Carpetblogger

We Watch Sports

As many of you know, Carpetblog is an American-run operation. A female American-run operation. That means that our interest in almost all kinds of sport is surpassed only by our interest in, say, derivatives. Our interest in football is even more intense.

We've heard the arguments in favor of football and none are very compelling. Some have compared football to religion, which, while accurate, does nothing to enhance our appreciation for it. Lots of things are wildly popular while at the same time being screamingly boring.

Under intense pressure, and having not one better option on a Wednesday night, we succumbed and went to a bar, and not just to do what we normally do at bars. We went with the specific intent of watching Turkey play Germany in the 2008 Euro cup. If you want to understand how Turkey got there and what the achievement represents, there are plenty of other blogs that can explain it for you.

Because Americans view soccer/football as a game played by no one older than age 11, this is something of a watershed. Not that we've never watched a soccer game before -- alert readers will remember our monumental photographic achievements following in some aspect of the 2006 World Cup which involved Ukraine. We watched at least seven minutes of that game and joined the crowd celebrating on Maidan afterwards. We kept our shirt on, however.

 
It's true that there weren't as many boobies on display afterwards this time, and not just because the Turks lost. Unlike Ukies, Turkish women rarely take their clothes off in public.

We're not sure we can accurately characterize nature of the Turkey/Germany rivalry for Americans. It's sort of as if America played Mexico in some sport that we can't think of, with all the racism and divided loyalties it would inspire. As happens in a lot of countries, football exacerbates a particularly virulent strain of testosterone-driven nationalism here that needs little encouragement, even on ordinary days. People --particularly those with penises -- were pretty much out of their heads. Walking down Istiklal was like entering Magandalarstan!

The bar scene was grim. There were a lot of people actually watching the game, which we did not anticipate. No one wanted to chat. And they all devoted a lot of energy getting very excited about things that almost happened during the game, which is apparently very common when people watch football matches.

Don't misinterpret. We totally were rooting for the Turks. Anytime Turks want to wreak havoc in Vienna, Carpetblog is behind them. But really, our primary motivation for watching was seeing Turkey win, and hoping Russia would win, so they would play each other and we could root against Russia.

The Streets of Cihangir Ran Red Today!

With fake blood.

Does anyone know why the Istanbul riot police fill their water cannons with red water? If they were doing it to mark their targets, they pretty much failed since 85% of the people who were not police at today's Cihangir May Day Riots were, like me and Awesome Mossman, underemployed gawkers. If it was supposed to look like blood, there was too much of it to be believable. There's usually only that much blood in the streets during Bayram.

But excess was really the theme of the day. I really don't feel like explaining May Day in Istanbul, but 31 years ago, 37 people were killed by police during May Day protests near Taksim. The incident was never resolved, no one was punished and ever since then, the government tightly controls all May Day commemorations and forbids large gatherings on the square. So, anti-government forces use May Day as an excuse to challenge the authorities and air a variety of poorly articulated grievances. To be clear, May Day protests have nothing to do with workers.

Since a gathering of more than a couple of people having tea on Istiklal attracts bus loads of riot police on a normal day, May Day really cleans out all the barracks and riot gear warehouses in anticipation. Cops started blocking access to Taksim early in the morning which wreaked havoc with traffic all day. Since those with rock throwing on their minds couldn't reach Taksim, they spilled into the surrounding neighborhoods. Last year, it was Beşıktaş and Dolmabaçe. This year it was Cihangir (among others).

If I need to remind you, we refer to Cihangir as "Yabancı Köy," or "Foreigner Village," because its gentrified streets, overpriced cafes and fine views attract scores of idle expats. Rioters throwing rocks at police in front of the tea garden where Cihangir's substantial leisure class wastes its days is so outrageous, it is simply not to be missed. That's the only reason I bothered to check things out today.

My guess is there were 3000 fully-geared riot police and an armored water cannon. If I were very generous, I'd say there were 100 rioters. The non-rioting, non-police contingent were split between gas-mask wearing journalists and people like me with cameras and flip-flops, numbering probably 300 or 400.

My sense is that most Turks don't really care all that much about the May Day incident anymore. Communists and Socialists are marginal and probably couldn't kick up much of a fuss on their own, so that leaves plenty of space for anarchists, anti-government rock throwers and assorted aggrieved dirty hippies to provoke the cops.

And I have to say, they managed some quality provocation. Rioters (look, I'm not calling them protesters, OK?) barricaded the Cihangir's main street with planters and parking barriers. They turned over dumpsters and started trash fires. Bottles and rocks and paving stones flew through the air when the cops moved in to confront the small pack of young men, but seriously, Cihangir=not Gaza. They dispersed into the side streets when the police advanced waving rubber batons and popping off tear gas cannisters. I did enjoy my first tear-gassing, but it wears off quickly and you can get back out in the mix pretty quickly.

I had forgotten how much fun things like this are (when neither side is taking it terribly seriously). It reminded me of the hot summer of 2005 in Baku, when every weekend we trekked to downtown Baku to run from the police as they beat the shit out of old women and threw guys into black windowed vans when the opposition parties tried to hold gatherings.  A high profile ambassador in Baku removed his lips from the Azeri government's ass long enough to chew me out once for "marching at the head of the opposition rallies." One of many regrets from that period is not posting what I saw or the photos I took at those events, but I didn't want to, you know, get myself in hot water. That all worked out pretty well for me, in the end.

The critical difference between today's riots and the ones in Baku was that the latter were generally peaceful. I take a dim view of protests as a political tool in general, but violent, message-free protests like today's are counterproductive and pointless.

Unless you like tear gas with your adrenaline, which I sort do.

The Olympic Torch In Istanbul

My views on the Chinese Olympics aside, the Olympic torch relay is the type of clusterfuck that I would avoid like the plague. Unfortunately I found myself on the last bus across the Galata Bridge, just before they shut all the major streets down between Sultanahmet and Taksim for the passing of the torch. Istanbul traffic is static in the best of circumstances; shutting down streets in the middle of the day is a disaster.

I should have noticed the heavily armed riot police on every corner and police helicopters overhead before even leaving my couch, but if I stayed home every time the Turks put heavily armed riot police on every street corner, I would become a bigger hermit than I already am.

Faced with the prospect of neither arriving at my destination nor being able to get back home, I decided to watch. As it happened, a torch transfer happened two feet from where I was standing. I don't know who the guy was who was taking the torch, but the TV cameras were pretty excited about him. Maybe a Turkish reader knows.

The manufactured display of excitement was just as corporate as you'd expect, with the flags of Coca-Cola and Samsung more prevalent than the national flag of the country we stood in. Yay globalization!

The relay failed to attract much attention on the streets of Sultanahmet. Most Turks and tourists seemed happy enough to be able to walk up blocked Alemdar Cad. and not get squished between the tram and a taxi

Carpetblogger Celebrates Fertility

Carpetblogger confidantes are already aware of our views on traditional forms of reproduction. Breeding has always been one of those things we know people do but would never conceive of doing ourselves. This policy chagrins various ancestors.

That's not to say we have no biological clock. In fact, sometimes it ticks so loud, all other sounds are drowned out. It only happens in early spring, though.

Unlike the women (and male -- you know who you are) who got all flushed at the sight of baby jumpsuits at the Awesome Mossman Baby Shower last weekend, our ovaries start to hurt when we see seed packet plumage and  green hoses coiled up outside garden shops.  Spending time with most (there are exceptions) children reminds us to double up on the birth control, but the garden department of Bauhaus (the Turkish Home Depot), with its sprouting bedding plants and neat stacks of potting soil, looks like the nursery of our dreams.

It's been five long years since we've been able to plant anything, but an ill-advised February vegetable garden back in Portland taught us long ago suppress the urge to start digging in dirt too early. Istanbul's spring has arrived in fits and starts, with a few 70 degree days followed by a week of cold and gray, but the need to grow something has become overwhelming.  It's time to sow!

The street-facing Carpetblog residence has rows of window boxes on the first and second floors. In fact, it was the potential of the window boxes that drew us to the house in the first place (its carpet-friendliness was a close second). The boxes sat barren last summer, because truthfully, our urge to grow things evaporates entirely once it's hotter than 80 degrees.

Our first stop was the Eminönü Beleyedesi flower market in the lovely Gülhane Park.
There, the municipality sells hundreds of pink and purple tulips in bloom. If creeping Islamization means millions of tulips in April, I'll get my headscarf out. Along with flats of begonias, geraniums and daisies. They also sell big pots of hydrangeas and rhododendrons, which in Turkish are called "ormanı  çiçek" or "forest flowers." That's exactly what they are! I don't get homesick very often but the forest flowers made me think of the Columbia Gorge where the rhodies at lower elevations are probably starting to bloom. We would like to be hiking among them right now.

The garden market next to the Spice Bazaar has an even greater plant selection, plus a lot of grass seeds, baby chicks, buckets of dog and cat kibble and leeches. There are plenty of vegetable seedlings too, which made me nostalgic for my south-facing tomato garden in Portland. I grew so many tomatoes I would bag them up and leave them on the neighbors' porches at night. No one in Portland needs extra tomatoes or zuchinnis in summer time.

We rounded up ten bags of soil and three flats of begonias, impatiens, geraniums and little filler flowers as well as assorted herbs to hang in boxes on the sunny back side of the house. As I poured bags of soil into the window boxes, the Kurdish ladies in the building across the alley leaned out their windows, watching and encouraging me. "Çıçekler çok güzel!" "The flowers are beautiful!" they said. And indeed, they are.

It was probably the first time I had done anything they recognized as normal female behavior.

Night Slugs

Regular readers know that, over the past four years, members of my household and I have gone to war with various kinds of vermin: Cockroaches in a computer, rats in a washing machine, feral cats attached to a carpetdog's head, and of course, primates.

But lately, I have been struggling with a mysterious force that has challenged me in new and troubling ways. This adversary is particularly vexing because I have never once seen it, only wiped its slime off my shoes and the entry carpet in the mornings.

The Night Slugs.

Our ground floor is more or less below ground, at about street sewer level. This has a lot more cons than pros. The house is poorly ventilated so at best, it smells musty fusty in the guest quarters. At worst, it smells like raw sewage, and not just when it rains. This doesn't deter as many guests as you might expect. We have issued a lot of frequent stayer cards with the caveat "management ignores complaints about the sewage."

Well, there's also the Night Slugs.

They come every night. Evidence of them is abundant -- every morning there are slivery trails of slime along the edge of the walls and cursive loops on the carpet. Now I can keep odd hours --coming home late, leaving for the airport early, arriving home early from the airport. I have never seen a Night Slug.

As a native of the Pacific Northwest, I know from slugs. Banana slugs. The great grey garden slug. The spotted leopard slug. I once saw a banana slug the length of my forearm in front of an outhouse (that outhouse was at Sammamish Bible Camp where I accepted Jesus into my heart in an unrelated incident, not in our backyard, k?). But even in my ancestral home, which far too often sheltered undomesticated animals, slugs were not allowed.

Because slugs were more common in my childhood than dogs and cats and sheep, I learned how to massacre them early -- cups of beer, a squirt of ammonia and best of all, salt. You have not LIVED until you've salted a slug and watched it instantly dehydrate like a living raisin.

I figured Turkish slugs would be no match for a native Slug Master like me. I placed salt all around the baseboards. Imagine my horror when there was no noticeable decrease in slug activity. Apparently Turkish slugs are immune to salt. 

This frightens me. What kind of invisible mutant slug is immune to salt? But you know what? It doesn't frighten me half as much as some of these helpful slug hints that I found while searching for slug pictures. (It says it's a quiz, but they're all true. Proceed with caution. Highlight: Slugs produce mucus so strong that they can hang from it in midair to copulate, which they do, at the ends of stretchy mucus strings more than a foot long.) In fact, that list -- which could only be published in a Seattle paper -- derailed this whole post.

So memo to guests: watch out for copulating slugs when you get up in the middle of the night. Management does not accept complaints about those, either.

PukkaLiving Istanbul

The word "pukka" always makes me giggle because it sounds vaguely dirty and definitely colonial, like a word the Simla houseboy would use to describe the memsahib with whom he's having an affair.

This new English site PukkaLiving Istanbul seems to be neither dirty nor colonial, however.

It purports to feature

"'unique’ stuff only known to the locals with a zest in life: hidden boutiques and indie shops; the best places for budget-busting extravaganza or bargain-basement trophies; our choice of hot new places and cool local hang-outs; where to find little-known designer shops; how to eat, shop and have fun in style while contributing to the local community. "

We'll check it out.

Why Learning Turkish is So Very Important

 

Because if you ever find yourself at Miniaturk, the most ridiculous theme park ever, you might pay 10 YTL to enter, instead of BEŞ (5 YTL ) or ÜÇ (3 YTL, if you're a student) or IKI (2 YTL if you're on a school tour).

When I woke up this morning, I had no idea I would spend a cold, sunny Sunday afternoon next to the Halic, strolling among miniature replicas of Turkey's major tourist attractions. But that is how I roll.

Having seen this lifelike model of Nemrut Dağ, I don't feel like I need to travel to eastern Turkey to see it in person now. It's that good!

There were also replicas of things that are not, strictly speaking, "tourist" attractions such as a mall, an Opet gas station, Ataturk airport, the Olympic stadium nor things that are, strictly speaking, Turkish, (the al-Aksa mosque and the bridge at Mostar). Seriously, can you see too many Opet stations?

But I kid. Miniaturk would have been totally worth it, even at 10 YTL, if only for the replica of Ataturk airport.

Trying to Get Excited About Snow

In the category of things you see but don't understand, a guy walking up the alley selling a few lemons from red net bags. In a snow storm.

As in Baku, the only thing that could possibly improve traffic on Istanbul's many hills is the addition of some slushy snow.

Seems like a good day to stay inside and lie on the couch. Should the snow stick around long enough and be attractive enough, look for some photos.

Puppyfarm Lounge and Cafe

Carpetblog's Beirut Correspondent and I have been tossing around a business idea that we think will really take off: Puppyfarm Lounge and Cafe.

Most expats don't have the space or time to have puppies of their own, but, as the Carpetdogs will attest, they miss their dogs back home and often need to spend some quality dogtime. We also know expats like to drink and eat. Thus was born the Puppyfarm Lounge and Cafe idea. How could any enterprise that features puppies to play with, food made by Breed and The Producer and plenty of booze fail?

We do acknowledge a serious difference in opinion about overall strategy, however. CBC believes the key to success is puppies and wants to toss the puppies out on the street when they get big. I think that non-puppies have an important role to play in Puppyfarm Lounge and Cafe. This dispute will be solved through a duel.

This idea really grew legs a few days ago. I found eight puppies in a vacant lot near my house! It was a Christmas miracle! Puppyfarm Lounge and Cafe was turning from a dream into reality!

Clearly they had been left there, but the fact is they were old enough to be weaned and whoever had left them made them a little shelter and left them food. The dumper also picked possibly the most puppy-friendly neighborhood in Istanbul.  Everyone who walked by stopped to look at them.

Of course, my first impulse was to scoop them up and take them all home, but 10 dogs in the house seemed excessive. So I emailed these pictures to the vet. Dr. Elif said she'd send them around to the other clinics, but didn't sound very optimistic that they would find homes because they were street dogs.

Every morning and evening we walked by to check on the squirming pile of puppies in their little fort. Each time, there were pans of fresh milk and food set out for them. At night they were all nested together to keep warm (fortunately for them it's been relatively warm and dry). Each time, there were also one or two fewer puppies, until this morning, there were no puppies at all!

I didn't see any puppy carcasses around and if one commenter suggests any conclusion to this story other than all those puppies found nice warm homes, you will be permanently banned from Carpetblog!

Bayram Questions Answered!

Reader Bulent, who always answers questions we didn't know we had, fills in some of the blanks on the Kurban charity option:

Here's another fun bit for you. You probably have noticed by now the deep mistrust Turks hold for organized charities asking for donations. Turkish Red Crescent has a solution for that this year. You pay them for your 'kurban,' they slaughter it in front of a notary public, film it, make a VCD of the slaughter, and send you the 'evidence' along with 1/2 kg of the meat ('kavurma', not the spoilable fresh version). The rest goes to the poor. They figure this scheme will give them an edge over the other charities who don't provide such high-tech evidence of the good deed actually getting done. Here's the link: Haber 7.

On the other hand, when I mentioned this to a local shopkeeper he immediately theorized that they probably have three or four films of various animals getting slaughtered and a VCD duplication machine. Just has to be so, y'know, because, 'they' are always out to con us.

Carpetblog is service journalism at its best!