged to educate you in the ways of the subcontinental voyager. It's only fair that I commence with the group of which I am an exemplary member: The Geek.
The Geek is invariably male, and prior to catching his flight from home he has spent months poring over maps, surfing the net, researching books, and has an itinerary that resembles a detailed mini-encyclopaedia. Pragmatic by nature, practical in deed, his backpack contains some or all of the following items; water purifier, mosquito net, compact but impressive medical kit, a small version of the Smithsonian library. He has 1:25000 scale drawings of each region to be covered (marked in yellow highlighter), and about twelve novels.

He will probably possess a sturdy padlock, a portable clothes line, an inflatable travel pillow, a plastic document holder with photocopies of insurance cover and passport, and maybe a downloaded copy of the Indian railways timetable. He has a pocket calculator, a power transformer and a dictaphone.

He would rather carry a hard-cover copy of his favourite novel than a bar of soap. This is the principal reason for his absence of personal hygiene. He wants to stay clean, but finds that shampoo and toothpaste add unnecessary weight to his luggage. His towel has been replaced by a 1500 page tome of 'The Spiritual Sites of India'. In other words, he smells.

When deciding on a room, he takes anything with a chair and desk, forgetting that behind that closed door is a space that can barely be described as a bathroom. He manages to track down an out-of-print book in out-of-the-way hamlets, but can't figure out where to purchase razor blades.

His interaction with other travellers generally requires improving, as he has a nasty habit of entering quickly into conversations with total strangers who are actually just hanging about to score dope. He never manages to get sex while travelling, though this is no change from life at home. A social outcast in his native land, he suffers mild ostracism from others in India because he doesn't appear to have washed for some time. But he is enjoying himself.

To spot, look for the portable library in filthy multi-pocket shorts. Always wears sandals caked in mud. Stares at anything for hours. Will keep talking to you even when you've walked some distance away from him.

Australians least likely in world to take annual leave

2008-06-11T10:16:00.006+03:00

This little article appeared on the Sydney Morning Herald website this morning:

Poor little rich country...

According to the Vacation Deprivation survey conducted by Expedia, a company I use on a regular basis to fly me cheaply about the globe. 'Australians are the least likely in the world to take their entitled annual leave', citing financial pressures such as the credit crunch and raised interest rates. Other Australians believe work commitments were holding them back from sun, sea and surf, so the complaint goes.

Bollocks. I've read some crap in my time, and a lot of that has been grace au Sydney Morning Herald, but quite frankly I grow more cynical each day. What does this article actually tell us? Not very much.

Australians are materialistic and pragmatic. They are not deep thinkers and certainly not the philosophical type. We are hardly alone. So typical of a rich, bored nation to cite financial reasons as hindering enjoyment and the ability to take holidays. Like many other nations about the globe, Australians love working because they feel the need to buy useless crap, or perhaps two bits of crap, in different colours, to fill their homes up with pointless rubbish.

How else to you expect to pay for this consumer lifestyle without working harder every year? Australians love sinking thmemselves into debt for their entire lives, paying off houses, cars and successive extensions to properties, and such topics are bandied about freely in conversations to the point that not owning property in Australia is perceived as a disability.

The managing director of Expedia enlightens us further by announcing that 'the image of Australians being laid back and holiday-rich was a thing of the past'. My opinion is that we've never been laid back and never holiday rich. There is no such thing as a laid-back capitalist culture. It's a freakin' contadiction in terms.

The moral is this: if you want to go shopping every weekend for the rest of your life buying stuff you don't need and won't use and wasn't even available a year ago but has now become a necessity to justify the fact that you work your entire life to pay bills and thus by paying a lot of bills you feel very justified, well then go ahead. Feel fulfilled.

How about changing your lifestyle? I take plenty of holidays. I am neither clever nor more intelligent than the average working man. I am neither lazy nor hard-working. I am not under financial pressure because I don't want to buy things. I have no credit crunch.

Funny thing though. When I found the offical Expedia 2008 Vacation Deprivation Survey Results, Australia isn't mentioned anywhere in the document. I looked for past surveys but Australia is a glaring ommission. Austria, yes. Us, no. We don't appear among the contol group.

The report. And Australia doesn't seem to figure in it.

So what am I supposed to think? The Sydney Morning Herald doctors a reputable company's report? A national paper somehow analyses non-existent data and then publishes not only a false article, but one that makes me more arrogant than ever in my belief that I can never return to live in Australia again?

I've contacted the Sydney Morning Herald and hope that they can provide the data I requested. I don't want to believe they would fabricate an article, especially one that clearly plays into my prejudices with gusto.

My moral for living is simple:

Work enough to have time for your friends and yourself

Don't buy crap and get yourself into debt
Take a lot of holidays

In two weeks time I commence ten weeks' holiday. I worked and I now intend to enjoy myself.

Sydney Morning Herald, I await your response.

Rather excited

2008-06-06T22:15:00.000+03:00

Wooh-hooh!

Today I completed my University of Technology of Sydney offer acceptance form and in exactly the time it takes the combined Turkish and Australian postal systems to safely navigate my envelope's contents into the hands of a friendly but probably slightly bored paper shuffler, I'll be officially enrolled once again as another pointless member of society who skims off the taxes of hard-working everyday Australians by becoming a student. I'm very excited. Both at the opportunity to study again, at my long opening sentence to this blog entry, and at the chance to stop shaving and arise from bed after others have long scampered from the house with their briefcase.

It's so long to Starbucks and crying into my caffe latte at 8am and buongiorno 'maybe I'll get up now before the sun goes down'. Exhilarating.

There is much to do. Stationary shops, inexplicably along with hardware stores and the Turkish bakkal, hold more than a passing attraction for me. I've forever been mezmerised by locales with floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with a multitude of products in numerous shapes and sizes and ordered in a way that makes me feel safe. Stationary store offer me a sense of security that a roof over my head cannot. I love the the lines of neatly arranged lead pencils, in descending order hardness, from 4B to 2HH. Paper organised by texture, paints by hues, sketch books by size and notebooks by binding. Stationary stores bring order, an oasis in an world of cluttered desks and office disorder. It's easy to draw the same analogy with hardware stores and the infinite possibilities of fixing, fasting, joining and adhering that can be had.

The Turkish bakkal, or deli, corner store or tuck shop a la turquoise provides the same sensory fulfillment. I always return from the local shop with more than the requisite repulsive and ubiquitous un-gratifying long-life milk that remains de rigueur in Istanbul. There is something very attractive about kuruyemiş, the unending variety of fried fruit and nuts that can be had within 500 metres of where you might be positioned in Istanbul. I like regularity and Turkish dried fruit keeps me very regular indeed.

Anyway, I'm off to the closest stationary shop to buy everything that cannot be purloined from work over the next eight days. I have also purchased a new digital voice recorder but it's such an exciting acquisition that it deserves its own blog entry. So more about that later.

I'm off to talk gsm, foolscap and spiral binder.

The beautiful south

2008-05-20T19:00:00.000+03:00

I'm in Mamallapuram or Mahabalipuram and have just arrived from Chennai, or Madras. It all depends on who you speak to, or which signs you take notice of.

Whatever the case, the south is a different country.

Mamallapuram is a small village about two hours' drive from India's fourth biggest city. It's a beautiful location, the site of many rock carvings and a couple of extraordinary temples dating from the seventh century. The golden beach is wide and long, and overlooks the Bay of Bengal.
The village sleeps and wakes to the gentle tapping sound of chisel against granite; the sculptors here are known across the world and stalls line the streets advertising their wares. Thousands of statues of every size and shape are lined up for inspection. A garganutan Ganesh reclines next to a eight-foot Shiva behind which peacefully gazes a serene Buddha, and the sculptors are happy for you to sit and stare in amazement as they go about their daily business.

I've come to Mammallapuram with good intentions.

I've checked into my hotel which will be home for the next couple of months. At present I am the only guest, and so have the place to myself. My spacious room sits on the second floor - big double bed, desk with a bookshelf (already full), a very large and very clean bathroom. The outside balcony is enormous and, if I stand on my toes, I can just spot the sea.

I'm now dividing my time between the school and orphanage, helping out where I can and, for the first time in a while, experiencing culture shock. It's going to be huge learning curve, but with countless smiling faces that surround me, I'm settling in quite nicely.

So I'm going to take my leave, and won't be updating the website for some time.

I'm feeling very content, and very relaxed.

See you in a while.

James x

That certain je ne sais quoi

2008-05-18T21:48:00.015+03:00

Last night, perched high on a rooftop bar in Beyoğlu, Aslı and I lounged comfortably and talked fondly of favourite lady, Istanbul.

Kebap enjoys hıs Sunday sleep in.

Aslı knows the magic of Istanbul better than most, and if like all Turks she can note the disadvantages, hassle and annoyances of living in this great metropolis, she's also one of the first to say something positive about the place too. She asked me, not for the first time, what it is about Istanbul that keeps me here.

Well, it's not the weather. My only real complaint about Turkey is that winter is too long. As I've written earlier, Istanbul is grey, really grey, in winter. And since weather dictates my mood then I pass long periods of doubt and gloom from November to April.

Many years ago, during a course on Middle French, I read the lines of Chretien de Troyes in Yvain the Knight of the Lion:

Car parole est tote perdue, S' ele n' est de cuer entandue.

To understand something truly you must feel it within your heart. Old French eloquence and my awkward translation aside, Istanbul can only be experienced once you begin to breathe it. And then, I'm afraid, it has you in its hold. Of course, any subject or person for which you have feeling excludes impartiality and most certainly rational thought.

Aslı's question must remain unanswered for the time being since I am incapable of dealing with this city with uncluttered, straight-thinking Cartesian clarity. I intend to come back to the issue when I've been away long enough to view it through different eyes. For now there's no other place I'd rather be. Corny, it's also the truth.

Since the sun shone today I awoke to a flood-lit bedroom. Kebap was happy to continue sleeping while I showered and I dropped him off in the neighbourhood mosque garden while I scouted around for a barber. I bumped in Lieve who lives at the opposite end of the street. As a career diplomat, she's just received news of her new posting to Amman.

We chatted about summer vacation plans, how stunningly beautiful the Teke Peninsula region of Turkey is (see Lycian Way entries from April), about the possible catastrophic development of Kaş and the complete non-Turkishness of Ölüdeniz, among other things. I love summer conversations because work is far from everyone's mind. A little while later and freshly shaved I started a slow walk to Ortakoy. Kepab was courting some cheap little tabby tart under a car as I passed my apartment building, but I left him to it, crossed in front of the mosque and down into Kabataş.

Tomorrow is a national holiday, Gençlik ve Spor Bayramı. Commemorating Mustafa Kemal's landing in Trabzon in 1919 and the beginning of the liberation effort to free Anatolia from foreign rule. Atatürk inaugurated Youth and Sports Day during his first term as the new republic's president. I mention this as the Turks can always be relied upon to unfurl the flag on balconies, display it from windows and indeed drape entire buildings in the Star and Crescent. what must perhaps look like fervent nationalism in to the untrained eye is, in my opinion, a fierce pride in secularism and the founding values of the nation. Kabataş was parading in scarlet and so too were the supporters of Bolu Spor and Eskişehir - Turkish football fans love to wear their team colours and everyone was passed was draped either in red and black or red and white. Apart from the police of course who were more soberly outfitted in blue with riot shield accessories.

After passing the stadium I started the polluted Golden Mile, one of my most frequently walked promenades in Istanbul from Dolmabahçe Sarayı, outpost of the moribund Ottoman Empire, to Beşiktaş, canton of pirate CDs and infernal transport hub. Between the two stretches the long tree lined Dolmabahçe Avenue, a wonderful walk among exhaust fumes. I'm always drawn to this area and yet inwardly berate myself for breathing in what must be an unhealthy quantity of carbon monoxide.

Beşiktaş reached, I moved on to Ortaköy where I browsed the stalls and came away with nothing. I am rarely in the mood to shop for anything other than books and so happily snacked on a almond croissant and slowly made the walk home.

When I arrived back in my neighbourhood, Cihangir, I pondered one of the things that really does keep me here - variation. Istanbul has many problems like all great cities, but the constant unknown, that you'll see some new and refreshing every time you take a walk, the fact that everything seems open for business every hour of the day and the new details you note of the old buildings and mosques. The sea and it changing view depending on the hour and the season.

Most of all, the interaction with Turks. Over the course of the day I experience what casual inquisitive yet respectful familiar friendliness that I've never experienced on this scale in a large conglomeration before. I chatted with my neighbour, a man in the mosque garden, a seller of scarfs on the pavement and played football with some boys in the street. The guys in the supermarket say hello every time I pass, as does Hamza the television repair man on my street and the rustic farmer selling artichokes from the back of his truck.

Kylie, this is my town.

Here, you're a nothing but an hyper-botoxed tourist.

It's a very small gesture and yet perhaps above all else, I love the inhabitants of this city's ability to communicate with a simplicity and genuineness that I'm yet to discover elsewhere.

I feel like I belong here. Which feels rather nice.

Bad habits.

2008-05-17T17:26:00.006+03:00

I've a lot of these.

I am unable to quite smoking yet I know it's the filthiest habit around. To the abhorrence of my students I continue to chew and bite my fingernails. I have been known to pick sweets of the floor dropped seconds previously and pop them into my mouth. Perhaps worse still, I refuse to wear deodorant. I own two pairs of socks. And that is not a joke.

An example of people I want to maim.

Yet, if there is one habit I wish to change, it's my aversion to the mobile phone. As a normal 21st century irrational city-dweller, I've succumbed to the mobile era. For many years I adamantly insisted that I would never own the greatest intrusion onto me-time ever thrown into the public sphere. I remember listening to conversations at high volume during morning bus journeys to Central Station in Sydney and wishing I could beat the head of the phone-lover into an unrecognizable bleeding pulp.

Those people who chatted on footpaths while walking no-where in particular, oblivious to the shared public space around them, instilled such violent feelings within me that I needed to seek psychiatric help. I was elbowing anyone who came within range. The mobile phone seemed to make me even more aware of people's ignorance of those around them, bad manners became acceptable, even the cultural norm. Worse still, not having a mobile was perceived as reactionary. I am not a Luddite.

Like all wonderful invention, the arrival of the portable phone should have been a welcome step in the history of telecommunications. Instead, ownership of my cheapo Nokia has only exaggerated my sometime anti-social traits. My monthly expenditure on telephone credit is minimal. I love to talk in person but loathe talking on the phone. Unless, Mum, I'm chatting with you.

Yeah, like I bet that's a meaningful conversation

So whilst I have now owned a mobile since the day I landed in Istanbul, I'm remain unaware of current protocol regarding usage. You see, if I don't feel like answering, I don't. And this, I know, is what can only be defined as a bad habit. It's rude. I know I'm wrong not to answer but I can't.

It's time to explore the fear that dwells deep within me. I hate to disappoint, let down or otherwise be unable to assist someone when the need arises. And for some reason, if someone makes a request to me over the phone, I always reply in the affirmative. This is not healthy.

However, last week something went wrong. One of my closest friends in this fair city rang, and I didn't answer. I didn't even call back. He got angry, and rightly so. My friendship might have been lost and I would've deserved it. And this is why I love the Turks. They crave human contact more than Anglo-Saxons.

I guess this will fall into disputed territory it's got to be said; the Mediterraneans are just better at friendships than I can ever hope to be. I can't source any academic reference here, I'm going on instinct. I can go a month without speaking with my friends. A Turk cannot. And this is something I need to learn. Otherwise, I'm just bring plain rude.

How I perceive the average mobile user. Yes, it's wrong, I know, but then again, is it really?

And so I promise from this day forth:

a. to pick up the phone when it rings
b. to call back as soon as possible if I am unable to pick up
c. to feel free to say no on the phone
d. to keep my Turkish friends because they are good to me

How I still have this many hang ups (now that's a pun) at this age is beyond me.

Better now.

2008-05-17T14:11:00.010+03:00

I sincerely love my cat. Having someone to take care of makes me feel less selfish in a life committed to avoiding responsibility and emotional attachment.

Ten days ago I returned home. Nothing unusual there, I return home every day. Well, most nights anyway. By the time I open the apartment door, nine times out of ten Kepab is patiently waiting while I unload my pack and then expects the usual hugging and free under-the-neck-and-scalp-scratching session that ensues.

Kebap makes friends. Or enemies. Not sure. Anyway, social networking.

That particular night he didn't come to the door, nor did he stir when the bedroom light was switched on and I threw off tie, shirt and trousers to change into short, T-shirt and sandals. I picked him up off the bed. He growled deep and low. I dropped him back on the bed and, as is my routine, got out the cafetiere, lit a cigarette and checked for new grey hairs in the hallway mirror. Kepab, I realised while butting out my Winston Light, still hadn't moved from the bed. Something was up.

It took me several minutes to work it out. His tail was injured, possibly broken. A journey followed to visit Alper Bey, my vet of choice because the previous one seemed indifferent to Kepab and my several hundred questions regarding the right choice of cat food for a young street cat. Alper, knowing Kepab to be rather, well, violent and a master of claw-in-the-face martial art tactics when the need arises, excused his inability to take an x-ray on the spot since other staff had left for the day. Kepab is not the kind of cute little cat that sits quietly on a cold steel table in the examination room while a vet sticks a gloved finger in places Pope Leo X enjoyed a tad too much. Kebap is 100% street feline. He don't take crap and he don't like to be touched by strangers. Alper knows this well.

Badly brought up or not, Kebap is my charge and I had to leave him overnight until staff arrived tomorrow and enough hands would be available to hold him down and x-ray his tail. I naturally inquired about his diagnosis and was informed that if the tail were broken there was a high possibility of its amputation. I didn't take the news well and slept badly that night.

Flirtatious behaviour in the mosque gardens. Inappropriate.

The following day I raced to the vet after work. Kepab lay forlorn in his cat basket. Something between Lion King pathos and Isabelle Huppert as Madame Bovary (deathbed scene).
I knew he wasn't happy. Alper had tried to telephone me without luck during the day. To be fair, what would I have known about removing a lesion from a tail anyway? He had carried out what needed to be done and told me that my baby would still be 'drunk' for the next few hours. Do we even have a specific word in English to describe the after effects of a general anesthetic?

Back at the house Kepab appeared less drunk and more just plain pissed off. Certainly in no mood to talk. He went back to the bed. I had ten days' worth of antibiotics to administer. That sounded like a lot of fun. Kepab looked comic and pathetic a la fois with his bandaged tail and purple plastic Elizabethan collar. Kind of like Paris Hilton, though unlike her my cat is not a useless slut.

Now it's Saturday, ten days post-operation. The course of antibiotics has finished and we've angrily revisited a surprisingly calm vet who had changed and re-changed an ungrateful Kepab's bandage. Today is the first day of real, proper summer weather in Istanbul. Kepab and I are in the garden of Cihangir Mosque, affording a wide view of the Bosphorus and making me fall in love once again with this metropolis. Kepab is less interested in watching ferries ply the waters than I am. He enjoys scratching his head against plants more than I do. He enjoys socialising with others of his species. I do not.

We're both happy and relaxed. It's fine time to be in Istanbul.

Kebap a la plastic ruffle. Tres chic, tres aujourd'hui. Le must de Cihangir pour le chat de votre vie.

Words fail me

2008-05-16T18:55:00.008+03:00

It's not funny. The longer I remain in this country the more tormented my mother tongue sounds as I attempt to communicate with both native speaker work colleagues and my students of English.

Daily I bemoan the fact that both my written and spoken expression of English worsens. I've gone from having words on the tip of my tongue to an almost complete inability to cough up the mot juste as required. Extracting abstract nouns is now more often than not a chore and, more than usual, I'm avoiding conversations where opinions rather than fact are necessary. I'm tired of hesitating and stalling my interlocutor while I rack my brain to search out the words or phrases needed to complete my sentences and convince the listener that I am not in fact just a near-native speaker. For God's sake, how can this be happening?

Help me, O dear, dear prescriptive grammar

Well, this shouldn't be happening. Of course, we all suffered intermittently from tied tongues. Especially when exhausted it's often difficult to take in, let alone produce a stream of the vernacular. We've all sat through dull, pointless meetings where our train of thought has erred, only to be expected to proffer some learned opinion on a subject discussed for the last half an hour about which we have no idea. This happens to me all the time because I detest meetings. They're rarely necessary, intensely infuriating and to be honest, for the handful of people who clearly enjoy the limelight I'd be happy to let them make all the decisions regarding agenda items.

However, I digress. My complaint revolves around my loss of naturalness, fluency and proficiency when talking about the most everyday subjects. My grammar falters, nouns have disappeared almost entirely from my vocabulary and it might even be that I can no longer use irregular past simple verbs. I gived up.

Naturally, there are those of you out there who would perhaps suggest that no Australian, regardless of education or upbringing, speaks an English worth listening to. I'm often subjected to opinions regarding bad English, lazy English, inferior speech. I'm not a fan of the prescriptive grammarians nor those who think a certain sociolect exists, namely theirs, that is more correct than others.

Bad English (food).

Although most arguments claiming superiority of one English over another usually boils down to what we like to call accent. From the English-speaking arena, those originating from Australia, Birmingham, Liverpool and the Black Country in England, and probably many Southerners from the United States, will have no doubt at time been subjected to or subject of arguments regarding deficient speech that of course doesn't measure up to those bright young things graduating from Oxbridge-upon-Pretense.

Accent aside, I find that Turkish words and grammar are having an immeasurable effect on my speech and writing. I am still yet to master Turkish yet clear progress has been made over the past few months. I have learned reported speech and can form definite clauses. In short, my Turkish is becoming more flexible, more elastic, and is rarely misunderstood. My English is raising eyebrows.

Below are some recent observations.

First, I'm thinking seriously about visiting the Spain and the Portugal during the summer break. I plan to spend a lot of time idling on the beach but then heading over to the Balearic Island to catch up with friends in the Majorca. you get the idea. The use of the definite article, otherwise known as the in English is sometimes difficult to teach and for all but the upper-intermediate learner, cumbersome to employ correctly.

That said, the use of the with geographical place names is straightforward and amounts to learning by rote a few rules. Exceptions are rare. We say I'll visit Germany but I'll travel to the United States. It would be pleasant to sip a mojito on a yacht in the Caribbean but find accommodation on Lake Como. And the rules appear to have slipped out of my head. But I'm still planning to visit the Spain regardless.

A possible birthday present for those who feel the need to offer something

Next in importance is the in-creep of Turklish, a phenomenon itself divisible into the art of inserting Turkish words when English suffices and the mollifying habit of Turkifying English words. Utterances such as yani, o kadar, tamam, evet, hayır, bitti, yok ya and değil mi? have all but wiped out the equivalent so, that's it, ok, yes, no, it's finished, no way, and really? Not that big a deal I suppose but at times it bugs me.

More problematic is Turklish, most noticeable in my miseuse of phrasal verbs and collocations. I often can't remember whether I should open or answer the phone if someone calls and either turn off or close the lights when I exit a room. I'm constantly giving notes to my students after marking tests and they take permission from me to visit the toilet during classtime. I overuse nice and good because in Turkish it's almost impossible to avoid the ubiquitous güzel, an adjective used to cover every possible positive situation in Istanbul. Interesting, good, delicious, pleasant, beautiful, impressive, fascinating among other seems to be shrouded in a halo of güzel-ness. I can't decide whether adjectives are lacking or I have reached saturation point for learning descriptive words.

Obsolete forms are seeping in. Where, whither and whence have all been used in the last month. I am Charlotte Bronte. I am James Hardy. I sound like a twat. Hither and hence are likely to follow.

Bad Turkish (hair and shirt)

But phrasal verbs. That's what I wanted to mention. Turkish has them, and most of them are rendered with etmek and yapmak, to do. I do party, do my work, do my duty, and strangely, in an unusual twist of fate and lingusitcs, do myself. I even confused my head last week but it was understandable since my day had been very crowded in the school.

The list goes on. Adverbs of position confound me greater still. I cannot distinguish between above and on, below and under, behind and between, but I am sincerely over it.

Many moons ago, when I live in Paris, I told a visiting friend that I was interrogating my answering machine from a distance. Some things never change.

And by th way: These people ought to be punched. Hard.

It's all about change

2008-05-14T22:19:00.002+03:00

Nice one. Congratulations on your offer to study at the University of Technology of Sydney says my double-sided colour brochure.

Yesterday I received my offer of admission to undertake a Masters in Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Life as I have known it for several years it about to change.

It's over three years since I departed Australia and aside from several temporary bouts of mild homesickness and constant self-flagellation at my inability to adapt to Istanbul's peculiarities, I want to stay. This city has an addictive charm that just will not break.

Thus it had become pressing to view the bigger picture.

Back to school.

I'm no longer young. I've had a checkered career which has kept responsibilities at greater than arm's length but that has perhaps not provided the self-fulfillment of which I currently feel in need. It's time to look up and think sharp. It's time to ponder life's direction. With the horns firmly in my grip, I intend to lead the bull onwards and upwards.

Teaching in Middle School has been the most rewarding experience to date. I hope never to tire of being in a classroom brimming with youthful energy and grinning naughtiness. However, I need to get more serious about what I'm doing and consider how good an educator I really hope to be.

A few months ago I became weary of administration. I realised I was becoming irritable and inflexible when dealing with paperwork, meetings and all the quite unnecessary evils that come with the modern education industry. Often I was at odds with what was being said but felt my opinions were nothing more than poorly thought-out, ill-timed and badly delivered diatribe that rarely did anything to empower me or my colleagues. There is a lot that is frustrating about teaching children. Adults are to blame for all of it.

In brief, if I want to remain in Turkey on a more permanent basis - and I do - then I need to think where I want to be in the next five years. I envisaged my travelling three months a year, working the other nine. I see a little apartment in my neighbourhood for which one day I will hold the title deeds, I'm imagining a summer house on the Mediterranean coast, I see a permanent household staff member.

My first step on the road to comfort is browsing the four-page Distant Student Enrolment Guide. Next, I'm going to have to say goodbye to shirt, tie, regular shaving and an equally reliable regular monthly income as I turn student once again and rely on an income source from private tuition.

There is much to accomplish over the next few weeks. And all of it will push my organisation skills to the limit. No doubt this issue will be featuring with great frequency in my head and on this blog.

I am feeling inspired once again. which is exactly what I needed.

Sunk.

2008-05-11T21:09:00.004+03:00

Last year when I was in London I bout a book entitled Overcoming Depression. It was appropriately placed on a shelf and left to gather cat hair and dust.

Twelve months later I've scoured the room but to no avail. I can't locate it. Given the current state of my abode I'll be lucky to find my bed tonight, but still, I'm left feeling somewhat sullen. Something tells me I'm depressed and yet this very train of thought smacks of self-indulgence.

Neither sure whether I owe it to a strict Anglo-Australian upbringing or some other strange twist of personality, I consider depression as something that afflicts others. I don't get downcast and yet find myself at a low ebb. Quite frankly, I feel rubbish.

A multitude of reasons to be content produce themselves: I benefit from a great lifestyle in a magnificent city, I work a mostly fulfilling job, and I know there are people who genuinely care about me. I don't think I'm homesick even if the amount of time I spend poring over sites in Australia via Google Earth suggests otherwise.

There is, however, an increasing amount of anti-social behaviour in my personality. I rarely want to go out and instead prefer the company of my cat to others. Conversations only occasionally hold my interest for the briefest of periods. Books are preferable to people. I sleep long periods. My mood swings are more extreme and more frequent and I quite easily pass a weekend without talking with another soul besides supermarket staff and taxi drivers.

I think I need a swift sharp kick up the Khyber Pass.

Ire

2008-05-04T15:52:00.006+03:00

If there's one thing that makes me angry, it's people.

As is my regular Sunday afternoon, I've been browsing the electronic press and came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that informs me the Malaysian government is proposing to impose restrictions on women travelling alone outside the country.

The Malaysian ruling party is debating whether or not women should provide written consent from families or employers before being permitted to move outside the country's borders. Apparently there has been a significant number of criminal cases in which female Malaysian nationals have been duped into transporting illegal drugs and at present over one hundred women are lingering in foreign prisons.

The state news agency views this as a move to counteract criminal activity but I smell religious influence. I very much doubt that Malaysia, with a population of highly-educated nationals in a vibrant, dynamic and multi-ethnic society, has any further use for the stunted minds of officials stunted by misogynistic, God-fearing claptrap.

My grandmother, mother, sisters and female friends and colleagues are living proof that the chicks are equal to men in every way except their ability to remember birthdays and every celebration date I manage to forget. I find it incredulous that once again the evil that is religion pervades even further into a society that seemed secular not so very long ago. I was last in Malaysia in 1992 and retain vivid memories gorging on chicken satays in Ipoh and belting out Country and Western ditties in a karaoke bar somewhere in Sitiawan.

I loathe religion. I detest it because I've never seen it's positive side. Whether God exists or not is up to the individual and not the lawmaker. The Western Church may have given us some rather dab painting commissions and extravagant architecture that would have otherwise never seen the light of day, but for religion to continue to interfere with the rights of the individual is unacceptable and, in this day and age, deserving of two hard smacks to either side of the face.

Equally outraged but more eloquent in style are the words of Norhayati Kaprawi, a spokeswoman for Sisters in Islam. She is quoted as saying 'It is totally ridiculous and it's a totally regressive proposal with regards to women's right to movement'. I agree.

That written permission is going to halt the transportation of A-class drugs across transnational boundaries...

God, if you really existed you wouldn't have made the human race so stupid.

And if I were a Malaysian woman I'd be after someone's head.

Another quiet day in my favourite city.

2008-05-01T21:23:00.008+03:00

When the sun shines in Istanbul my mood becomes as warm as a Turkish bath. And although I generally work on Wednesday, the nervous ruling AKP party had, like their predecessors, preempted social uprising during May Day and sealed off the centre of the European side of the city by the early hours of this morning. School was therefore out of the question since commuting from the Taksim district where I live was supposedly unfeasible.

According to the media, 66 schools were closed in affected areas and much public transport closed down. In particular, all transport leading to Taksim Square was suspended for fear of allowing large numbers of demonstrators to gather. Enough riot police were present to fill a football stadium along with many amoured vehicles, a number of which were fitted with water cannons.

You need to understand that successive Turkish governments have been loathe to allow public demonstrations in Taksim Square since 1977 when a score of people were killed. Since the armed forces coup d'etat in 1980 permission has not been forthcoming for any demonstration, although from time to time I've seen gatherings, all of them peaceful and all attended by a gargantuan contingent of police.

So I spent the early afternoon playing improvised volleyball with a security guard at a neighbourhood mansion on my street corner, checking on the multitude of new feline arrivals in the area and sharing chocolate with Mert, a six year old happy not be be at primary school for the day.

Helicopters began to circle over head and the sounds of protesters came floating down the street. Several hundred moved slowly into view and managed to advance a hundred metres up the main thoroughfare of Cihangir before being blockaded by Robocops. It all seemed relatively peaceful though the crowd slowly dissipated and people moved silently on their way.

Half an hour later I decided to head to the local Carrefour supermarket. Arriving on Sıraselviler Street, a new scene opened up to me. Evidently, events had transpired less harmoniously here. Scattered across the street were the remains of heavy concrete pot planters, strewn in every direction. The pepper gas began to sting my eyes and I'm assuming that water cannons had also been used since rivulets of scarlet were running down the gutters. All bar my barber had closed for business and people sat aimlessly. Police everywhere, yet no real tension in the air.

Or at least it seemed like that to me. Often it's hard to comprehend events that take place in your adopted home since you haven't enough history in the place to fully understand what's going on. It reminded me of how the media reported several bombings in Istanbul last year of which I remained unaware until I read about them on the BBC website the day following the events. How a city can be rendered unsafe by a biased media that makes your family and friends wonder why you're living in such a dangerous place. Istanbul is so large that events can happen here to which I am oblivious for days on end. And yet it always feels so safe to me.

It also brought to mind the uncovering in Austria of a man who purportedly kept his daughter hostage in a caller for the past twenty-four years. How something so insidious and terrible can be kept hidden for so long, and yet now the country's chancellor is calling for an 'rebranding' campaign. It's easy for us to judge the entire nation by one shocking event so that we can quickly distance ourselves from the 'others' who might have implicitly allowed this to happen. I feel sorry for those people held captive as I feel sorry for the Austrian people as a whole. I hope we can all reserve our judgments and eventually realise that this crime was committed by an insane individual who could be found in any one of a number of places on the planet. And that this outrage doesn't taint the Austrian people as a whole.

Besides, I've a personal reason for not wanting hostility towards the heir-apparent of the Hapsburg dynasty. In Turkish, like in so many languages, Austria/Austrian and Australia/Australian are oft confused. I don't need that now.

Turkey still has bigger problems to face than allowing a full democracy to operate and therefore allow demonstrations during May Day in the heart of its biggest metropolis. A reported released on 29 April regarding Freedom of the Press summarises that the country still has a long way to until it allows its journalists to write openly and freely, and indeed in certain respects perhaps the situation has even worsened since changes to the penal code were introduced in 2005.

I hope very much to see a government elected one day that is worthy of the people in this wonderfully complex country which I choose to call home. And maybe there will be a time when demonstrations no longer bring out en masse pepper gas and water cannons.

Motivation, where art thou?

2008-04-25T19:58:00.010+03:00

This is what presents itself to me when I open my grammar book this evening:

As in the case of embedded statements, the main verb in embedded speech is söyle-. In indirect imperatives, similar to the other indirect speech structures, the embedded verb is marked with the nominalising, possessive and case suffixes. The nominalising suffix in indirect imperatives is -MA. The embedded subject is marked wıth the genitive and the verb with the agreeing possessive suffixes.

I'm not trying to be clever here. And I'm certainly not trying to show you how impressive my knowledge of Turkish is after two and a half years. What the above tells you is how to change:

Read my letter

into:

He told me to read his letter.

While it may actually be pointless to expound further, you have no doubt understood that at times my motivation for learning Turkish wavers.

Recently I've been reading literature on second language acquisition. As I teach students from different ages groups with varying reasons for learning English, individual differences in second language learning is becoming more important to me. Plenty of research has already been done on learner characteristics and I seem to possess many of those that fit 'the good language learner'.

I'm willing to make mistakes, will try to get a message across even if knowledge is lacking and constantly look for patterns in the language. I enjoy grammar exercises, have good academic skills, confidence and analyse my own speech and that of others. My personality characteristics are favorable to language learning. I can be extroverted and am not afraid of taking risks in a learning environment.

But then we come to motivation. Research describes two important factors for learning languages. The first is the learner's communicative needs. Well, living in Turkey, I need this language. I want, desire and ache to speak the most major of the Altaic tongues. I genuinely want to remain in Istanbul; I want nothing more than to solve my every need without resorting to a translator, and my ego is so large and brittle that I am repelled by the idea of the idle, can't-be-arsed expatriate who relies solely on English, local staff and a healthy bank balance to meets his or her needs.

The second factor affecting motivation is the learner's attitude towards the second language community. I love Turks. I choose to live here. I have a large contingent of amiable, garrulous Turkish friends. Anatolian history is vast and one of paths into it is through Turkish.

You would think my motivation endless.

For me the problem is that the period between studying new grammar to incorporating it into spoken language is, well, long. There's got to be a better way to study Turkish but unfortunately private lessons and courses out out of bounds for two reasons.

First, I'm one of the really, really irritating students who always moan that the teacher is unqualified, boring, unable to impart knowledge clearly, disinterested in the class... I'm not a good boy in the classroom. Secondly, my choice to teach full time in a school and then offer private English lessons out-of-hours means that, four days out of five, my free time starts after 8pm. Actually, there's a third reason. I like to learn in the comfort of my own room with Internet, reference books, fresh coffee, my cat within reach. Perhaps an issue related to my age.

This reads like a complaint but it's not. There is much to be thankful for. Back on 1 November 1928, the current 29 letter alphabet replaced the Ottoman Turkish script with the Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet, one of Atatürk's reforms for which the non-Turk should be grateful too. As an extension of the Latin alphabet and under the initiative of the first president of the Turkish Republic, the language was completely overhauled and today, although I may moan endlessly about laborious grammar conventions and innumerable suffixes, at least I'm not required to adopt another script.

As I am with Arabic, which, with foolhardiness, I commenced in earnest two weeks' ago. To date, I have made very little headway. However, I like my new calligraphy pen set. And at present I seem to have ample motivation to learn the countless permutations of letters.

Hopefully it will endure.

Ilk bahar geliyor

2008-04-24T19:18:00.004+02:00

I am loving the spring sunshine. The neighbours celebrated its arrival by promptly cutting down the sole tree providing shade to our kitchen and afterwards cementing half of their garden.

However, the positive spin on this is that Kebap and I now have a uninterrupted view of the Cihangir Mosque from the larger of the apartment's two balconies. The wisteria's looking fine too.

Well, tomorrow it's ANZAC Day and the multitude Australians and New Zealanders in town last week have disappeared further south and, as I write, are undoubtedly stirring from their hotel beds in the Dardanelles to begin the bus journey that will take them to the Gelibolu Peninsula National Park. The first of the Memorial Services will take place in a few hours and thousands of Antipodeans will remember, lest they forget, the sacrifice that so many made and will continue to make as long as we still feel the need as a species to conquer each other, take what doesn't belong to us and kill someone who might otherwise be our neighbour.

After visiting Lone Pine and other sites last year I was often moved to tears. I know it's naive to suggest that we can live in a world without war. There are simply too many evil and self-serving governments on the planet who stand to lose their sanctimonious idealogical raison d'etre if they don't possess an 'other' whose sole function is to relegate us to history. Or so they would have us believe. Get them before they get us. I've not naive enough to believe that anything is ever going to change.

However, it's paradoxical that I now find myself on the soil of a friendly country and that was seemingly our enemy not so long ago.

I hope those who visit Gallipoli over the upcoming days will find it the humbling experience that I underwent.

Below is an unsourced quote by Paul Rodrigues that I found on the Net:

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.

And you have to admit that these days, even the average Westerner can find Baghdad on the map.

The Lycian Way: Day 7 and a half

2008-04-12T18:43:00.005+02:00

My cat snoozes on my bad as I watch the light fade fast under another day of grey cloud in Istanbul. It's hard to believe that a week previous Damon and I had just completed between eighty to ninety kilometres across, over, under, around, through, past, in between, out of and beyond the most glorious stretch of coastline aged with scattered ruins, replete with rambling forests, oozing fields bursting with spring colour and offering to us a sights that had finally, after two years in Turkey, supplied the nec plus ultra of Mediterranean landscape.

The trip had ended in Üçağız and we were completely out of cash. We used our last 6 YTL to board a dolmuş to Demre. Nothing could have been more unsightly to us than this town brimming with the ugliest grey concrete tower blocks of which Turkey is so fond. I slipped my sunglasses on hoping to guard myself from so much hideousness. After seven days among nature it felt wrong to come back to this so suddenly.

And that was it. By ten o'clock that evening Damon's head was squishing a Toblerone bar into the table in the waiting lounge at Dalaman as he gave up the fight to remain awake. We'd dozed in and out of slumber for most of the afternoon on the boardwalk in Fethiye and all I wanted now was a) to see my cat, and b) to uncake the grime from my body. I did both somewhere around midnight, though not at the same time.

Although I've learned that my store of adjectives remains well below that needed to describe the people and places we visited, I have wonderful memories and images that I hope shall bring me back here once again. The whole week simply reinforced the fact that quite possibly, I'm never coming home.

Damn, ten more weeks of school until the summer vacation starts.

The Lycian Way: Day 7

2008-04-11T08:14:00.009+02:00

Our bodies were weary and the air hung heavy with the smell of putrefaction.

Even after I opened the tent flap, nothing seem to improve the quality of air. Whatever today had in store for us, it was sure gonna need to involve cleansing. Although it seemed to me humorous that I had worn the same underpants for an entire week, at this point there might have been health risks to consider. More crucial was the following day's return flight to Istanbul. I couldn't quite imagine what I might smell like within the closed compressed environment of a plane. Strangely arousing.

Today was to be a round trip. From Üçağız we planned to it easily across low ground to Aperlai, a small Lycian settlement perched on mountainside and running into a shallow bay. The classic Mediterranean ending to our trip. and since we would return to our departure point later that day, Onur at the local restaurant kindly less us store several kilograms of unneeded items so we could trek with a lighter weight on our backs.

It was all straightforward. We walked briskly for about three hours, spotting sheep, donkeys, horses, goats, cow and camels along the way.

By the time we arrived at Aperlai the wind had increased and clouds now blocked the sun. The waters of the bay, still inviting, looked cold and refreshing. Lycian graves sat in shallow waters, as they do in several parts of this area. I assume sea levels rose but have never bothered to search for the reason. In fact, after a week of moving through the area it seemed the very first time in eons that, while travelling, I hadn't really done any research whatsoever on the places I would come across. I had been fairly ill-informed about the region's history the entire stretch of the journey and yet it was definitely one of the moments of holiday memories.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

So... Freezing water. Two filthy boys. One Reality Show. Not really, just no choice here. It was time for the big wash. At the risk of hypothermia and unlimited sea urchin needles entering sensitive areas. It took 3.78 minutes for me to enter the water up to my thighs. for a male, entering freezing water using the step by step approach becomes ineffective at this point. You need to simply dive in. More easily said than done. Damon counted, I dived and had the fastest, most efficient and soapless wash in my life. I've seen pictures of Russian cutting holes in the ice at the height of winter and plunging into the dark murky depths. I always put this down to a lack of pleasures available under the Soviet Regime but now have the personal empirical evidence to show that below zero temperatures certainly make you aware of your living status. However, it does shrink your weener.

Another exploration of Lycian building was in evidence everywhere from the edge of the bay, sprawling up the hill and possibly onto is ridge. A little more of the same as Apollonia but here the proximity of the sea made it extra special. I felt disappointed the sun didn't shine down on the whole scene but nature is capricious and global warming is my way of saying make winters shorter, you with me?

And that, unfortunately, was more or less the end of our journey. At 5pm we knew the sun would get home before us so we donned our packs once more and returned a toute vitesse to Üçağız. I think we celebrated with a beer. Damon definitely did as I have photographic evidence. I simply can't remember anything but wanting to climb into bed.

The Lycian Way: Day 6

2008-04-10T14:36:00.021+02:00

I knew this would happen. I return to Istanbul and an entire week runs out before I've finished my holiday memoirs. Rather crap at time management, I never seem to improve what has evidently become the bane of my life. It all just slips away so fast and compounds the feeling that I never complete the task at hand.

Anyway, my favourite day on the trip.

Not the most beautiful scenery and certainly not the best weather we experienced on our journey, however, our penultimate day on the trail was the most varied and interesting. And close to twelve hours of walking. I was feeling fit.

We arose at the crack of dawn, ate something for breakfast that must have been instantly forgettable because I can't remember what is was. Undoubtedly fruit. I know I drank only water because it was to be the first challenge of the day. to find some more of the stuff. Until this point, we had merely glanced at markings on the map that showed the locations of various cisterns and natural springs, however today we were certainly going to need to find some as we intended to make it hydrated and headache-free to a small village, Kılıçlı, by sundown.

We set off and up a hill where we found a large signpost showing the way forward. A large white house with makeshift garage was our first sing of life and within moment Damon located the cistern. we were then at odds whether to knock on the door and request water. In these parts we doubted the inhabitants rose early. Why get out of bed at all when you don't have to deal with incessant traffic and your obligations are limited to watching peacefully over some languid livestock. Of course, I'm wrong. These people had quite likely arisen hours previous and by now were many furlongs away tending to goats high up on the ridge.

Extracting water from the cistern require the kind of lateral thinking of which I remain in short supply. However, given the urgency of our situation it was indeed amazing at what we achieved using a small two handled pot, some old string and elbow grease. Ten minutes and a few failed attempts behind us, we managed to fill at capture at least three litres and I felt rather proud the event had gone so well.

The nest few hours were spent collecting another dog, idling among the usual olive groves, scrambling over rocky outcrops and travelling through gentle pine. Bracken and small scratchy bushes were a feature of the day and on several occasions we needed to stop to check we were indeed headed in the right direction.

Eventually we came into a almond orchard and met with Bayram Bey. Who I thought initially was going to shoot one of us dead for meat and keep the other as a sexual plaything. Unlike most Turks, Bayram was not garrulous. He liked to stare at us a lot. A lot. I felt the taste of fear and an impromptu and imperfect rendition of Deliverance involuntarily played in my head. I wasn't ready to squeal like a pig.

Like all Turks, Bayram was hospitable to a fault and invited us in for tea. His house was as ramshackle as you could possible imagine but had a particular to it even though I couldn't imagine what exactly life would be like in such an abode. We drank a few cups of tea and Bayram offered us water from his tank, which he needs to collect from the nearest village every now and then since rainfall has presumably dropped in the parts in the recent past. Bayram had a puppy called Aslan, Lion, that could have killed damon or I with a single jump to the throat. Deliverance involuntarily re-played in my head.

We were accompanied to the tractor path that crossed one of Bayram's fields and pointed in the direction of the nearest village, Boğazcık. We greeted a few builders and refused the offer of lodgings from a woman who appeared from nowhere and then disappeared equally mysteriously, as we set our bearings to Appollonia.

Appollonia. At the foot of a hill we unyoked our burdens and climbed backpack free to a view and ruined Hellenistic city atop a scree-covered hill. The ancient sure loved to build a) on steep slopes, and b) way above sea-level. I have really good calf muscles to prove it.

We found a theatre amidst the undergrowth and Damon performed a sparkling RADA-inspired version on Aristophanes. I took photos and cheered him on until finding my own niche among the collapsed Byzantine church where I delivered a fire-and-brimstone sermon from a tree-cum-pulpit. It was all very thespian but I suddenly remembered that I necessarily hate all actors for the pretentious jerks they are and more importantly the suns rays were no longer warming my aching cadaverous body.

We slid down the slopes, got back into the yoke and took off towards a village that time and perhaps even Turkey, forgot.

Backtracking a kilometre or more, we came upon a large bull emitting a large sound that gave a largely uncomfortable feeling in my pants. An grumpy 900kg bovine is not to be tampered with, especially when it clearly does not want that green piece of string around its horn to be tied to a lamp post. It looked irascible and sounded damn well annoyed. Damon and I spent approximately three minutes wondering whether the big scary bull was going to flee, mount the cow, or worse, mount us. A completely calm couple sat there gently coaxing the animal that was going to kill us into its leash. Jesus, have you seen the hooves on a bull? I choose to sat afar.

Animal chained, we moved on into the village proper, except there wasn't one. Man, this place was small. I loved the stone houses but hated the feeling that this was the sort of town people think are full of gentle welcoming village folk but in fact one of the barns contain acid bath holding the remains of previous intruders. Don't blame me, I do originate from a scary town. I come from a very spooky place indeed. Still, not that it left any psychological damage.

Provisions had diminished rapidly after a day's energetic use of muscles, and I called out to a man who was staring at his wife who was staring at us. Luckily for us he turned out to be the owner of the town store. Of course, if can can call a room covered in dust and stacked high with only fifteen different flavoured varieties of Pop-Cakes and Cola a shop, then were in for a rather large spree.

Being American, I assumed for Damon this was virtually a health food store because he promptly stashed a lot of things in individual single serve sized packets into a medium-sized plastic bag. When I started to cry the owner went back into his house next door and brought two loaves of bread. I stopped weeping. Damon was grinning about his new diet of Pop-Cakes. Turks loves this kind of crap. It's cheap. It's completely void of nutrition. None of this can ever be good for you. It was all cheap and let's face it, we had no other choice.

On the shopkeepers advice, we could pitch our tent and sleep anywhere we wanted. I wanted to stay out of range of both aminals and people who might like to eat other people. We effortlessly avoided more big fat and scary things making loud noises and made our way out of town. Spotting a great, wide and green field that might give us shelter and offer at least a 400m unobstructed view in every direction, I felt safer that we weren't going to be eaten.

Murat Bey kindly allowed us to rest in his field, and his obese, food-munching son waddled his way in front, signalling us to follow. Mustafa was about 24 years and 24 stone. The kind of man who spends his whole life ogling woman who never want to marry him. Still, we were males and so his only interest was to help us clear the field of the 857 rocks that might cause discomfort while sleeping. Mustafa gave up after the third stone but we carried out while he proffered all manner of information about the area.

Very helpful he was too, when, after unpacking the tent he informed us public transport didn't make it far. Without explaining the entire thing which would take too long... Damon I ended up riding in Mustafa's mate's car to the next town of Üçağız later that evening for the tidy amount of too much cash. In fact, Mustafa was wily and had, by exaggerating the distance and difficulty of the journey between his town and our next destination, organised him and his buddy enough beer money to ensure he'd be hassling poor, unsuspecting females for a long time to come. God, how can any young man allow himself to get a belly so big that he looks pregnant? Disgusting.

So, we were in Üçağız and our tent still needed to be pitched. I'm fairly sure we ended up sleeping in someone's extended garden, though in these parts they don't seem to worry about that kind of thing so much.

I will say, however, that at this point in the journey, Damon and I were no longer smelling very nice.

It might even be fair to say Mustafa just didn't want us reeking in his fields.

The Lycian Way: Day 5

2008-04-09T21:58:00.008+02:00

Today, the backpack felt lighter. My body and mind had gradually adjusted to carrying more than the usual daily burden of laptop, wireless moused and unmarked test papers up the hill to the taxi stand and I was arrogantly starting to feel like I knew what this trekking thing was all about. And, I had the beginnings of a very sexy tan.

It was a late start. Damon was eating everything on the table at braeakfast and so for no reason other than it felt good, I slipped downstairs for my second hot shower in 24 hours.

We headed up to the Otogar and took a bus ride to Kaş. We had decided earlier that to cover the best parts of the Lycian path in our extremely short period of time then some shortcuts would need to be taken to avoid the uninteresting bits. In fact, back in Faralya we had received it on good authority to avoid leaving Kalakan by the waymarkers since we would have been following tarmac for eight to ten kilometres. Damon and I had instead opted for 45 of returning to the ways of modern transport and lisntening to the kind of modern Turkish pop music played therein rather than suffer several hours snaking along the paved coastal road, listening to car honrs and soaking up exhaust fumes.

As Kaş it was time to stock up on supplies - namely a small pot, rice, lentils, bread, soup mix, chocolate, lighter fluid, fruit, and the kind of sweets that Australians call lollies but that I never ate unless a) my grandma gave them to me or b) I'd just had a vaccination and the doctor's receptionist felt obliged to offer something for the pain. Damon chose a bag of candy called Olips and I laughed quite a lot because that sounds dirty to my ears.

We went downhill until we reached the harbour and then kept moving so that I saw nothing at all of the town but instead was out among the trees, bushes and other nature-type things within no time at all. I distinctly remember us losing us way, confused by either a junction waymarker that in fact was not a junction and a house with turrets that we were supposed to turn left at but in fact wasn't even in our field of vision. After sometime we confirmed the junction was a lie and the house situated around to the right. I finally understood the guide book contained about the same quantity of literal truth as the any of the Holy Books.

On Day 5 I began to hum Goodbye Yellow Brick Road to myself, a tune I would find in my head some three days later. When ar you gonna come down? When are you goin' to land? Still have no idea. We came to a strange field with rocks that were amassed in no particular fashion but that would have looked at home at some pretentious modern art installation gathering somewhere in your local wanky upmarket neighbourhoood. Entitled Rock(y) 1. There next hour of so involed a lot more prepositions of movement and some confusion involving our first motorised cistern and a temporary gate made of chicken wire. We separated ways for 500m to ewnsure we werne't actually going to take a wrong turn, though after being truamatised with chicken wire and animal kept within in at a young age I in fact just need a couple of minutes to compose myself.

Soon we were sitting down again eating more chocolate and then we were following a blue piece of rope across a field of young pomegranate trees. Next, more rocks led up to the windswept Çoban Plajı. I had once of those successful anger management moments after seeing inordinate piles of non-biodegradable plastic refuse strewn in an otherwise deserted location.

More walking before we arrived a couple of hours later we found ourselves at another protected and this time clean bay, replete with an outcrop of ruined stone buildings and cistern containing foul-smelling undrinkable water. It was here that we decided to pitch camp for the evening.

We set up the tent and proceeded to gather firewood. A lof of fun too complicated to explain was had with an enormous piece of granite and some very thick branches, although maybe it'll get lost in translation here. The fire started first time around. Fire started ensured that, and at only 1.85 YTL, it was clearly a bargain and a product for which I would need to find more uses.

The rain set in and we cooked dinner over the campfire. A few fishing boats chugged into the bay for the evening. not a sound but water softly lapping against the rocks. As had already become our habit, we slept soundly that night.

The Lycian Way: Day 4

2008-04-08T19:57:00.015+02:00

I'm a little too tired now to write but know if I don't get these thoughts down now then it'll be another week until I have the opportunity and by then my memories of the journey will have already withered and begun to fade. I'm going to limit myself to 500 words. Which is what I say every time I begin to type an entry.

Again the sun shone, we ate a hearty breakfast and set out from the village of Gelemiş to the ruins of Patara, a couple of kilometres down a paved road. Turning right at a majestic old stone gate, we turned left at the first Lycian tombs we'd encountered. With difficulty with found the track through waist high flowering weed which led up through a smattering of houses and until we passed a man who gave us fresh peas. Not since Orlando's last risotto had I eaten them since city Turks seems to prefer theirs pickled in jar. Foul.

The first dog we encountered was vociferous and warned us and our accompanying canines to keep well away from his charge of goats. The next dog we encountered just about made me poop in my already quite filthy shorts. A real live Hound of the Baskervilles, I paled when he showed his fangs and ever so nonchalantly picked up in each hand a stone the size of my head. Which made walking cumbersome. His owner was nonplussed about the entire thing but it wasn't until we were half a mile out away until I unclenched my buttocks. I could still hear his bark as we turned another corner and proceeded down the remains of a poorly kept road that rains had almost completely washed away, thinking abseiling gear might have come in handy.

We delved into the chocolate supply to keep our minds from the growing trickle of sweat running down our backs and passed over into green fields and yet more of the now obligatory but charming olive groves. A retired English couple now living in the district handed us a few pointers before we stopped for lunch. Again we feasted on fresh tomatoes, cucumber, goat's cheese and I hoped that God would provide me with a leaner, more svelte figure upon my return to Istanbul.

Over a few more hills and we began to head down as the track widened and again the sapphire waters of the Mediterranean came into view. The downtrodden looking dog has so far followed us the entire morning's journey - no mean feat considering she was both malnourished and had clearly been abused for most of her short life. I'd forced Damon earlier to gently lob a few stones its way to discourage it, but either this was the greatest adventure she had heretofore known or perhaps, as I would later come to accept, she had simply come to far to make her own was home safely. she was clearly intelligent enough not to want to face the shepherd's vicious canines again on her way back to Gelemiş.

A couple of hours later and our Kalkan, a once sleepy haven now draw card for northern Europeans of a town greeted us on the other side of the bay - the evening's destination was now in sight. and of course, it went began to go iffy.

After mounting and crossing the largest aqueduct I'd yet seen in Turkey, we came to a junction. Then we turned right, and down. Big mistake. After five hundred metres across razor-sharp rocks we had already passed the point of no return but even the dog hadn't been blindly foolish enough to follow.

For the next three and a half hours Damon and I could barely take our minds of the now dangerous terrain to stop and admire the views. One slip would've been a Hellish ticket to hospital, given that some glamorous Turkish rescue team would've been bothered to get the unlucky injured soul out. To be fair, it was foolhardy of us to continue. However, the sun decided to begin its descent and I was saying a large quantity of naughty words under my breath, and maybe some out loud too. I can't remember.

Rocks. In every direction. Rocks that would injure, main and possibly leave gaping wounds that would become infected, septic, and fail to heal. My leg broken two years earlier throbbed. I had a headache. We stopped playing 20 questions because I no longer cared about anyone else who had ever lived or died. It was us against nature with the soundtrack of our now lost dog in the distance.

Except of course, she wasn't lost. After howling for while she simply reappeared, silent. It's moments like this you marvel at the sheer intelligence of animals and wonder why it couldn't actually show us the path outta here rather than just follow us. Surprisingly, I kept my cool. Kalkan disappeared behind a ridge and the shadows passed over our head. Still nothing but rocks.

It was all very stoic, methinks.

Eventually, the combination of a newly bulldozed road, recent building development and a sheer lack of patience brought us to a switchback that climbed back and forth up an incline that would've made an Istanbul taxi driver refuse the fare. I had to stop three times on the way up. Now was probably a good time to give up smoking.

By the time we reached main road into the city our combined remaining energy level wouldn't have had to strength to complete a full English sentence. Beyond exhausted. As we crashed into Kalkan proper we headed downhill (thank you God) and headfist with dog in tow to the cheap and cheerful restaurant full of bronzed tourists and an East London family for whom everything was 'bangin''. Indeed, so it was.

Damon managed to shove in a chicken kebab while I again opted for beans and rice. Those muscles that run from you neck across your shoulders felt like someone was driving a Laguiole mezzaluna with a piercingly sharp blade into them. No pain, no gain an' all that, but to be truthful, I was feeling half dead and certainly smelt that way.

Ömer met us at the first pension we encountered, and had he not had rrom we would have both happily collapsed in the main street. The hot shower in the Gül Pansyıon was as invigorating as it was a fitting finale to the day.

I peeled of the filthiest socks since Edmund Hilary went walking up a hill and hallucinated as I lay down on a bed of cotton candy and drifted into a coma. No need to mention how well I slept.

Worth mentioning, however, is the breakfast we ate the next morning and also how Damon, possessing a slim physique at best, greedily polished off omelette for two (ie me and him) and then packed away half a kilo of the town's best clotted cream, known to Turks as kaymak and to the medical world as an A-grade aorta blocker.

Suddenly, we had energy again. And a full stomach. And the same filthy socks.

The word count is reporting 1187. It lies.

The Lycian Way: Day 3

2008-04-07T15:53:00.016+02:00

I awoke with verve and gusto. And three hours before anyone else. And hungry.

God smiled down upon us. The lingering clouds parted and at the princely hour of half past eight the sun rose lazily over the crest of the mountains and spilled its warmth into the valley; not that any of that makes Damon more of a morning person. By the time he pulled his idle arse from its slumber I had devoured enough my own body weight in olives, tomatoes, cheese, cucumber, yoghurt, honey, bread and jam. Our clothing and backpacks remained damp but Brian has assured us that today;s scenery would be some of the most spectacular along the trail. He was right.

We started uphill on a goat track and soon understood that not a few trekkers were losing their way on the Faralya-Alınca route. Brian's hand-drawn map would hold us in good stead to avoid backtracking and simply getting waylaid. The goat track moved uphill through the now daily dose of conifers and then flattened out over the saddle and onto a tractor path, upon whose left side rose terraces with craggy olive trees. It was now warm. As we moved over the next ridge it becomes impossible to describe the natural beauty. Think sharp intake of breath with an irrepressible desire to do an accapella Sound of Music into possible followed by uncontrolled rolling about in fields of buttercups and other flowers oft illustrated in children's fairy tale books. I have neither talent nor faculties to do justice to the perfect union of colour that held us in its sway. All that and Pan's tree too. There were a young German couple and two middle aged English folk attending to maps and fresh blisters but they held no interest for us.

This was nature like I hadn't tasted for three year since the valleys of northern Pakistan. The cacophony and incessant grind and greyness of Istanbul was all but lost as my head drowned in a sensory overload. we took some excellent photos too.

As we became more attuned to walking we felt confident enough to ask a goat herder for a shortcut. On the advice of Brian we had planned to avoid the village of Kabak, for the sole reason that I refuse to go anywhere named after a vegetable. Especially 'Pumpkin'. It sounded too David Lynch for my liking. So Nasreddin pointed across a gully and Damon and I nodded like we knew what he was talking about. Though we actually did, since speaking with herdsmen was proving more successful than with the average Istanbul taxi driver.

The next hour was spent wandering and wondering whether our newly chosen path was in fact a shortcut to Alınca. you cannot expect someone who lives in these parts, living with the ebb and flow of nature to have any real concept of time and distance. I realised that I had been a bad student and asked him open-ended questions. How would he possibly know what half and hour was? He'd simply told us that to keep us all smiling. In any case, while our timing was out we were on the right path and after encountering a bubbling spring among the oleanders we found the recently bulldozed track that would lead us upwards and onwards.

A quick break was followed by an emormous amount of walking. All of it spectacular and the majority uphill. Goats fed among the pines on gnarled bushes and the Mediterranean wove in and out of view as we weaved among the rock faces and along ledges. Damon dabbled in sunbathing atop a precipice that looked down the valley to a small beach and Pumpkin village. We'd managed to organise a picnic lunch from the previous night's lodgings so we feasted on spinach and bulgur, rice and flat bread.

We started to tire as uphill inclines became steeper, the sun beat down harder and we halted more periodically for a breath of air. After filling up at another spring we had only a couple of kilometres ahead of us until we happened upon Alınca with another awe-inspiring vista across Yedi Burun, The Seven Noses, a group of sharp peninsulas jutting out from the coastline.

A continent of septuagenarian German, Swiss and Italian walkers were busily consuming Turkey's favourite state produced beer (which personally I think is rubbish), so Damon struck up conversation auf Deutsch - he's talented like that. Next thing you know they're telling me of their experiences in Australia (Cairns was a dive, Sydney felt stuck in the 1950s, everyone was drunk after 6pm).

Damon chatted with a man for a while and then translated something to me. It goes a little something like this, Apparently there is a species of black dwarfish beetles that ingest pine sap that passes unaltered through their digestive system. Bees then feed on their fecal matter, return to the hive and produce something that is later harvested and sold around the world as pine honey. Marketing it as Double-Poohed Out Conifer Sap probably wouldn't assist with reaching sales targets. Once thing's for sure, I was right to move from German to French class in 9th year. Who knows what cultural dirtiness may have been impregnated into my feeble adolescent mind?

Still, Damon's half-Hun and his Teutonic tongue had us on a free ride to Gelemiş, our next starting point.

Gelemiş is a town becoming increasingly popular for it's long peaceful and surprisingly unpolluted beach. We didn't care for that as we had just walked a bloody long way and ended up falling into the arms of an old woman who offered us a camping place in her backyard for a fiver each. Best of all she left us fresh bread, cucumber, tomatoes, olives and bread.

At this point in the journey I stopped wearing my sole pair of underpants.

The Lycian Way: Day 2

2008-04-06T12:31:00.008+02:00

Of the four elements, wind is my least favourite. Principally since it reminds me of a bad childhood experience at the seaside in Port Broughton, The Moors (a place to conceal homicide victims), and conjures up a vision of Kate Bush on a stallion, bespoke in top hat and billowing chiffon, singing Wuthering Heights. The wind makes me shudder. It also tends to cause distress and unease to animals, namely my cat.

So in the first wee hour of the morning when the tempest blew up the valley and slammed into the side of the tent, there was general malaise all round. The tent seemed involved in some kind of synthetic, energetic and spasmodic Pilates session with Damon and I edging ever closer to the cliff face. At the point where I had to break loose from the tent in little more than my blue briefs to rescue a fugitive fly cover, it was clear we would have to move. Now.

Bleary-eyed and not in the best humour, the wind unleashed all its Zephyric force, currents of air violent and hostile worked against us as we hurriedly packed our belongings, took flight across a dirt field and sheltered in the shell of yet another unfinished residence that mars the landscape in these parts. However, this was not the moment to sound off about inevitable ugly cement progress but rather to huddle down in the among bricks and building material and so remain out of reach of the noreaster.

We awoke in a mass of thinly and widely spread goat excrement. Not an idyllic manner by which to begin the day. Damon was not smiling. A pear and apple each later we were determined to soldier on, left the turd, wind and cliff face behind us and head for the nearby village of Kozağaç. At the cistern we filled our canteen, cleaned our teeth, greeted an unfriendly canine with little-dog syndrome. Then along came Coşkan.

Without heading into territory of overused metaphors and images of the hospitable villager, Coşkan, his wife and two progeny, Yasin and Yasemin entreated us to the most onion-filled breakfast of gozleme I had ever known, coupled with the ubiquitous Turkish tea. I cooed over the baby, chatted with the young boy, talked endlessly wıth the man of the house and encouraged endlessly the woman of the house to bring more food.

Damon and I felt the need to move on as we hadn't really progressed very far and behind us gloomy clouds hung heavy over the formidably towering Baba Dağ. In recent memory an earthquake had triggered landslides that buried a row of houses and it was clear that the mountain seems fond of intermittently dropping several hundred tons of landmass, without warning, down its slopes and into the village.

Across scented pine forests, olive groves and pastures bursting with spring blossoms, it was difficult not to fall prey to the cliche of the pastoral. Had a knight dismounted his steed and practiced le droit de seigneur with some russet-haired buxom shepherdess, I don't think Damon and I would've considered it in poor taste. The views were arresting and it's always good to know that no matter how much city life can make you jaded, the country rejuvenates and restores your faith and enthusiasm.

Kirme was quite naturally the picture-perfect hamlet set amongst the flowering fields. Stone cottages with ramshackle fences, cows meandering. Everything was emerald green. Before I got sucked into some freaky Wizard of Oz type hallucination the mist enshrouded us once again and the heavens rained down upon us and our backpacks. We promptly took refuge under the conifers to realise half an hour too late that the rain had, as the Turks would say, 'soaked us like a sausage'. Go figure. As the steam rose from my dank and now reeking socks, our backpacks had collected enough water to be wrung out at some point in the future.

Unneighbourly bovines shot us furtive glances as they moved up the hill. I realised for the first time in a long time that I don't actually like cattle. Unless it's bleeding on a plate with my fork in it.

Soaked pas the point of return, we moved a little sluggishly to end our day entering Kelebek Valdisi, Butterfly Valley. We'd already exhausted our superlatives some time earlier and refusing to utter 'pretty' again, instead we stayed silent, mouths open and collecting rainwater. Kelebek Vadisi is freakin' gorgeous.

George House was owned by Rıdvan Bey and run by his son Hasan and other members of the extended family. Damon and I peeled off our wet suits and were inextricably drawn to the heat of the wood stove in the common room. Circulation returned to my toes and other, drier pension guests came through the doors. A few expatriates teaching English in Istanbul along with Brian, an Australian living in some remote village who spends his time planning and waymarking new treks.

As we lounged on Ottoman cushions scoffing a plethora of hot and cold meze, Brian volunteered his knowledge and gave us sound advice for the days ahead. A man of strong opinions, he warned us of shortcomings in our plans and suggested alternate routes.

We slept soundly with full stomach in a damp room, with the optimism that the sensational sunset was would bring more clement skies on the morrow and that our newfound information would ensure even better days to come.

The Lycian Way: Day 1

2008-04-05T10:55:00.000+02:00

After a quick flight, taxi ride and half an hour or so in a minibus, Damon, I and our backpacks found ourselves full of excitement in Fethiye and almost ready for the journey ahead. We exited the otogar, crossed the road and filled up and cheap and cheerful Turkish fare. Next was a half hour dolmuş ride to the wrong place.

Perhaps due to our combined level of excitement and anticipation, we bounced off the bus, onto the road and soon realised that we weren't actually where we had hoped we would be. A man with finely sculpted hair and a lascivious look in his eye soon approached us and with a phone call and exchange of monies his friend and taxi driver quickly transported us to where we actually wanted to be.

We had begun.

Already the late afternoon was upon us so it was going to be a short walk the first day. Within minutes the outrageously blue waters and classic ruggedly macho Mediterranean coastline of Ölüdeniz spread out before us. The town itself is an over-hyped but much cherished destination for the English, fleeing their miserable climes at the earliest moment to lather up on solar rays, fresh fish and probably quite a lot of sex with handsome locals. However, Damon and I, neither of us being English, headed up over and around until we reached 500m and every word uttered was in amazement at the view.

Unknown to me at the time, my camera lens was as filthy as my underwear drawer and so it's with more than a scintilla of disappointment that I now bemoan the general state of my photographic ineptness. Still, here's Damon looking cheesy as Hell and unaware of just how incredibly soiled that hair is going to be in a week. I tried to capture that 'Lonely Planet cool' but feel that Damon's overall look adds an edge and perhaps even another dimension to travel photography.

We continued up, around, down, over and behind some other prepositions of movement until we met with our first of many pine tree groves. I was already regretting the weight of the third T-shirt and traveller companion's English-Turkish Bible I'd so hastily packed, but panoramas, vistas and other scenes abounded in beauty. I soon forgot about the provisions I'd packed and would carry around the entire week without once using them and instead focused on the dying light, my inexperience at mounting a tent in the dark and questioned whether in fact I was really going to manage without Starbucks caffe latte for this stretch of time.

Over the saddle of the hill we came upon a flat green pastoral scene and decided this would make a suitable location to pitch a tent. night was falling at at higher elevation the cold seemed to creep up on us as did the incredibly rapidly encroaching and all enveloping mist.

To end the first day with precipitous views, our tent was placed as close as possible to the edge of a 600m drop, to ensure that any ill-thought plan to sprint from the tent opening in the middle of the night, perhaps to meets the urges of nature, would certainly end in death with a spectacular view on the way down.

At some point between going to sleep and getting up again, the wind started to rage. At midnight we were heavily asleep under orange nylon, unaware of what Mother Nature had in store for us just an hour or two later.

As you can plainly see, the little orange dot halfway down the left hand side of the image was going to be no match for Nature's fury.

Leaving the kids at home

2008-04-04T19:53:00.011+02:00

It's a tough life being a parent, replete with angst, arduous choices and troublesome decisions. When you love something and feel responsible for it (ie my cat), relinquishing ownership, even temporarily, is onerous.

Doped up on rabies vaccine.

Tomorrow I depart for the sun-drenched skies of southern Turkey. More precisely, my flatmate and I will embark on a seven day expedition across the magnificent landscapes of the Lycian region, nestled between the modern cities of Fethiye and Antalya. Synonymous with Northern Europeans and ex-Soviet holidaymakers, package tours and ugly tourist developments, this part of the Mediterranean was once inhabited by the Lycians, best remembered for rock-cut tombs which we hope to meet with along the way.

A year ago I never thought twice before squeezing short and shirts into a backpack and setting out from home. My position has somewhat altered now. I feel vexed about leaving Kebap at home. Really bad. More so after returning from the vet an hour ago where he had to receive his rabies vaccination. Kitty's a bit glum this evening, and I'm hit with that Catholic guilt again from which, as a good Protestant lad, I've suffered since birth.

Perihan Hanım, the wonderful authoritarian disguised as a dame d'un certain age living downstairs and whose bill-paying capabilities have to be fully experienced to also be appreciated, has volunteered to keep Kebap in food and water until my return. However, her generous offer hasn't assuaged my apprehension.

It's April, the sun has miraculously reappeared, and in the feline cosmos hormones are running at an annual high. Again, my responsibilities imply keeping my adolescent cat from the clamoring paws of rutting females. A surfeit of unclean images unsettle my feeble mind. While awkwardly clambering across scree, gazing deeply into the azure waters of the Mediterranean, I shudder at the thought of my cat set upon by young females, who, for wont of a better term, are achin' for it.

Still, at some point in time successful parenting means letting go of control. Kebap needs the freedom and space to find his own way. I just hope he doesn't hook up with the town bike, you know what I'm sayin'?

So. The Lycian Way. Tomorrow morning Damon and I board a plane to Dalaman and then work our way to the beginning of a trail that promises a dramatic mixture of nature, history and culture. Actually, after the last few months in Istanbul, nature is the sole requisite ingredient for happiness. I need extended intakes of fresh air. Kate Clow was the first to mark out the path not so long ago and I'm thankful to her and those who have since journeyed in her footsteps that I've been able to prepare easily for the journey. The rest is up to us.

I expect this kind of thing the entire parcours.

The weather report promises reasonable weather if not cool evenings. Pictures I've nastily downloaded from the Net without referencing herald breathtaking moments. All in all I plan to return to my hometown in a week, full of vim, earnest, and ready to face the final half semester of the academic year.

I'm really going to miss my cat.

http://www.lycianway.com

Kebap

2008-04-02T20:43:00.011+02:00

Pre-attack Turkish-English strategic planning session.

After skimming through the Australian Quarantine and Something Else Service site yesterday I am reeling in horror at the discovery that Australia won't permit the import of any live animals from Turkey, no exceptions.

A highly responsible cat owner, I am having to reconsider the thought of returning home at all. There is simply no way that I am leaving without the psychopathic bundle of fur that is my best new friend.

I thought Rome was a town for cats. Istanbul is the town for cats. Millions of well-fed overweight moggies endlessly trawl daily through refuse bins in search of that savoury morsel, scrambling up and along the walls of the neighbourhood mosque, gorging on piles of cheap diarrhea-inducing dried pellets scattered in front of apartment entrances and generally living high life alla Turka.

Kebap was just a wee young lad when I espied him pining away in the street last September. Neighbourhood watch later informed me that the mother has passed away and his brother's whereabouts were lately unknown, so I took the exceptionally small and energetic bundle into my care.

Faster, pussycat, faster.

It had been some time since I'd been responsible for any living creature other than myself. I first named him Abdullah since I've always considered it a solid masculine Muslim name. Neighbourhood watch duly informed me calling my cat after Mohammed's father was clearly improper - I reside directly across from the mosque and calling the cat in each evening for dinner might upset a few local souls. More scarily, an unfortunate English woman teaching in the Sudan had been incarcerated after designating a teddy bear Mohammed earlier the same week. As always, I'm lovin' the radically under-educated.

A friend suggested Tarçın, Cinnamon. Nope.

Kebap is Turkish.

It's all about the love. And possibly a dash of bewilderment.

Naming over, we've spent the following six months understanding that neither one of us is particularly easy to get along with. No-one alerted me, until it was far too late, the need to discipline a cat. Kebap likes to bite, especially my face. And especially between the hours of three to five am, when I'm apparently not expecting it. I've recently learned to sleep with no trace of hand or foot peeking out from under the duvet. Any sighting is good cause for attack.

Kebap drinks only the freshest water from the shower basin, obsesses over paper and plastic bags, and sadly, prefers napping on the flatmate's bed than curling up on mine. He takes more than his fair share of the pillow in the early hours of the morning and doesn't understand that jumping on my face is not the way to get more food, now.

He is obsessed with my ink-jet printer and takes immeasurable pleasure from it.

As with any ward, guardianship entails numerous duties. Good food doesn't come cheap and my otherwise handy Turkish teacher's card provides no discount for vaccinations. After much anguish I've decided against sterilisation. The vet informed me that castration keeps the cat calmer during those heady days of spring; however, I'd need to watch his diet for the remainder of his life, as a tendency to put on weight is the most notable side effect of feline vasectomy. He also informed me that Kebap would turn into something of a balcony-potato, preferring inactivity to mad minutes of insane inexplicable movements through the apartment. The last thing I want in an animal is laziness. I'm Protestant. There is no greater sin committed than that by the idler.

So Kebap will remain intact, just as nature intended. He may well add to the city's feline population in time to come, but as a handsome cat I think he ought to reserve the right to act upon a few carnal urges from time to time. Only ugly things shouldn't reproduce.

Kalmak ya da kalmamak

2008-03-30T20:08:00.006+02:00

Do I stay or do I go now? So sang that little British band all those many moons ago. At present, I'm posing myself the same question as the gleam and glitter of this marvellous metropolis fades to something resembling a burnished walnut commode and I begin to wonder whether it's time for me to move on.

And so we arrive yet again at that point in my life where the promise of stability and career development is outweighed yet again by the possibility that countries unseen and lands in far flung places hold untold pleasures and discoveries that could excite me more that my once-beloved Istanbul.

The last few months have been an emotional nightmare and I need a change. After ten days on a sumptuous African safari in Uganda I quickly recognised that what had once pulled me to Istanbul was now the reason I wanted to get out. Uganda was lush, green, supplier of abundant fresh fruit and air and I wore nothing but sandals for the entire trip. Istanbul feels filthy, unhygienic and decrepit. Will this god-damn wind ever cease?

Winter in Istanbul, and this is my third, hangs oppressively. There is nothing but grey tones to the sky, the buildings, and the faces around me. The air reeks of petrol fumes and something else unpleasant, the apartment water supply stinks of turpentine, and my bedroom door handle has fallen off. The top button on my brown cotton work trousers has disappeared. Everyone talks of the coming water shortage in summer but I see nothing but a slightly altered form of it hanging over my head. Tell me, aside from Manchester is there a city in the world that had more cloud cover?

La grisaille. Last week I bought a 5-disc Edith Piaf box set which tells you a lot about the person I am and indeed the fact that I listened to Mon Dieu on loop for at least half an hour means that it's both time to extend my musical appreciation skills and get myself some sun.

Me happier, where the grass is apparently greener.

I love Istanbul but need to get myself out of this rut. Suggestions please.

Baci di Napoli

2007-12-24T16:34:00.000+02:00

The Italians are insane.

More than Istanbullites, Neapolitans have mastered the art of living in a city on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

It's a full year and a half since I last visited the Kingdom through which far too many have passed and left their mark.

I captured this photo of Orlando and I somewhere in the Spanish Quarter this afternoon.

The Municipal Council need to seriously reconsider how they are tackling this city's waste management. Quite strange in a city with a high population of bidets.

Probably not the first person to write about this.

2007-12-19T21:15:00.000+02:00

The most distressing part of my job is waking at 6am every morning. More calamitous still is that my body, even when on holidays, chooses to stir at the very same hour. I tossed and turned in my comfortable bed for about ten minutes until giving in to the fact that I was not going to get a sleep in. My body wouldn't allow it.

A lot of old things without much town planning.

Showered, shampoo-ed and shaved I went downstairs to my Internet-booked hotel marble lobby where breakfast awaited me. Italians need sugar for breakfast like a smack addict craves heroin. After a couple of fresh doughy puffed donut-shaped things and three caffe lattes, I was high and pumped on a sugar fix that made me feel strangely energetic yet aggressive and belligerent at the same time. I was ready to conquer the Forum.

Looking across the lower level of the Vittorio Emanuele memorial to Trajan's Column.

I retraced my steps from the previous day and worked my way over to Trajan's Market and more history that any one soul can inhale in a single breath. The vista of the Fori Imperiali from the wide main thoroughfare is one of the most dazzling steps back into our humanity's past. The Forum was once the centre of political, judicial and commercial life in the largest city of the most powerful empire the world had known. What remains still commands my respect; what must have been is beyond my imagination. However, clearly not beyond that of a number of erudite archaeologists and historians who together with some clever publishers have put together one of those smart little tourist publications to present a then-and-now portrait of the Eternal City. I browsed through the book stands for a while, eventually deciding that it was indeed foolish to waste further time perusing when the ruins actually it stood before me. I just lack imagination, and that, no money can buy.

Either Castor or Pollux gracing the entrance to the Piazza Senatorio.

I picked up the pace and raced about. The temple of Saturn aside that dedicated to Castor and Pollux, buildings raised and then fallen to the worship of Gods long discredited (see, it happens to all of them sooner or later). Rome's beauty is bewildering. I wandered about trying to reach what I considered would be the best vantage points for photographs, somehow ending up in front of the country's foremost monument to an over-sized ego - the massive white colossus to Vittorio Emanuele that backs onto the Campidoglio. And adfter climbing the stairway I admired both sides of the Piazza Senatorio structures designed by Michelangelo. Impressive.

Looking west from the Campidoglio.

I got waylaid while heading for the Vatican and ended up in across the Tiber in Trastevere, though I did manage to visit the fab Santa Maria in Cosmedin before completely losing my way. In Australia my hometown was at one time considered the City of Churches but that is one Hell of a misnomer. More truthfully it's home to the mullet people who like cars even if other cities might also fight for such an honorific title. After admiring a mosaic floor that was about a millenium older than any structure at home, my stomach cried out for foccacia.

God, Italian food is scrumptious. Even the take-away version is spectacular in comparison to what I suffer in Istanbul. Don't get me wrong, it's just that after two years I have no desire to fill my belly ever again with döner or dürüm. Sated with Parmesan and prosciutto, I moved progressively into shabbier picaresque neighbourhoods, decrepit buildings the colour of rich ochre ever so patiently awaiting renovation. Unlike Sydney, it'll be some time before the chrome and pine wood craze materialises here.

After gaining two kilograms from a single Italian breakfast. I resolved to diet immediately. The temple of Vespasian and Arch of Septimus Severus are in the background.

At some stage in the afternoon the river re-appeared. I crossed it and spent the rest of the afternoon in near-postcard-perfecto Rome. Campo di' Fiori, the Fontana di Trevi and the Piazza Navona, where Bernini's masterpiece stood unhappy, shrouded in scaffolding while encircled by a market hawking every Christmas stocking stuffer that 10 Euro could buy. While I was desperate to grab a Pope Benedict dartboard, as luck would have no-one would change a 100 Euro note, which is strange in a city where everything costs more than that. I settled for some chocolate for friends at home but unfortunately had consumed it before exiting the square.

The bell tower of Santa Maria in Cosmedin and the Temple of Hercules.

Intoxicated from history and European glamour, I did what I always do when visiting another city; looked for work. Born without the right to a European passport was once the bane of my existence. I think differently now, but for many years it was my sole focus and a debilitating chip on my shoulder. Yet again I was turned away from the reception of a reputable Roman English teaching school for mot having the correct working papers. These days I don't worry so much. Istanbul remains, 9 days out of 10, where I want to be. It would be just be pleasant to have some options from time to time. But I no longer wish for Europe to cave in on itself. Well, not that frequently.

And so my day ended. My feet very sore. I felt elated. I was asleep in the hotel by 10pm. Ready to awake for sugar at 6am.

Fontana di Trevi.

La citta

2007-12-18T17:41:00.000+02:00

Rome is an impressive city, stuffed with history and a lot of people wearing glamorous clothing and miserable expressions. I am, after all, in the heart of Europe, where long ago good manners gave way to haughty expressions and a judgments based on the quantity of instantly recognisable brans names worn. Luckily, Europe has history, otherwise I’d be just as happy to see the place bombed into Hell.

The rather outrageously decorated facade.

It has to be said that Rome is without a doubt one of the most beautiful cities on Earth and I cannot help but compare it with my beloved Istanbul, with whom it shares some of its past but little of the spoils of which empires usually profit. Constantine moved the capital of the dwindling Roman Empire eastwards in the 4^th century and Rome was reduced not to long after to a city of several tens of thousands of inhabitants. Meanwhile, Constantinople blossomed and underwent a spectacular transformation as Constantine and his successors directed public works that would stand the test of time and still remain among the city’s best fifteen centuries later. Istanbul under the Byzantine Emperors and afterwards the Ottoman rulers was for many centuries the City of the World’s Desire. Rome, for its part, the Eternal City, knew the Renaissance and some of the most splendid artistic expression ever known. I kinda like both.

As the French would say, le plafond.

Still, both metropolises are aging none too well. Traffic chokes the thoroughfares, infrastructure is generally of poor quality, and it’s telling that in both cities successive governments have failed miserably to provide inhabitants with an adequate underground train system. It’s fair to say that you would expect certain delays owing to archaeological digs when working on an underground transport project in either of these great towns. However, the delays are outrageously long and unacceptable. Either dig or don’t dig. And if you find something, then weigh up the value of the find with the fact that whatever is there has probably been buried and long-forgotten and would have continued to be so had the metro system not been undertaken in the first place. People in these cities deserve fair transport systems and probably would find them more valuable than than a few more artefact's stuck on shelves in glass cases. In fact, it would be interesting to discover just how many of the inhabitants of Istanbul and Rome actually visit their own museums. I'd pretty much better they opt for better public transport over another glass-encased collection of Phyrigian artefacts.

Anyway, all I’m saying is that to my friends, Romans, countrymen and Istanbullites, you should be expecting more from your local representatives. Especially in the way of transport.

Rome’s weather was surprisingly mild and I was able to manage without the heavy coat and warm socks that I seemed to need so much at home. Istanbul has a chill factor that requires a scarf and gloves during the months of December to March. Here I was able to walk out of the hotel almost naked.

Overkill. But I like it.

Interestingly, within moments of leaving the hotel I came across a multitude of Muslims finishing prayer. I think it very interesting to find a large population of practising Muslims in the very centre of the Catholic world, trying to picture a gathering of Christians in Mecca. Still, that was pointless.

The fabulously rich facade of Santa Maria Maggiore stood out as I strolled down Via Carlo Alberto and wondered how much money had it actually to taken to construct all of this. And if the Italians of today can barely manage to maintain a place within the G8, it must have clearly been a different situation in earlier days. It takes a lot of cash to construct stuff like this.

The original church was established on the Esquiline Hill in the 4^th century on the very same spot where snow had magically fallen during the middle of the Roman summer. Since then Popes have added to the edifice until it became one of the great Basilicas of the city. Santa Maria’s interior is rich. Lots of gold. Apparently, the first boatload of it brought back by Colombus and his buddies from the Americas was used in the construction of the coffered ceiling. Mosaics line the nave above 4^th century columns and the whole thing is quite spectacular indeed. Best of all it a mosaic depicting the Coronation of the Virgin. Damn impressive.

I left the basilica feeling as though 12 years between visits had been too long a time. Thought that I might make it back again tomorrow.

San Pietro in Vincolo is another favorite because I love a good legend-cum-story and this one has it. The chains that held St Peter in the dank Mamertine Prison somehow ended up in Constantinople. In the 500’s the Empress Eudoxia popped one of them into a church and sent the other by FedEx to her daughter in Roma. Pope Leo I received it as a gift, which should come as no surprise since the church has always received much more than it has given in return. Long after being correctional accessories for St Peter, the two chains somehow ended up together in Rome again and are now displayed below the high altar.

Climbing the stairway to see St Peter in Chains

I believe none of it, apart from the fact the Pope Leo got one as a present since almost everything of worth in the whole of human history has passed through the rapacious paws of the Catholic establishment. Glad to be a protestant.

The same building also contains MichelAngelo’s Moses adorning the tomb of Juluis II, a latter-day pope I quite like since Raphaels’ painting of him is a triumph. A laminated A4 size version of it helps me to teach adjectives of description to my private students, however, that is irrelevant.

Michaelangelo has initially planned to adorn Papa’s tomb with a lot of marble fixtures, but since the Pope himself became more excited about up-and-coming basilica of St Peter’s, Mike only every got around to finishing Moses and a couple of The Dying Slaves when he was asked to start work on the Sistine Chapel.

From this very moment in time can be pinpointed the inability of Mediterranean peoples to finish what they started or to concentrate on only one thing at a time. Now there's an article waiting to be written. Anyway, the painting of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel took precedence, The Dying Slaves ended up in Paris and Florence and today the father of the Jews sits alone among empty niches with a couple of horns in his head that should in fact be beams of light. Such was the poor quality of biblical translators from Hebrew to Italian during the Renaissance.

I am loving Rome.

The very polished interior of St Pietro in Vincolo.

I have a new moustache. It's excellent.

2007-07-20T16:14:00.000+03:00

With the run up to the Turkish elections and in celebration of the recent opening of the Nationalist Party branch in my neighbourhood, I thought I'd add a touch more style to my look.

Men are winking at me a lot more often out in the street. In broad daylight. And in view of their wives.

Pistachios and sugar and more pistachios and more sugar.

2007-07-04T14:40:00.000+03:00

Jen eats more than her fair share of the kadayıf.

My fondest memories of my grandmother, and there are many, revolve around sweet food. Back in the days before some idiot invented nutrition, when most parents understood that a balanced diet was all that was need to spare a child from obesity and dieticians were thought of with the same abhorrence as African dictators, my grandmother would all but force feed me unending sickly sweet chunks of shortbread topped with glistening red glacé cherry. How I never ended up with a higher Body Mass Index score is anyone’s guess but I suppose I’ll have to thank genetics and the people who invented that particular branch of science.

And so we come to Gaziantep, clearly the sweet capital of the world. What a French bakery might require in sugar for a month’s worth of pain au chocolat goes into the making of a single tray of baklava. Dentistry must be profitable in this town.

As with all places in this part of the world, there’s plenty of history to be had. Unfortunately, we weren’t really up for it in the heat and realized that in fact we’d spent the entirety of the previous day mooching about Urfa during the hottest parts of the day. It had taken its toll. We wandered about languidly in the heat, usually in search more of shade and fresh orange juice than the ethnographic museum, at which we conveniently arrived ten minutes after it had closed.

Gaziantep was a break from Urfa’s heat and surliness, and it did feel good to be back in what we felt Turkey ought to be like. The moustaches were friendlier, the heat less draining and the kebabs forever ubiquitous.

Now it was time to leave the planet altogether and head for the wonderful landscapes of Cappadocia.

Not so much fun

2007-07-03T19:25:00.000+03:00

The only living creatures in Urfa able to find respite from the heat.

Please, staring like that is just rude.

Şanlıurfa or its shortened form Urfa as most Turks call it, lies several hour’s drive directly west of Mardin. Though as far as the culture spectrometer reads, it’s indeed quite a lot further away. Urfa is Arab, not Turk. Geography and borders confused us into thinking we were holidaying firmly in the Turkish heartland, but only ubiquitous kebabs and lack of vegetarian food remained the same. Urfa, or Şanlıurfa as I insisted on calling it, was a bit disconcerting. Well, not for me, but for Jen, because she’s a woman, and often it’s a man’s world.

Mardin had been as warm as and welcoming as the sun’s rays which enveloped the city. Therefore, upon arrival we were disappointed to be in the territory of people who stare, furrow brows and ruffle bushy moustaches unfavourably in our general direction. Urfa was clearly an Arab town and at times like this I’m glad to be a man, although some of you who know me personally might actually dispute that.

the very latest in safety fencing for wet areas.

For females travelling among the Arabs lands, it can’t be all inane giggles and laughter. Since I love getting attention I often forget that for others there is an unwanted variety of it that makes them feel uncomfortable, out of place, and can push limits of cultural sensitivity. A glance is fine, because yes, we are probably exotic to you because yes, you are certainly exotic to us. Even an extended that’s-the-first-time-I’ve-seen-a-woman
-with-two-legs-since-those-two-blonde-
Dutch-women-rode-through-here-on-bicycles
-wearing-little-else-but-their-jewellery kind of look is not discomforting for me. However, an outright thirteen second stare with fly-entering-mouth expression is, in my opinion, a bit, you know, villager. And more truthfully, it ain’t the staring that concerns me, rather the accompanying body language, as though someone had just swung a Gorgon head through their line of vision. I’d like to think my beauty has that effect on people, that an Arab man with an unkempt eyebrow and incongruously jet-black moustache be so taken aback by my svelte form for a man in his late thirties that he is rendered awestruck. But I think not. Then again, the Arabs do have a reputation for boys, but a boy I no longer am. I simply act like one.

Do you look this good in a tea towel? I doubt it.

So, I’m not really sure how women cope with the lingering, sometimes predatory I’d-like-to-forcibly-exchange-you-for-my-wife look, but I personally recommend you employ the very handy and usually ineffectual stare-off. We’ve all done it. All of us. Truth be known, I like a challenge. I can’t compete in the moustache stakes and Allah has blessed me with two distinctly separate and non-furrowing eyebrows, but I can mimic disdain as well as any South Sydney City Council public servant, or for sheer vehemence, a Woolhara retail sales assistant. (Sydney customer service and the appalling standards of it accepted by the city’s population are a continual bugbear and sense of bitter humour for me, but I digress). Suffice it to say that our time in Urfa was not the Wilkommen Bienvenue and Hoş Geldiniz diagonally stencilled in stark baby blue Comic Sans font (another pet hate) on the side of our ailing inter-city bus.

Urfa is birth place to Abraham, father of the Arabs and devoted vandal of idols. He also tinkered with human sacrifice but as you well know, thought better of it at the last minute, substituting a ram for his son. As the son I actually would’ve been feeling a little rankled. I mean, it’s hardly a gesture of equivalent stature. Ram for son. How about son for ten kilos of gold? How about no sacrifice at all? Maybe just going without dessert for a week? That particular Koranic and Biblical scene will no doubt be familiar to you as every painter worth his mettle from Giotto to Ruben, passing by Caravaggio and countless other have depicted it in oils on canvas. If you haven’t seen it, pop along to your local major European capital city art museum and have a peek. Along with Judith making Holophene into two distinct pieces, it’s a winning combination. Isaac, the goat, Dad and his big sharp knife. Whoever believes video games are violent for children should not at the same time be a literal reader of the Old Testament. If so, your hypocrisy starts here. Maybe time to rework your ideas. Oops, more digression.

Urfa attracts serious pilgrims and though I write like a prat I am respectful and sensitive to other cultures. I’m especially sensitive to woman wearing all-encompassing black shrouds in thirty-seven degree heat. Thank you Saudi Arabia. The sooner you deplete you petroleum sources, the sooner you will be reduced to the pointless cultural backwater that you deserve to be. May your wells run dry that your women may revolt and the world be free of your nefarious cultural influence.

I like the word pilgrimage because the medial syllable is grim. Apt. Pilgrims are thus. People stared and wandered ever so poignantly and unsmilingly about two wonderfully enigmatic pools abundantly brimming with plump carp, the fish apparently the descendents of logs on a pyre built to punish Abraham. Legend dictates to us that King Nimrod, riled by Abraham’s idol-breaking incursion into the temple, broke from the tradition of crucifixion and creatively treated the latter to a Joan of Arc form of death. Extreme heat. Fortunately for Abraham, at the last minute and not unlike his own timing with human sacrifice, God entered the scene turning the logs into fish and scorching flames into water. I like a good legend and I especially like a good piece of architecture that has grown up around it in the following centuries. Jen and I wandered about too in the stifling heat, too seriously for my liking but then this was not a place for mixing fun and worship.

I feel, while we both experienced something unusual, we were glad to be heading out the following day. And with all the thousands of pilgrims in town, how is it you can only get kebabs? I’m a little let down by all of this. All that meat makes you constipated. Perhaps I’ll end here.

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

2007-07-02T21:54:00.000+03:00

Methinks rather spectacular. Checkin' out what the Syrians are up to from high up.

There are very few places left on the planet that allow the imagination to soar, that bedazzle the senses and that truly transport you to another world. I like these kind of places.

Mardin, a hilltop city perched high on a flat-top hill and overlooking Syria, is simply beautiful. If you've visited magical Jaisalmer in India, and even if you haven't, then throw together the pictures that your mind conjures up of the Middle East (or northern India). Swirling arabesques, pointed arches, elegant minarets, shaded tea gardens, moustachioed men, countless children, cobble-stone stairways leading to more cobble-stone stairways, donkeys, wailing Arab music, massive hewn stone, hummus, eggplant, olive oil, the odd madresse or two, and soak the whole in a bath of golden light from a cloudless sky with a cool breeze sweeping across recently reaped wheat fields. And you have Mardin.

Once you veer off from main square of Cumhuriyet Meydanı, you leave behind the already slow pace of a city far from the bustle and grime of Istanbul and fall under the spell of the Middle East proper. Jenny and I spent the entire day strolling aimlessly throughout the town, walking perhaps ten kilometres in no particular direction, backtracking across narrow lanes of walled houses where fig and apricot tress stood listlessly under the burden of ripening fruit, children played among themselves and women sat chatting in doorways.

Kurds are an affable bunch. Like the rest of the people inhabiting the giant swathe of lands from Lahore to Cairo, we were treated to smiling and quizzical looks at every step. These men have the best moustaches in the world and also like most of the Middle East any woman not of those parts invites some general interest. Well, stares actually. Personally, I love getting attention, in fact, I clamour for it, so I was pleased that Jen took it all in her stride and wasn't bothered at the fact I probably could have sold her for a few dozen donkeys. Which I would never have done because who else would listen to my daily monologue?

The newly-opened Antik Tatlıdede Butık Otel. You ought see the view in the other direction too...

We were invited into the home of Memur Bey who introduced us to his family and showed us the vaulted ceiling of his wonderful 400-year-old home while his wife, mother of seventeen children, offered us the perfectly sickly sweet lemonade that I've developed a taste for recently.

Mardin, for the time being, is not on the tourist map. The fighting of the last decade between the fairly angry Turkish government forces and some fairly angry Kurds has all but scared off most intrepid visitors but it's a town that is truly remarkable for the friendliness of it's inhabitants. As the sun sets, Mardin is among a handful of cities that can truly be called gorgeous. As the late afternoon sun descends stone walls glow yellow-orange and fields stretching down the hillside and into Syria turn a golden shade of brown. Nice postcard stuff.

The interior of the very recently restored Sultan Isa Medresesi.

Completely unrelated to this spiel is that Jen called me a chatterbox today. Well, I think that's what she said but I couldn't hear her properly as I was in fact talking at the time. I make no apologies, I have many varied and interesting things to say. Besides, I may talk a lot but she can certainly eat for someone with such a petite frame. A course of action she may later come to regret when we hit the Aegean coast in a week or so, you with me?

Jenny starts to eat everything at once and doesn't seem to care that she clearly ate the greater share of the dishes. Likewise for the dessert. I barely got a bite.

After hours of wandering we settled onto a terrace overlooking the cropped wheat fields and ordered up big. Sebzeli patlıcan salatası, kurtulumuş domates salatası, humus, zeytinyağlı yaprak dolması and muammara, followed by irmik helvası. Just think the best of Mediterranean food with a dash of the Middle East. Eggplant, tomatoes, olive oil... you know the drill.

The stars came out and we got sleepy. It has been a very good day indeed. Jen went to bed with a full stomach and I didn't. Tomorrow we have to catch a bus and I don't like buses.

It's so hot I think I might actually die

2007-06-28T11:39:00.000+03:00

Relaxing at home on another gorgeous day in my life, waiting for a terrorist attack. Note the fab new sandals.

According to one of my all-time favourite websites that displays time-zones and 7-day meteorology forecasts for every inhabited village across the globe, it is currently 34 degrees in my fair city. Which, in my fair opinion, is probably misinformation. I am currently on the balcony, trying to stay out of the cleaning lady's way, watching the world go by and wondering how strong the heat actually has to be before it can bleach the colour out of an entire city.

Today, Istanbul is white-hot. I'm dressed in enough clothes to appear modest and I'm drenched in my own sweat. I'm barely even moving and yet a hitherto undiscovered delta is forming at the base of my feet. The clear gain here is weight loss: at current speed I anticipate losing approximately 30% of my body mass between now and three pm, and since you can never be too rich of too thin things are certainly looking up for me in one aspect of my life. Anyway, the sun has changed my city into something reminiscent of a Turner canvas during a particularly abstract and mad painting frenzy. The contour and outlines of buildings and people have morphed into a swirling haze of pastels and if I didn't know already know the difference between the ground and the sky I might well get confused.

Blood suckers, and possibly a young terrorist.

So I'm hot and bothered but extremely excited since in a few hours I will haul myself off to the airport to greet a dear friend from home who I haven't seen in almost two-and-a-half years. And since it's over a year since anyone from Australia came to visit me, I'm feeling mighty joyful. 'Joyful' is a in fact I word whose existence I refuse to accept but that is otherwise over-employed by every Turk learning English. I have absolutely no idea in which module of which chapter of which poorly written English Language text book this particular vocabulary item is to be found but it's not a lexical chunk that I ever choose to use. I mean, call me old-fashioned, but when was the last time you even used the mother-ship word 'joy' in a conversation? Can't remember, can you?

Truth be known, the last time you saw this word was on a Christmas card sent to you by someone you inadvertently forgot to send a Christmas card to and it was already too late to send one without them understanding that in fact you had perhaps intentionally left them off your Christmas card list. So 'joy' and its derivative may be an adequate simile to 'happy' and the less-easy-to-use 'enjoyable', but in my book it a word to be avoided at all cost on the basis that it reminds me of defect Christmas card lists and the overwhelming Catholic guilt I feel on a daily basis as a non-practising Protestant. In another life I might have started an Inquisition against writers of English as a Foreign Language publications who choose to include words in vocabulary lists that no intelligent living English speaker would ever use outside of a church pew.

Anyway, Jenny's arrival will shortly inject an enormous amount of joy into my life and I'm sure she won't be too tired. It'll be thirty-six hours since she passed through Melbourne customs but hey, she's clearly here to see the sights.

I'm allowing ten minutes to collect luggage, another three to acclimatise to intense heat and then the necessary half-day to understand that yes, these people don't drive very carefully.

People who claim to be my friends/harem, but who may well be guerilla leaders.

(Can you believe the woman upstairs just chose this moment to beat the dust out of her rugs over my frickin' head on the balcony upstairs? I feel even better now that a layer of the filthy muck, which according to another interesting website I visit is principally composed of dead human skin, has adhered so quickly to my sweat-streaked skin and given me an appearance of those man might have spent the morning mining chalk. There is also someone making wheezing panting noises upstairs but I've decided he's probably lifting weights because that would be the natural thing to do on such a warm, sunny day).

It must be clear from my rants how much I'm in love with this city and how much I become joyful when showing it to friends, acquaintances and random people I meet on the Internet.

Linda and I waiting for an attack to happen at any moment, anywhere in the city, while joyfully sampling fine summer fare.

Over the last three weeks I've been treated to the company of French, Canadian, Irish and American guests in this here fine city, and if I didn't have enough free time to spend with them, I still had the wonderful opportunity of showing each something special about this city. It was also a practice run for when Jenny arrives this afternoon since we have three weeks to tour as much of this country as the private bus system, our feet and the sweltering heat will allow. Although every one of my private students has advised against going to the south-east of Turkey, terrorist attacks and nothing other than kebaps to eat cannot deter me.

The overzealous souls at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade have recently updated their travel advice to my adopted home country:

A caution from people who live in the world's most boring city. In fact, I've seen more verve in graveyards. However, they do know how to format a document well, which is admirable.

" Attacks could occur at any time, anywhere in Turkey." How's that for irresponsibility? Could you actually write anything more vague?

Misinformation and scaremongering at it's best. The last time I visited the Australian Vice-Consul I was struck how relaxed, even comatose the man was. He didn't look like he oversaw the welfare of my nation's interests in a country where your life was on the line every gooddamn minute of the day. Stuff like this makes me less than joyful.

Don't accept it. He's a terrorist and it's a bomb.

I would like to state the that chances of being involved in any kind of unsavoury event in south-east Turkey are minute when compared with the chances of being unfairly harassed a by aggressive inebriated revellers in any given city of my native country at 11:36pm on Friday evening. That is fact. Besides, what is life for if not to make an adventure of it? I don't want to look back in 17 years on my death-bed (according to my most recent fortune teller) and passively watch a life of lawn-mowing and Ikea knick-knacks pass before my eyes. If my last view on this planet is of a bearded man of indeterminable age with an acrimonious grimace brandishing a kebap over my head, so be it. I want my life to be glamorous.

Ok, think I've sweated my way down to 70 kilos. The heat has made my head go a bit funny.