About to sit down and attempt to write a blog, looking a little tough and Turkish.Allah allah… is it really a year since I jumped off a wall and broke my heel bone into several pieces? And thus it’s almost a year since I wrote to many of you and to be fair, I’ve been rather crap at staying in touch. Since I’m too old to make New Year resolutions and too cynical to believe I’d carry any of them further than the second month of the year, I’ll do away with much needed apologies for negligent behaviour and get down to the task at hand.
I’ve gleefully ridden another twelve months on the charmingly decrepit roller coaster that is Istanbul, City of the World’s Desire (who wrote that? – I cannot recall). And if you failed to grasp the pathetic imagery in my previous sentence, well yes, it’s been an emotional time. Those of you who are either mentally retarded or cerebrally stunted in some way will, like me, appreciate what living in a foreign culture can do to a healthy state of mind. I’d like to write that I’m closer to understanding life in Asia Minor, that I comprehend the insane babbling of my local green grocer, that I’ve grown used to people feeling sorry for me, single and childless. I’d be happier if after a year I understood the necessity to dollop yoghurt onto every dish consumed, or if I’d located a single 10 metre unbroken stretch of footpath in a city encompassing five hundred square kilometres. I hate having to look down when I walk because it’s damn annoying. And why does the woman on the ground floor keep telling me I’m a quality person? Her house is brimming with plastic rhododendrons, so clearly, she knows nothing.
Lighting inside the Blue Mosque.
Why do I have to eat so much eggplant? Surely there’s a limit to the number of culinary delights that can be fabricated from the dull, dry and tedious chick pea? It would seem not. Being robbed seven times in fourteen months has given a strangely bewildered look to my once handsome face, which, added to grey hairs rapidly spreading across my beard that comes from a the thankless task of being a teacher, makes me appear old ahead of my years. I’ve reduced the number of flatmates from four shrieking single females to a sole little Irish lass but am still no closer to understanding why women just don’t find me amusing in the mornings, the time of day when I’m at my most witty. And if you think I’ve mastered the paradigms of the aorist tense in this incredibly agglutinative language then you can look sharp and think again – I ain’t ever gonna get my tongue around Turkish. This city would kill a weaker person, you know what I’m sayin’?
March 4 2006. After the doctor removed my plaster cast and I recovered from the shock of just how unappetising an unwashed foot can look and smell after two months, I was thrilled to be back in the land of two footed persons. Unfortunately, I hadn’t figured on a recovery period after cast removal (or so the medics said) and was pretty miffed when I couldn’t just start racing about the place as normal. Medicine might have found a cure for smallpox but personally I feel it remains an undeveloped science if you can’t just swing back into full gait eight weeks after smashing your heel into four pieces. And for the record, I didn’t receive a single Get Well card. Niente.
Late March brought sleet and rain, snow turned into ashen slush under an army of shuffling feet and not a few cubic tonnes of vehicle exhaust; I began to experience for the first time a sentiment known in this land as hüzün. Now, at the risk of sounding like a pretentious git, the word in italics denotes a certain etat d’esprit that infiltrates Istanbullites after months of gloomy skies without a hint of sun, a cityscape of endless concrete, a lack of birdsong - dour faces all round. If you like a good read, then you’ll know the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature is Orhan Pamuk, who dedicates a vast chunk in one of his books to this sufferance that leaves you teetering somewhere near profound melancholy but not quite yet depression. Clearly, he knows something.
Can you feel the hüzün?
Hüzün prevents you smiling. You pull your collar up around your ears and furrow your brow. Inclement weather turns the Turk lugubrious and in turn you become dispirited, cheerless and downcast. You stop meeting your friends for çay and instead pass your free time nose stuck in a book. Your anti-social instincts come to the fore and you reject invitations to go to the cinema, meet for a drink, whatever. Still, I can’t stay in a state of misery for long. It’s just not my nature. I like to smile.
Sooner or later the whole month of March began to feel like a trashy Cold War spy movie. Frequently I crossed the paths of snarling Turkish men on shadowy Istiklal Caddesi and the insalubrious neighbourhood descending to Tarlabaşı - district favoured by thieves, gypsies and hookers - I felt this hüzün affair to be a little forced, a little too much as though people had nothing better to do than pout, feel sorry about everything and nothing in particular, and since I’d made eye contact they might as well look surly. Frankly, I grew weary of it all and soon enough realised that I had no genuine idea of what hüzün actually was.
When you consider, depending on statistics you wish to quote, perhaps forty percent of Istanbullites are living on less than a third of what I’m paid, many of them lodged in inadequate housing and dealing daily with the petty frustrations that Turkish bureaucracy and State throw at them, then I have no experience of what might act as a catalyst to plummet you into hüzün. I was simply acting the spoilt Western brat who felt by mooching about with a downtrodden glare, I’d suddenly touched upon the essence of being a native of this city. Clearly, I know nothing.
Maşallah! Simone arrived from Australia via London in the knick of time to put stop my emotional tomfoolery and admire my new handlebar moustache. Previously I had received but scorn and contempt from my jealous female cohabitants but Simone knew that within me lay the innate sense of style to carry off such a daring and chivalrous addition to my image. It was not only super to reduce time devoted to shaving, but I started to think of all the new possibilities that lay ahead...
Simone gets close up and personal with my moustache.
Sadly, facial hair is oft perceived as a political statement in this otherwise moderate State. It is impossible to comprehend the effect a moustache or full beard can have without some knowledge of history. Turkey is a country not yet one hundred years of age, a fatherland that experienced massive upheaval throughout a turbulent twentieth century, climbing out of the remains of a moribund Ottoman Empire to look towards Western Europe as it forged a new society based on a democratic, laic and secular State. A certain moustache can brand you a Nationalist, a full beard a Islamist – the latter is an image that the Western press also love to use to instill fear of the Muslim world into the heart of nations built of good Christian values. Just as veiled women have no right to work in the Public Sector, so too is a beard healthily discouraged for men. As a foreigner I am generally exempt from such rules, but since I’m a tad swarthy it’s better to avoid suspicious looks that a full beard can draw. Still, policemen seemed to like the handlebar moustache. They started smiling at me.
Fishing from Galata Bridge
looking towards Eminönü and the New Mosque.
Anyway, Simone, me and my moustache enjoyed the tourist sites of Istanbul, sipping on tulip-shaped glasses of tea and mooching about the famous mosques and sites of the city. We scoured Eminönü, a famously old market district near The Blue Mosque with its narrow streets, screeching hawkers and stalls burgeoning with enough kitsch to keep any lover of brass, copper or iridescent coloured plastic kitchen utensils well pleased. There is nothing that cannot be bargained over in this neighbourhood – it is the nec plus ultra of cheap and nasty. Entire streets are devoted to similar products; a lane with shops containing only buckles and buttons, thoroughfares selling only toys, another leather goods, yet another pink plastic Barbie drinking cups. If it’s sad Soviet-made junk that you’re after, spices from the East, Bangladeshi textiles by the ton or genuine Turkish rugs made in the Chinese People’s Republic, you can get it here. And not a price tag in sight.
I detest - no - loathe bargaining. Turkish has a great verb to describe the action. Pazar means both Sunday and market. Pazarlamak means ‘to go shopping, Minor Oriental style’. I long ago learnt to gesticulate like a wailing Arab without losing face and although I can obtain a bargain when I want, I just find the whole experience tiresome and trite. And even if my hirsuteness allows me to blend into the average Istanbul streetscape, every shop owner in Eminönü can pick me for the yabancı foreigner that I am so it’s harder to commence with a fair price. Clearly, these people know something.
Soon enough it was time to see Simone off to less polluted skies. I was left alone in this enormous city and suddenly, I hated my job. My students were wonderful, I got along well with the majority of my colleagues. However I found unbearable the infantile lies and deceitful behaviour of the Director of Studies, an unqualified mental wreck whose working hours consisted in cementing everyone’s opinion of him as a Class A jerk. An expert in the super-paranoid, he would spend his day imagining then extrapolating conspiracy theories, of those he imagined plotting against him in his unloved position of power. The man (and I use that term in it broadest possible sense) preferred laminating pretty pictures to doing actual work and sincerely believed that by dressing in a suit all who approached him would be blown away by such professionalism. This was The English Centre, a sole proprietary business employing twenty-odd souls and paying a pittance, not Microsoft & Co.
Özkan, Kuzey and me at the Arap Camii
Employees at The English Centre were generally well-travelled, slightly jaded yet humorous misfits, most of us roaming the world because of our inability on some level or another to live a worthwhile life in our respective home countries. We weren’t career-driven people who longed for meetings, carried business cards or talked about the latest in communication technology. We worked and expected to get paid. Slowly it dawned that the pay was coming late, then in dribs and drabs, then not at all. Well, I needed money to survive in this city so I gave my month’s notice as per contractual requirements, and went on my way.
At first my requests for the two months owed in pay were politely refused. Time and time again my request for monies came to nothing, citing some facile reason or another dreamt up on the spur of the moment. Sure, I understood they didn’t have the money. So why not treat me like an adult and tell me the truth? Why the lies? My blood boiled quickly after that and despite many more visits to the office and telephone calls to the same it was clear that The English Centre wasn’t about to meet its financial obligations.
One night in late November, a full five months since my departure, I climbed the steps to my ex-employer’s office to request money, even more determined this time as I’d discovered my flatmate, also an ex-employee, had managed to get her monies owed that very day.
Ahmet Bey wasn’t about to cough up. One of the least attractive parts of the work culture in this part of the world is that high unemployment, together with a strict hierarchical organisational system, and some sad leftover from the Ottoman era about unquestioning sycophantic respect for the boss fuse to create an ambience not conducive to negotiation. My boss knew he held all the cards and simply refused to cough up the cash.
What his cards couldn’t tell him was that old age has made me more philosophical about money, that my upbringing has ensured a ongoing healthy disrespect for any supposed male role model, that as a native speaker of Australian English I possess a unsurpassed back-catalogue of award-winning expletives, and that quite frankly, I’d had enough.
I know that the word f*** is in poor taste, and that my mother would cringe if she were to hear me use it. That such a word ought be used, if not at all, then sparingly. Here was the perfect moment to show, as a competent teacher, the use of the word in all functions of speech. As noun, adjective and adverb, in every tense, mode and aspect that I could possible utter, I propelled a string of the vernacular that ended with the impolite suggestion that he roll the monies owed into a cylindrical form and insert the aforesaid package deeply and with great force into his rectum. I felt great, my neck muscles de-tensed and I walked out of the office feeling relieved and comforted, not of course before shouting the foulest word in Turkish I know, dallama. Reasonably effective. I shut the office door quietly and moved on.
Now, I know there are people who believe that expressing anger is a bad thing to do, that anger begets anger and that I should have dealt with the situation another way. I know several long term friends who will just sigh when they read this and know that in many ways I still remain, psychologically speaking, a child. Well, your ideas are rubbish and clearly, you know nothing.
'Kids, please, listen for just a moment... you're going to need... '
Yet again my words of wisdom fall on deaf ears.
So, yes, in the meantime I found a new job.
I’m now teaching in a private school, located about twenty kilometres from the centre of town in a newly constucted affluent neighbourhood of Lego-inspired compounds abounding in oversized abodes and sleek imported luxury vehicles. My students possess PSPs, nano-pods, and mobile phones that would cost me a month’s salary. They go skiing at Les Trois Vallées and wander through Nike Town on Fifth Avenue during school holidays. Every one of them has visited EuroDisneyland. They have maids to clean and cook and drivers to whisk them to and from school. Yes, they are spoiled, but since they’re children they remain for the time being, adorable. They still possess a wonder of the world and have that particular Turkish affection for their teachers which I lap up without hesitation.
The little angels on a day out with Mr Heywood.
It’s a hugely rewarding time for me as I struggle in my new career. I’ve always believed in the value of education and its ability to make the world a truly better place. New experiences are vital to a better understanding of those around us. A good education promotes tolerance and provides a child with the tools to find happiness and ultimately fulfilment in a world otherwise obsessed with careers, money and youth. Whether or not I’m imparting knowledge that will assist my students in the right direction, well, it’s too early to tell. However, I enjoy what I do and to be honest I’m gaining as much from my students as they are from me, not something I’d anticipated in my remuneration package.
Each morning at six o’clock I awake for the shower-shave-shirt-and-tie ritual that sees me waiting by seven outside the Marmara Hotel for the driver who takes me to school. Classes start at half eight and continue until three thirty, just like at home. I’m currently entrusted to 6th and 7th grades, corresponding roughly to twelve and thirteen years of age. I’ve always been well organised so lesson plans are done in advance and I’m usually prepared for any unforeseen glitches in the day.
Another meeting from Hell
Alas, I never counted on so many meetings. Now, I know there are amongst you those who are also obliged to participate, actively or passively, in modern society’s greatest ill, the after-work meeting. I empathise. No word in any linguistic treasure chest expresses my feelings of aversion to the agenda, the PowerPoint display, and the inventor of the wireless microphone. The combination of these three elements is almost enough to produce an embolism and I often find myself harking back to days of yore, when boring someone to death was a crime punishable by flaying or disembowelment. For me, meetings are the perfect examples of how not to teach. Imagine standing in front of your students and talking at, not to them, for one and a half hours sans interruption. I fail to grasp how modern teaching methodology that has long since moved away from chalk-and-board and copy-this-down-into-your-notebook techniques still produces teachers who, microphone in hand, become monotonous and wearisome in the extreme, making me want to commit heinous crimes. Clearly, these people know nothing.
So I’m getting paid and loving my new job and thinking that after all these years I’ve found something that I’m actually pretty good and that might actually hold my interest for longer than two years. We shall see.
Also, I’ve moved from the bohemian and groovy part of town, Tünel, to Cihangir, the neighbourhood of actors, foreigners and people who prefer not to be mugged on a frequent basis. My view has altered from that of an austere Aya Sophia and delicate architecture of Topkapi Palace to the overwrought and baroque ice-cream monolith of Dolmabahçe Palace, a spectacular testament to a dying Empire with little other to do than build outlandish edifices for pointless aristocrats. Cihangir has a fine mosque which sits only a few metres from Majella’s and my balcony. The call to prayer floats into the house five times a day, though I’m rarely about to hear it.
The ezan blares out across Istanbul, and for that matter, across cities stretching from Rabat to Yogjakarta five times a day, every day of the year. It reminds the practising and the faithful to pay their respects to Allah. It’s a sound that reminds me of fabulous moments spent in many Muslim countries, and to boot, it often acts as an alarm call in the morning. Handy.
Majella above, Nihal to the right, and Orlando below.
Anyway, Majella and I started living together and working together but after a week we both tired of that so it was off to Ireland for her to stock up on duty-free gin while I grabbed the opportunity to take a break from hectic Istanbul and visit the tranquil Italian city of Naples.
Ten years between visits had clearly dulled my memory. Though no Italian and by extension no Italian city could be considered quiet, Naples is a locale that positively bursts with life and energy and noise. Orlando was born under Mt Vesuvius and within him lies approximately the same amount of energy as was released during the eruption that destroyed Pompei and Herculaneum all those years ago. Orlando kept me laughing, walking, dancing, sunbathing, gossiping, discussing and eating in the company of his friends Loredana and Franco. He even made me cry, which is no mean feat. I visited the Museo Archeologico, the excavations at Pompei, the fabulously lemon-scented town of Sorrento, and scoured the cities, streets, and alleyways from La Merghellina to Spaccanapoli, stopping to eat gelato, cornetti and every other baker's delight that had been denied me in Istanbul – metropolis of baklava and too many things dripping in sugary syrup. Napoli was heaven.
Back home I unpacked then repacked my bags pronto to spend a few days in the south of Turkey with Uğur, Serkan and Ercan. For the first time in my life I was booked on a package holiday. With a large amount of trepidation I entered the Green Lake Holiday Village and wondered whether in fact I was about to spend the next five days in what would be considered my personal vision of holiday hell.
Serkan, Uğur and Ercan relaxing in Gündoğan.
Hundreds of Roman-roofed villas strained under blossoming bougainvillea and other assorted things that flower prodigiously in pleasant climates. I could hear water slides in the distance and people chinking champagne glasses. Slavic persons were hauling oversized suitcases in undersized swimwear. Let me tell you, the sight of a fifty year old Russian ex-schoolmistress scraping her Louis Vuitton across faux-Paris paving, two pieces of orange twine stretched across her frame masquerading as a bikini… well, it wasn’t pretty. Her high heels offered no shock absorption and for a moment I felt she was in danger of blinding herself permanently should any part of her ample bosom escape.
Check-in was another hour spent among the riff raff of the Ex-Soviet Republics. Can’t say I enjoyed it immensely until I remembered how much John Waters has brought to my life. My way to get through the next five days was to imagine myself starring in one of his movies – an easy feat considering props and cast were already on-site.
To be fair, most of the above about the Slavs is nonsense. I made it up because I was on a roll, it’s late at night and I’m in need of a break. Back in a moment.
Right. Package holiday. I adored it. For five days I paddled the warm waters of the Mediterranean, feasted on seafood and lazed on a deckchair lapping up every last carcinogenic ray. And in that time my Turkish improved dramatically, as did my suntan (see photo).
Me with most excellent shorts and tan.
Most of you know something of my paltry attempts to achieve fluency in the planet’s foremost Altaic tongue. I landed in September 2005 and by November spoke considerable Taxi-and-Restaurant Turkish. By January 2006 I could speak like a two year old child but then reached a plateau where I dawdled aimlessly for the following months. No amount of study eased my pain and I never thought I’d truly master the art of talking backwards, what Turkish is all about. If you take an English sentence, reverse the order of the words and then join them together for utterance in a single outburst, you are probably speaking fluent Turkish.
Learning French and by association Spanish and Italian, is simply cheating. Porte, puerta and portello are clearly the same thing. Kapı is not. Ouvrez la porte, abra la puerta and apra il portello don’t ring a bell with kapıyı aç. I’m having a lot of difficulty.
Serkan and Ercan spoke little or no English and Uğur patiently acted as translator for a number of days. Luckily childish humour requires no decoding and all four of us enjoyed each other’s company while poolside or on waterslides. I put on four kilograms because I ate like a Russian ex-schoolmistress.
The days flew faster than the overnight bus journey back to Turkey’s foremost city. Arriving tired but sated I swung into work. I returned to school and to my private students.
A personal favourite - blending in perfectly to the surroundings.
The latter part of the year went by in a blur. I was balancing a full time job at the school, eight private students over six evenings, Turkish lessons and my new found passion for Play Station. Especially Lego Star Wars – very cool. My pirate DVD collection trebled in a matter of weeks, my book collection overflowed its shelves and suddenly I felt middle-aged. I remember one night looking up sadly from my Ikea sheets to glance my backpack sitting forlornly at the top of my cupboard. Allah, my life had stability, something I’ve resisted since time immemorial. The routine started to get me down and by the end of November I was climbing the walls with despair. For the very first time in my life I sunk into what I thought was depression. Melodramatic maybe, but I was hugely miserable. I’m having massive issues with the absence of concrete achievements in my life. Christ, is this what middle age is all about? Clearly, I am missing something.
Still, Özkan and I flew to London to celebrate New Year, so that kept me happy for a while. It was six years since my last trip to the fabulous English capital and open spaces, green parks, clean air and wide streets were the perfect antidote to my ravaged state of mind. I zoomed about Assyrian exhibits in the British Museum, nosed through tomes in the National Library, bored my mate stupid on Caravaggio in the National Galley. I wandered through Covent Garden, down Drury Lane and Baker Street. London is place that could never feel like home but that, as an Australian, I have to be jealous of. It is without a doubt, the world’s best international city. There is nothing that can’t be found here, no language that isn't spoken on the street, no food that can’t be sampled and perhaps the only race of people I didn’t see in four days were members of Masai tribe. London is world-class.
With only twenty days of school to teach before the next break, I set about planning another trip. And yesterday I returned home after a few days in what is the city without peers – Paris.
Paris, but you didn't need a caption to tell you that.
Seriously, I could bore you even further with my love affair for La Ville des Lumières, and will. It’s been a decade since I left this place that I once called home. I missed it for a long time, then accepted it as being out of my league. Paris, more than any other place on Earth has shaped for better and worse the person I am today. The people I met inspired me, the museums, art, cafes, book stores, and cityscapes have ensured that no matter what happens to me in life, I’ve already seen the best.
If there’s one place on Earth you should visit before you die, this is it.
The highlight of the trip was running into Joël on the street, a friend I lost contact with years ago and with whom I passed hours drinking coffee and watching the world go by. We strolled along the Grands Boulevards and slunk about the medieval remains of Le Marais, all the while scoffing on croissants aux amandes and wishing I had never left this place. I overdosed on art in the big museums, climbed the Arc de Triomphe and purchased a number of Turkish grammar books, knowing well I’ll always speak French better than I will Turkish.
Returning to France was like coming full circle. In the last decade I’ve visited twenty other countries, travelled tens of thousands of kilometres in planes, trains, buses and automobiles, and generally had a very good time. It worries me that I have no home of my own or a pension plan in place, I still live from one pay check to the next and waste all my money on guide books and language references. I’m single, as per usual.
Nick, Kuzey, Özkan, Lieve, Josephine, random child selected from crowd and me at Eyüp.
Still, between Paris then and Paris now I’ve done a bit. I’ve sipped tea on a lost island off the south coast of Bangladesh, been drugged and robbed in Thailand, held my breath at the wonder of Angkor Wat and spent time with the kids in Mahaballipuram. Iran proved to me once and forever the arbitrariness and bias of the Western media, and Pakistanis will remain forever the most hospitable people on Earth. I’ve held my first Kalashnikov, cross the Howrah bridge on foot and scared myself stupid in the border town of Peshawar. I’ve travelled the road to Santiago de Compostella, built a few Spanish castles in the sky and seen a million cherubs smiling down from cupolas of a thousand Italian churches. I’ve spent hours upon hours in the world's best museums, hours upon hours attempting to communicate with strangers with whom I could say very little but who offered me limitless friendship. I’ve waited for decades on train platforms, in passport control queues and in front of automatic ticket machines. I’ve been treated with respect by total strangers in countries that our governments would classify as hostile and inferior and I once spent a very long afternoon stuck in a hammock with two lizards and a coconut filled with white rum. I’ve danced at the full moon party on Kho Samui, dined with pilgrims in the Baluchistan desert and vomited from my seat on a camel in Rajasthan, without losing my balance. Clearly, I want to see more.
Right, I’ve dived into tawdry nostalgia. Sickening. For those of you who arrived this far, congratulations. Be good to yourself, your loved ones and those you encounter on the street. Lastly, remember that not all Muslims are tea-towel wearing fundamentalists as the Sydney Morning Herald would have you believe. I’ve been keeping up to date with the news in
Australia and I’m not very impressed.
Take care.
Relaxing at home on another gorgeous day in my life, waiting for a terrorist attack. Note the fab new sandals.
Blood suckers, and possibly a young terrorist.
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.
Linda and I waiting for an attack to happen at any moment, anywhere in the city, while joyfully sampling fine summer fare.
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.
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