http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~pf/travel/turkey.diary.1 (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
Diary of a Foreigner Living in Turkey (Part 1) December 1993
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September 8, 1993.
So I'm in Ankara now. The journey to Venice was trouble-free,
and the ferry-trip to izmir a delight, with a very impressive
passage through the Channel of Corinth. Then, you've certainly
heard by now of the bizarre stranger who crossed the superb
Western Anatolian countryside in his car, listening to (and loud-
ly singing) Anatolian songs?! Miraculously, I only had one flat
tire, and avoided at least 25 fatal accidents in 600km (they
drive like crazy over here)...
---
Ankara is a city with two faces: on the one hand, there are
super-modern parts where you'd think you are in a Western metrop-
olis; on the other hand, you may easily step back by one century,
almost without transition. There are many parks, and streets are
always bustling with people. The internal economy is very com-
petitive, and you can buy everything here, during very long open-
ing hours. Turkish products/imitations are about 3 times cheaper
than back home, but imported goods are up to 3 times more expen-
sive... The weather? About 28C during the days, constant blue
skies, very agreeable evenings, fresh nights. Turkish cuisine is
absolutely living up to its reputation as one of the three finest
in the world: appetizers ("mezeler") and deserts (hmmm, what gor-
geous pastry!) are terrific.
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September 30, 1993.
Ankara remains a very pleasant surprise: it's astoundingly green,
considering the bleak countryside all around. And they seem to
have subscribed to sunshine here! But they tell me that temps
will drop very soon...
---
Contrary to my ekspectations, US imports are sometimes cheaper
here than in Europe. Such is the case with CDs (about US$13 on
imports, and US$8 on local CDs)! Together with the world-class
clothing industry, and some other items, you can easily pay off a
trip to Turkey with some well-targeted shopping! Twinkle,
twinkle!
---
The other day, while shopping for equipping my apt, I was looking
for a power ekstension cord. The shop only had these industry-
size 10m cords with half a dozen jacks lined up at one end, which
I didn't need. So I decided to build my own: the cord was easy
enough to find, and so was the male jack, but then, hard as I was
looking, I couldn't find any female jacks for the other end! Only
then did I remember that the supermarket I was in is under the
Kocattepe Mosque, the biggest mosque of the Middle-East (and one
of the world's largest to boot): so maybe the female jacks are
veiled!? I never found out, but spotted a convenient cord at
some bazaar.
---
Another strange fact is that change is consistently in short sup-
ply wherever I buy something. So I often leave involuntary
"tips" because the price has to be rounded up. What drives me
mad is that this often happens at places where one only buys
small things, so chances are that quite a few people are able to
give the correct change when paying: but why and where does this
change disappear until the nekst customer (usually I ;-) comes?
This is BTW a quite common phenomenon in non-Western countries,
but I never understood what laws of physics/statistics make
change unavailable when *I* need it. Maybe it's only a dumb ef-
fort at ripping-off customers, and thus rounding up one's salary?
---
I finally went through my first diarrhea, though it wasn't fun at
all. So I'm set now for drinking tap water! Although my apt has
European-style toilets, such isn't the case everywhere. Some-
times, there are only these hole-in-the-ground squat toilets: if
we had these back home, I wouldn't have needed any rehab ekser-
cises after my knee surgery!
---
The big frustration is of course the language: it's very annoying
when you don't understand anything on radio / TV / newspapers /
commercials / wrappings / instructions, and so on. Although my
phrase-book is invaluable as a guide for conversation with those
who know bits of English/French, I of course signed up for a
beginners' level course in Turkish at Bilkent; it's a matter of
courtesy to my host country, and of sheer survival. I have to
admit however that there is a daily Turkish newspaper in English,
and that one Turkish radio channel broadcasts news in English /
French/German about 5 times a day. Once I have TV and cable, I'll
also have quite a few Western channels, including RTL, though no-
body seems to know what the "L" stands for :-(. Some news-stands
have an incredible array of Western dailies/weeklies/monthlies,
though at much inflated prices.
---
Oh, and for those who are worried about my "emotional status" in
Muslim land: large parts of Ankara, and especially the Bilkent
campuses, seem to be "anti-fundamentalist" enclaves in a country
that is fairly secular anyway. So don't worry: decolletes are in
the average as deep as in the West, skirts are in the average as
short as in the West, blouses are in the average as tight as in
the West. Even better: Turkish women tend to be ekstremely
cute...
---
As you noticed by now, the Turkish alphabet doesn't have the
letter "x", so I have to type "ks", as in "Taksi", as a work-
around. Ooops ;-)
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December 16, 1993.
An important remark to my Turkish friends: some of the material
in these diaries may sound offensive to you, or may reflect on
things you might prefer people outside Turkey do not know about.
But note that I profoundly love your country (otherwise I
wouldn't have come here in the first place), and yet I want to be
completely honest and mention all the things that clash with my
Western values: sometimes, things are hard to swallow for
Westerners, but don't forget that at other times (as you very
well know) Turkey easily tops Western societies, and that I do
mention these things as well!
---
The fall was extremely short for local standards (maybe one
week), and we now have temperatures around 0C (down from around
28C). It snows occasionally, and it rains even less, and the sun
luckily persists in keeping the sky blue, despite the cold. All
in all, I'm quite happy with the weather here, one of my minor
objectives having been to escape the grey, rainy, and cloudy
falls, winters, and springs of back home.
---
In the summer, Central Anatolia is a pretty dry and hot region,
so there are not many natural occurrences of the green color.
Luckily (FYI: green is my favorite color), municipal and campus
authorities have this obsession of growing grass everywhere:
hence you'll see entire armies of men watering grassy patches so
as to keep them alive, especially in the evenings. Thank you,
Turkey, for catering to my visual needs!
---
Close to campus, I located this MOBIL gas-station (free adver-
tisement) where unleaded gas *is* available (many stations an-
nounce having some, but are consistently short of it when you get
there). So that's one good reason to go there. One of the other
two good reasons is that MOBIL is the first (& only?) company in
Turkey to employ girls (some of them quite pretty) as outdoors
personnel at the pumps! (Self-service seems to be an unknown
concept here, for the obvious reason that such practice would in-
crease unemployment. As an aside, sometimes it seems to me that
unemployment is not really existent here, as people always find
ways of self-employing themselves in all kinds of inventive
ways.) Now on to the third good reason to fuel up at that sta-
tion: if you purchase at least 20 liters, they'll wash your car
for free, on the spot! This is a quite nifty feature, as the air
is so dust-laden here that your car will always look like coming
straight off the Paris-Dakar rally, even though you had it washed
3 days before and let it stand idle!
---
So I went to the airport one day to find out where it is, how to
find my way back (not obvious), and where/how to pick friends up
when they come to visit me. The road took me through an impres-
sive time-warp: first the modern high-rise sections of Ankara,
and then a long string of so-called "gecekondu" villages. Houses
are built in one night ("gece") there, with people taking advan-
tage of a centuries-old Ottoman law stating that such houses may
not be demolished by the government. So there is no real urban
planning in such suburbs (and they are huuuge), and conditions of
life are quite miserable compared to the rest of the city. Some
upperclass Turks are quite ashamed of the existence of these vil-
lages, and they will try to divert you from seeing them, or will
express outright shock when you tell them you've been there for a
walk (as they would never be caught dead in such sections of the
town). Many people would call these slums, but you may also view
them as villages near the city, and they are definitely much more
representative of the average Turk's lifestyle than the Beverly
Hills-like sections some would want us foreigners to spend all
our lives in. I think no Westerner comes to work in Turkey to
see how the very few gilded rich live (namely often in reckless
imitation of what's going on in the West), because that's nothing
new to them, nor to restrict her/his life to such a life, because
s/he can have the same life back home, or even a better one. We
have an interesting conflict of interests here: Bilkent academics
are relatively well-off (and some of the students are outrageous-
ly well-off), and don't really seem to bother about the rest of
the nation, which is precisely what we foreigners are here for!
Turkish society (still) is sooo different from Western ones,
especially if you drop the richer 1% of the population: people
are really friendly and hospitable here; they'll go out of their
ways to help you; they haven't succumbed (yet) to the all-out
int'l frenzy of money-making/modernization/competitiveness/etc;
they are easy-going and fun-loving; and so on. (I'm _not_ saying
the well-off people don't fit this general scheme.) Granted,
some aspects deserve improvement, or are hard to accept for peo-
ple who have been brainwashed in different ways, but things are
very likeable the way they are! Of course, the upper 1% will de-
fine this state as backwardness/underdevelopment, but do they
really have to impose Western ways onto a Middle-Eastern nation?
do we really have to make this world a global village of
McDonalds+MTV junkies? I'm fully aware that these ideas may be
misconstrued as spitting into the hands that feed me, and that I
probably wouldn't like to live in a "gecekondu", but, hey, I'm
just succumbing to the many contradictions of the Middle-East.
Back to the airport-story (which was just a pretext to convey the
ideas above): the airport is a pretty impressive affair, it
reminded me a lot of the Luxembourg-City International Airport
(to outsiders: this is a joke!).
---
Hey, I found a way to become rich very fast: the Luxembourg Frank
(LUF) has a slightly better exchange rate here than the Belgian
Frank (BEF). Don't ask me how come, I'm flabbergasted as well,
because both currencies are identical by definition. But I'm
happy that at least one country recognizes that the Luxembourg
economy is doing better than the Belgian one. ;-)
---
I have a TV now, though no cable TV yet. But the rooftop antenna
on my apt building already provides me with 14 channels, all
Turkish, except MTV. So I left the thing running for quite a
while, and zapped a lot, so as to figure out what's turning peo-
ple on here. As a sports enthusiast, I get more than my share:
Turkish league games in soccer and basketball are plentiful; on
top of that I can see selected league games in soccer from Italy,
Spain, England, and Germany; plus many European Cup games in both
sports; 3 NCAA basketball games per week (yeah! the fore-span
features a Thomas Hill slam-dunk, go Devils!), and 1 NBA game per
week.
Otherwise, as in any country, the result is pretty sad. Beyond
the imported (and dubbed) movies and soap-operas, there are a lot
of Turkish productions (which I cannot judge, due to my lack of
understanding of the language), many musical shows (some with ex-
cellent classical Turkish music renderings), and some really sil-
ly shows that seem to have no content at all, but rather be rea-
sons to show off some cute Turkish maidens in skin-tight dresses
hopping around like North-American cheerleaders at every oppor-
tunity. In the few years since my first trip to Turkey (1986),
this country seems to have slipped from one extreme to the other:
from a total ban (?) on published erotica to very lax standards,
and to public debasement of women in the media. (Here I'm on
very slippery terrain, but let me push ahead anyway.) The ap-
parent contradiction in all these shows is that whenever the cam-
era swerves over to prove that the audience in the studio is hav-
ing a good time, you would expect to see a male-only crowd. But
no, there are many women, and they seem to enjoy themselves!
Even better, quite a few of these women wear headscarves (not the
full veil), and thus wouldn't be caught dead while showing some
of their hair to men, and yet they seem to thoroughly enjoy them-
selves while some other women on stage show quite a bit more than
their hair... Go and figure that one out! The only theory I
could come up with (after discussing this with some Turkish
women-friends here) is that Turkish society is divided into two
parts, regarding the classification of women: on the one hand,
you have the family world, where women are expected to be faith-
ful, obedient wives, mothers, cooks, and cleaning staff; and on
the other hand, you have the men's world, where women are for
"entertainment" only. These two worlds do not intersect, and
wife-women perceive the entertainment-women as mere objects (!),
thus with no virtue, and hence not as despicable beings, and they
even tolerate/encourage men to have fun in their world. For the
same reasons, prostitution is legal here (provided under police
and medical supervision), because the object-women allow the
wife-women to preserve their virtue. Cover-girls (even on most
serious daily newspapers), the girls of many commercials and of
some of these shows, many female singers, many actresses, all
belly-dancers, etc. definitely seem to belong to the men's world
only, and are said to make tons of money. I'm afraid though that
I'm just scratching the surface here with my current understand-
ing of what's going on here.
The other thing that bugs me with local TV channels is that they
are often geared towards the rich (many commercials advertise
things most people can only dream of, and the audiences in the
studios always look rather well-off), and that the name of the
game often is a mere imitation of Western TV: local bands play
Western instruments and compose Western beats into their songs,
teenagers dance Western steps & dances during concerts, and girls
shriek just like the hysterical groupies back home, local orches-
tras play Western symphonies, everybody is dressed up in Western
ways, and so on. These people are entirely throwing away their
own culture, and probably are MTV addicts. I just plainly refuse
to believe that Western culture is universal in the sense that it
appeals to everybody, regardless of what corner of the Earth one
is coming from. I'm not saying they shouldn't enjoy Western cul-
ture (after all, I like some of the Turkish classical music quite
a lot), but they seem to do this with a reckless abandonment that
frightens me (after all, back home, people don't go in droves to
concerts with Turkish classical music). If the West is the best,
as they say, why do Westerners run away from there? Not every-
thing is perfect in the West (as we all know), so what point is
there to abandon one's culture because of some apparent deficien-
cies and to entirely embrace another one with its own, new defi-
ciencies? OK, it's hard to convince them of their errors. More-
over, Kemalism itself (a doctrine named after Mustafa Kemal, the
1st president of the modern Republic of Turkey) shows that this
is the way to go (some of his first laws were the prohibition of
some traditional garb, which was then considered an outward sign
of backwardness). I think there is a lot of mental underdevelop-
ment in the minds of those who think Turkey should throw every-
thing overboard and emulate the West: it's not outward signs such
as fashion, music, etc. that translate underdevelopment! Nor is
it necessarily inner values that do so. The whole problem is:
what is underdevelopment? what is civilization? I think there
are no absolute definitions of these concepts, so why should we
start comparing cultures/societies in terms of such criteria?
But again, I'm afraid I'm off the mark with my current under-
standing of what's going on here.
---
Q: How many PTT workers does it take to get a parcel from abroad
through to you? (PTT = Turkish Post and Telecommunications)
A: 17,
1 to receive the parcel from the airport;
1 to write a pink slip that there is a parcel for you at the PTT;
1 to deliver the pink slip to you; (now you go to the PTT)
1 to open the guarded door to the PTT, and re-open it when you leave;
1 to whom to give the pink slip at the international desk;
1 to help you in the whole process, because he speaks English, and
because it's easy to get lost with the next things to do;
1 to verify that you really are the addressee;
1 to tell you that you are in the wrong office;
1 to tell you that after all you were in the right office;
1 to fetch the parcel from the storage room;
1 to open the parcel (in front of everybody!), and to close it later;
1 to search the contents for offending/illegal/... materials;
1 to write a white slip that the parcel is OK, and to charge you
an arbitrary amount for importing its contents;
1 to re-verify that you are the addressee, and to stamp the white slip;
1 to counter-sign the stamp on the white slip;
1 to verify the counter-signature on the white slip, and to counter-
counter-sign it (honestly!, but sorry, the loop stops here...);
1 to show the duly stamped & signed white slip to, at the
international desk again, but who can't find your parcel
any more (this one is actually the same one as above);
1 to re-locate your now closed parcel in the storage room,
and finally to deliver it to you. (whew!)
NB. This is NOT a joke.
The whole process (home --> PTT --> home) takes me about 2.5 hours...
Moral of the story: when you feel the strong urge to send me
presents, please either (a) send them DHL/FedEx/..., or (b) put
them into a standard envelope and write "Book/Livre/Buch/Kitap"
all over it, or (c) refrain from doing it and laud yourself on
your good intentions. Seriously, I'm NOT going to pick up any-
thing at that place again.
---
Did you know that Santa Claus (or St. Nicholas, the patron saint
of children, students, unmarried girls, sailors, and...
thieves(!)) was born in Turkey? Did you know that Maria (the
mother of Jesus) died in Turkey, near Efes (formerly Ephesus, a
well-known place to those who've read the New Testament)? Many
other biblical/Christian personalities and sites are spread all
across Turkey, making this country much more of a religious
crossroads than many would want to believe. More samples? Mt.
Ararat, where Noah is said to have stepped off the Ark after the
Deluge, is in Turkey. Some of the earliest Christian communities
lived in Anatolia, and went into hiding in the out-of-this-world
landscape of Cappadocia when Arab raiders swarmed into the area.
Their underground and troglodyte cities feature some of the most
beautiful Byzantine art. istanbul is of course THE treasure-
house of Byzantine art.
Of course, today, Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country. For
instance, Mevlana, the Afghan Islamic mystic (Sufi, actually) who
lived and died in Konya, wrote books that are among the most in-
fluential ones of Islam right after the Qu'ran and the Hadeeth
(an account of the life of the prophet Mohammed). His preaching
of equality of all people, regardless of their sex, race, or re-
ligion, ought to be mandatory reading everywhere. I even heard
that the Turkish women's liberation movement quotes him (gasp!)
as one of their forerunners!
Last Sunday, I went to Konya to watch the world-famous perfor-
mance of the "Whirling Dervishes" of the local Mevlana order.
This dance is performed in memory of Mevlana's death-day, and is
a religious dance, not a folk dance. Also, it is a meditation
dance, not a dance to show off and make converts. It was a very
impressive event. A small orchestra performs some very mystical
music on traditional instruments (especially the "ney" flute),
and accompanies a choir. After a while, the head of the order
steps forward, followed by the dancers, and they ceremoniously
shuffle around in a large circle in a very dignified and medita-
tive way. Eventually, the dancers one-by-one get their "bless-
ings" from their leader and start whirling around. First, they
make a few spins with their arms crossed over their chest, and
then they extend their arms (one hand facing the sky, the other
hand facing the earth) and start spinning around the square,
their ample white robes floating around their bodies. The rota-
tion speed is quite high, and this goes on, with short interrup-
tions, for over an hour! It is quite amazing that nobody fainted
or even stumbled, even though some of the dancers looked quite
old. A breathtaking performance! I also visited the Mevlana
Museum, a highlight of every trip to Turkey with its masterpieces
of Islamic Art.
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HoSCakal,
Pierre Flener
Dept of Computer Engineering Email: pf@bilkent.edu.tr
and Information Science Voice (GMT+2):
Faculty of Engineering +90 / 312 / 266-4000 x1450
Bilkent University +90 / 312 / 266-5031 (home)
06533 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey Fax: +90 / 312 / 266-4126
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