Carpetblogger

O Silent* Ramazan Night!

*If by silent, we mean "drums and drum-set car alarms at 3am." This post is a total lie.

The first year in Turkey, it was a charming cultural tradition to be appreciated and embraced. The second year, it was an annoyance to be avoided. The third year, it has become a target for open hostility.  (Some day we'll do a post comparing and contrasting Ramazan in all the countries we've had the good fortune to visit during the Holy Month, particularly the Qat-fueled all night parties in Sana'a we saw last year. It's all fun for a couple of days. A month is too much).

Astute readers know that Ramazan, the Muslim holy month of daylight fasting which starts today, begins about two weeks earlier every year. This has practical implications for everyone, believers and infidels alike.

For example, it's much easier to fast in December when days are very short and cool than it is to fast in July and August, when days are very long and hot. Ramadan is going to be a summer holiday for the next few years. It also means that the drummers, an old Ottoman tradition in which guys with drums troll neighborhoods waking people pre-dawn for sahur (pre-dawn meal), start earlier and earlier. This year, drumming would probably start around 3 am. Every day. For 30 days. Also, it being August, people like to sleep with their windows open, even if their bedroom overlooks the Sokak. Our Sokak seems to be home to some heavy sleepers and drummers like to pay special attention to it. After a month of this, even the most ardent cultural relativist begins to fantasize about beebee guns and water balloons.

Recognizing that most people own modern conveniences such as "alarm clocks," that some drummers are opportunists who accept tips to not drum on certain streets and that some harass residents at the end of Ramazan for tips, some municipalities have banned drumming. We applaud those municipalities, but until now, ours has not been one of them. 

As the Turkish Life has noted, "I'm just waiting for some mayor to say 'Globalization has given us McDonald's and TV dinners. You can easily eat throughout the year without killing a big cow at Kurban Bayramı. And if you want to show off to the neighbors, well, that's what fancy cars and iPhones are for.'"

But! TL has issued a late report that drumming in Beyoğlu has been banned this year. Despite heavy skepticism in Yabancı Köy about any ban not involving YouTube actually being observed in Turkey, it appears to be the case. No drumming last night! It may be a peaceful month after all, inşallah.

Carpetblog's Round Up of Expat Shopping

It's a little known fact that Istanbul expats want for very little. If we're willing to pay for it, we can get almost anything we want, including the two big ones: pig products and booze. We bitch and moan about scarcity/price of both but, having recently spent a week in Islamabad, we should shut up.

There comes a time, however, when an ingredient for a Thai or Indian or even American dish is needed and doesn't exist in Istanbul. Sometimes, the finding of a random American product is much more important than the having (Oooo! Look! Duncan Hines brownie mix! Want!) of it. Sometimes, it's easier to buy a product on the road that you know you can find in Istanbul but not without a lot of effort (such as putting on shoes). Highly valued, expensive seasonal fruits or unusual cheeses can also be carried in (Mangos and Litchis from Pakistan! Avacados from Israel! Limes from the UK!)  Often though, the point is simply to return with perishable/breakable/potentially poisonous item that none of your friends has yet thought of smuggling in.

We've been on the road a lot lately. We count our food and wine acquisitions among our greatest accomplishments of the year. For example, we brought 14 liters of wine and booze, a kilo of Boerewores (South African sausages), ostrich pate, game sausage and several packets of biltong (jerky) back from South Africa. This, we'd like to point out, was a personal best in terms of quantity and quality. We also pulled off a stunning and unlikely-to-be-repeated hand-off of imported goods (mostly English cheese and bacon) in Istanbul during a 30 minute layover (having too little time to hit the duty free was a personal failure) between international flights. It's not easy being a part of ILIQTT (Istanbul Liquor Transport Team), but membership has benefits,

What follows is an Expat's Guide to Foreign Product Procurement, Duty Free Shopping and Helpful Packing Hints, sponsored by ILIQTT. Motto: Don't argue with us. We're professionals.

(A primer for American readers: if you don't live somewhere where imported goods or "vices" like liquor are taxed onerously, you will never understand the appeal of duty free. Prices are higher than you would pay in the product's home country but far, far less than you would pay in your destination country. We want a piece of this racket.)

Best Duty Free Overall: Dubai wins. It's practically a shopping mall. Electronics are cheaper there than in most places outside the U.S. Lots of high end makeup, too. It doesn't have anything interesting or unusual though. Neither does the entire Gulf so don't blame the Emiratis.

Best Wine Duty Free: Johannesburg offers hundreds of local varietals and helpful wine stewards to help you choose. There are purchase limits though, and prices are much higher than in the wine shops. Still, if you can't hit a local wine store, it'll do. The exchange rate with the dollar is favorable so you can get delicious and unusual bargains. It also has a wide selection of products made of kudu (an antelope) and ostrich. Both are tasty! Buy some and serve it with a Cape Shiraz for Sunday Dinner.

Most Disappointing Wine Duty Free: Tbilisi. Sure, there's a huge supply but of only of the most well-known mass market brands at huge mark-ups. Stock up at World of Wine/Urine in downtown instead.

Best Duty Free Selection of Obscure European Liquors: Tel Aviv. Did your people brew it from plums in a Moldovan shtetl? Then it's probably in Tel Aviv Duty Free. Better still, Tel Aviv doesn't limit your purchases. It's pretty much as much as you can carry and think you can get away with smuggling in to your destination.

Best Wine Transport Mechanism: Box wine. If your mother drank her Carlo Rossi Rose out of a box when you were 10, you might laugh, but box wine rules. A five liter box maximizes space and is stable in a typical rolling suitcase. If you care about excess baggage charges, plan for two kilos a box. If you're coming from Lebanon, South Africa or France, pack a five liter box and your Istanbul friends will thank you profusely and finish it in one night.

Best Wine Transport Mechanism, Runner up: Wine Skins. A clever FOC (Friend of Carpetblog) who is a superior problem solver gifted a package of this genius product on her recent visit. It's as simple as wine bottle shaped bubble wrap and it's awesome. We leave several in our suitcase so we don't forget to carry them with us when we travel. We heart them.

Best Duty Free Scotch: We don't drink brown liquor but we know people who do and we aim to please. The Scotch Usta in the Stansted Airport offers helpful suggestions of obscure scotches that taste like ones your Scotch drinking friends like but may not have tried and make you look smart.

Best Source of American Products: Pakistan. We can't explain it, but there are real American brands in the supermarkets of Lahore and Islamabad: French's mustard, Duncan Hines cake mix, Pam cooking spray, Ziploc bags, Jif peanut butter, El Paso refried beans -- the list is endless. It almost makes a trip to Islamabad worth it. Almost.

Best, Cheapest Supply of Books in English: Again, Islamabad. Saeed Bookshop in the Jinnah Market has an amazing supply and most cover prices are less than $10. The international terminal in Islamabad has a good selection too. Since books in Istanbul are often double the cover price, this almost makes a trip to Islamabad worth it. Almost. The Karachi domestic terminal also has a great selection. We advise against a special trip, though. Nothing is worth a trip to Karachi.

Best Selection of Subcontinental Spices and Ingredients: Any Gulf supermarket. Let's say, for the sake of argument, you don't want to go to India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, but you crave and can't find such cuisines in your own city of 18 million (Is Istanbul the biggest city in the world without a Pakistani restaurant? Discuss). Since these countries' populations keep the Gulf states functioning, their culinary needs are well served in every major supermarket in the UAE, KSA or Qatar.

Best Place to Buy an Electronic Haddith Organizer and Tang at the Same Time: Jeddah. An absolutely perverse selection of orange colored products (Tang, Tide), religious frippery and rip off Chinese products. Not to be missed for the freak factor.

Most Underperforming Duty Free: Kyiv. With all the different vodkas available in that country, the offerings at the Duty Free are lame. Actually, this could be said for the whole of the FSU. But because vodka is so cheap and plentiful in every supermarket, it's worth bringing an extra suitcase and cushioning the bottles with pork loin. There are 54 breeds of pigs in Ukraine. Try one today!

Worst Duty Free: Putting Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabia aside, Doha has terrible duty free. It's half-assed, poorly laid out and they funnel you in there straight out of passport control. Doha airport is terrible in general. We avoid it. Also, Duty Free at Turkey's border with Bulgaria is also particularly grim.

Got any other hints?

Open Letter to Zafer Isik, Yabanci Subesi Resolution Manager

Sayın Zafer Bey!

Back in January, we posted about our experience obtaining our residence permit at the Yabancı Şubesi (Foreigner Office) in the İstanbul Emniyet (Police Headquarters), an experience we compare unfavorably to visiting a Central Asian gynecologist. We commended your operation for gradually imposing order by requiring folks to take a number and reducing the number of windows one has to visit and the number of stamps necessary to just one. We took this as a sign that, over the three years we have been obtaining residence permits, Turkey is, yavaş yavaş, becoming more civilized.

Well! After that post, you kindly left a comment, which we ignored at the time, because, just like the gynecologist, we avoid thinking about the Yabancı Şubesi except the one day a year when we have to go there, asking us to provide some constructive criticism*. Little did we know that you already had some improvements in mind for the operation that closely track the kind we might have suggested.  You should have run them past us! We would like credit for them (Your original comment along with a hasty translation are below).

Recent reports from the Correspondent Formerly of Kathmandu and Beirut and Now of Istanbul indicate that the changes made since January, are in a word, awesome. If you follow her work, you know she specializes in reporting on Epic Failures for Carpetblog. Based on her experience at the Yabancı Şubesi, one might conclude its management has been turned over to a pack of wild dogs. But we think that's unfair.

Gone was that experiment with internet-based appointments (did anyone really think that would work?). On her first visit, she was told that in order to get a number to turn in the documents for her permit, she would have to get in line across the street from the Emniyet, starting at 2 am. She did this and was relieved to see an orderly and friendly group already formed. She took the 18th place in line and made friends.

When 8:30am rolled around and numbers were handed out, she was discouraged to receive number 74. How did this happen? Comrades-in-line deduced that the first 50 numbers had been sold by an "entrepreneur" who, after "picking a fight" with other line-standers, was "detained" by the police with a show of force so convincing observers concluded the entrepreneur could only be another police officer. The ability to pretend you're not doing what you're doing is what separates Turkish police and waiters from all those yahoos in FSU. We admire that. Those people are savages.

After navigating the YS's signless maze (you might consider posting directional signs in Turkish, though definitely not in any other language), CFKBNI finally coughed up more than 770 YTL for a document that confers few meaningful benefits. We paid less than 600 YTL three years ago. Inflation! You have it! Play that card if it's your hand. Carpetblog approves, as long as you don't use the extra fees to improve the Yabancı Şubesi customer service.

We here at Carpetblog were becoming worried that Turkey was losing that developing world "edge" that foreigners always appreciate, especially when it comes to dealing with police and bureaucracies. We are relieved our fears were misplaced! If CFKBNI's experience this week was any indication, the Istanbul Emniyet has become concerned, too, and opted to rely on its old skool habits for dealing with "visitors."

*Just FYI, our contract with the "Constructive" Division of the Criticism Department expired long ago.

Original Post:
26 Ocak 2009'daki Yabancılar Şube ziyaretiniz ve yaşadıklarınıza ait
deneyimlerinize yer verdiğiniz yazınızı okudum.

Önerilerinizin yapıcı olacağı ve daha faydalı olacağına inandığınız
düşünceşerinizi, bizimle paylaşmanız.. saat 03.37 olmasına rağmen iyi niyetli yaklaşımlara her zaman açık olan emniyet teşkilatını memnun edici motivasyona taşıyacaktır. Yazınızdaki tutum ötesinde, gözlemlerinizin sizde olması gereken çözüm
önerisi nedir? konusundaki fikirlerinizide oraya taşımış olmanız bizleri mutlu ederdi.

Yanıtınızı bekler, iyi niyetli ve yapıcı olacak önerileriniz için şimdiden teşekür ederim.

Zafer Işık
İst. Em. Md.lüğü Yabancılar Şube Çözüm Ortağı
Yönetici

Translation:
I read your writing regarding your visit to the Yabancilar Subesi on 26 January 2009 and your experience.

With the belief that you intend your proposals to be constructive and more beneficial share with us ... Despite the fact that the hour is 3:37 a.m., the police staff, which is always open to good-intentioned approaches, that carry a motivation that will please the police staff.

Besides/beyond the manner of your writing, had you included in that writing your ideas on proposals for solutions, which your observations surely must have given you, that would have made us happy.

I am awaiting your response, I thank you in advance for your suggestions that will be good intentioned and constructive.

Zafer Isik, Istanbul Police Department's Yabancilar Sube's manager of
resolution partner

Carpetblog Recommends: Istanbul Personal Shopper

Are planning a visit to Istanbul and worry that you will enter the Grand Bazaar and not see anything but fake leather fur-lined jackets marketed to the devushka demographic?

Do you fear you enter the Bazaar and never find your way out?

Do you hate bargaining?

Are you an Istanbul expat and concerned that your guests will deduct a bottle of duty free wine every time they suspect you are making up answers to their touristic-related questions?

Are you an Istanbul expat who hates the Grand Bazaar with the white hot passion of a thousand suns and would pay any sum to never have to set foot in there again?

Do you fall into any of these categories? If so, we cannot more highly recommend our friend, Istanbul Personal Shopper! ISP recently took the Outlaws on a day-long tour of the GB and they returned with tales of having lunch at a lokanta on the roof, finding excellent bargains on cool stuff and confidently walking away from shopkeepers who wouldn't bargain. They also had the experience of walking around Sultanahmet with someone who knows why the Blue Mosque has six minarets and other, even more obscure facts about this historic city.

ISP is an American expat who is ordinary in every way except she loves the Grand Bazaar.  She is not a member of Istanbul's professional tout class and knows all the parts of the bazaar that aren't completely tacky and annoying. She knows her textiles, too, and will adapt your tour to fit any obscure interest you might have. Check out her website to learn more. The Washington Post loves her too!

Call her next time you have visitors in town/you visit Istanbul and tell her Carpetblog sent you. Her prices are reasonable, your guests will be thrilled and you won't have to go the the GB. Everyone wins!

Carpetblog Recommends: Istanbul Eats

This city is woefully lacking in useful online entertainment and restaurant information in English that's targeted at people who live here rather than visit. Props to Yigal Schleifer (of the excellent Istanbul Calling) and Ansel Mullins (who hosts our favorite Turkish radio show on Açik Radyo called Soul Sendikası) for starting a new restaurant blog Istanbul Eats.

It's got reviews of off-beat places like one of our favorite bean restaurants, Fasuli, and odes to Kaymak, the best condiment ever. Better yet, it seems to avoid the obvious places deemed "hot" by the travel press a year after they start to suck.

We've often considered writing more restaurant reviews but we think sometimes you need to be nicer to be in that line of work. Go show Yigal and Ansel some hit love!

Carpetblogger's Mixed Feelings About Turkish Airlines

We don't care much for plane crashes around here, particularly by airlines on which we are of practically elite status (translation: we enjoy benefits woefully disproportionate to the effort expended to achieve those benefits, such as traveling to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan). We especially don't like them when people die, despite  Captain Sully-esque efforts to prevent greater loss of life.

For us, Turkish Airlines has always been an island of competence in a sea of Turknology. The planes are new and clean, we never have to get to the airport more than 90 minutes before a flight because the lines move quickly, delays are rare, the food and service are acceptable, we can be home 50 minutes after landing, (memo to American air travelers: it doesn't have to be that way!), there are never people vomiting in the aisles and we have never once heard of drunk pilots (memo to FSU air travelers: it doesn't have to be that way!).

Most importantly, the red and white Turkish Airlines logo at an airport in some post-Soviet shithole always communicates an important and reassuring message to us: "You can get out here with a minimum of hassle and likelihood of death or dismemberment."  This inspires a degree of brand loyalty that we don't bestow on many products, particularly airlines. Crashes tend to undermine this perception, however. We're pretty sure that Turkish Airlines didn't take our brand image into consideration when it developed its current marketing campaign "Feel Like a Star" featuring Kevin Costner, since none of the ads' shots are from airports that look like concrete refugee camps.

So to see a Turkish 737 lying in pieces in a muddy Dutch field makes us sad and question whether perhaps our loyalty is misplaced. Alternatively, it also makes us think "at least it didn't happen in Bishkek."

For Those In NJ Who Are Ready To Rock...

After months of hanging around Istanbul, waiting in endless lines and worrying about having to return to Iraq, our friends, musicians and stars of the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad have left the building. All four members of Acrassicauda, Baghdad's only heavy metal band, have arrived in metal heaven -- Elizabeth, New Jersey. They received refugee status from the US and will be eligible to apply for green cards in a few years.

Here's how we met the band and although we haven't provided many updates lately, this is where they were a year ago.

Since arriving in the US, they've attended their second heavy metal show (the first was Testament, in Turkey) and met Metallica's guitarist backstage (in the photo), who gave them one of his guitars. That's already a big improvement over playing to Turkish biker gangs and unappreciative drunk yabancis in Kemanci.

There were lots of times when the bureaucratic obstacles seemed insurmountable and the money impossible to find. It's also easy to imagine the problems that lie ahead. But these boys have balls the size of cantaloupes, proven perseverance, charm, wit and despite everything, phenomenal luck. They're gonna do just fine and we admire them tremendously.

Marwan, Faisal, Tony and Firas -- maşallah from İstanbul! We wish you the best and expect you to play Meadowlands someday.

Word of the Day: Buzcu

Our favorite construction in the Turkish language (other than the brilliant "miş" tense, which allows one to disassociate oneself from the information one is relaying) is designating an occupation by adding the suffix -ci/-cu/-cı/-cü to a noun. By using this construction, you create a new word that means "guy who does X" or "X guy" (and it is always a guy, though the word itself is gender neutral).

There is no occupation too small or insignificant to warrant a "-cu" ending. For example, our new favorite word is "buzcu" (booze-joo) or "ice guy."  In fact, we just discovered the existence of buzcular, which doesn't make a lot of sense. If there are yağcilar (olive oil guys), karpuzcular (watermelon guys), turşucular (pickle guys), hurdacılar (junk guys), tavukcılar (chicken guys), balıkcılar (fish guys), a davulcusu (Ramazan drummer guy) of course there will be buzcular.  Turks are logical like that.

In Istanbul, you can't just go to your local market guy (your bakkalcı) or even the Carrefour for a bag of ice for a party. They don't sell it. You have to go to Buzcu Sokak Now, there is no such alley, as far as we know, called Buzcu Sokak*, so don't go asking around for it (and we're sure it's probably accusative too, but, seriously, we've stopped even trying). But since Turks also tend to name alleys after the types of businesses and the -cis clustered there and we don't know the actual name of the street, it's become known as Buzcu Sokak in the parlance of the day.

That doesn't mean there's not some mystery associated with the buzcular. Most of the buzcular on Buzcu Sokak are also çamaşırhanes (full service laundromats. Someday we might explore how putting the ending -hane to a noun means "place."). We cannot explain why the çamaşırhanes and the buzcular are the same enterprises, but it makes them easy to find. We're also not at all sure why all the buzcular we've seen are also çamaşırhanes but not all çamaşırhanes are buzcular. We're pretty confident that someone will explain this all to us.

*Buzcu Sokak runs parallel and in between Tarlabaşı Bulvarı and Nevizade/Balık Bazaar, if you need ice this weekend.

Ask Carpetblogger: What are your options if your pet dies in Istanbul?

Because we like to answer questions you didn't know you had and we like to write about things we're pretty certain no on else has and because we wish someone else had written about this already, we're going to tell you what options you have if your dog dies in Istanbul. We're servicey like that.

The answer to the question "what do we do after?" created a pit in our stomach well before any dog headed that direction. We imagined having to put them out with the trash or futzing around with taxis and shovels in Belgrad Forest, the only sizeable piece of undeveloped real estate within an hour's drive of home. Neither option appealed in the least.

Thinking the worst and incapable of asking the questions ourselves, we tasked the able and Mo-loving Villa Luna with assessing the alternatives. We dreaded her report, but we were surprised when she told us we had three choices, not all of them awful:

• Istanbul has a pet cemetery. Who knew? We didn't care much for this option, but we were surprised to hear such a thing exists.  Someone who has more motivation than we do should look into the who/what/wheres of this. In a culture where keeping animals as pets is a relatively new phenomenon and dogs carry lots of theological baggage, this is sort of intriguing.

• Official burial in Belgrad Forest. Apparently you can get a permit to bury your pet in the forest north of the city, which is the watershed for Istanbul's water supply. This option didn't appeal either but it's surprising to know it exists. We have no idea where you'd go to get such a document or how long it would take or who you'd have to bribe or if it wouldn't just be easier to be low profile about doing it yourself. It's a big forest and probably there are lots of things buried there without a permit.

• Cremation. You may or may not know that, like many observant Jews and  Catholics, Muslims don't cremate. So, while pet cremation is pretty common in the US (our ancestors have boxes of childhood dogs lying around), it was hard for us to imagine cremation was an option in a culture where people aren't cremated. As it turns out, it's expensive, but possible. Seriously, we didn't devote much energy contemplating the logistics surround this process so don't ask, but his ashes were returned a few days later, albeit in inappropriate packaging. The Turkish Life sought out a more appropriate container, which turned out to be a cookie jar from the bazaar.

Carpetblog: Answering questions you didn't know you had for a couple years now.

A Visit to the Yabanci Subesi

Every yabancı with a Turkish residence permit dreads the annual visit to the Yabancı Şübesi (foreigner office) at the police headquarters (the Emniyet) for the renewal process. You look forward to it the same way you look forward to a visit to the gynecologist, only it's more invasive and there are a lot more Central Asians in the waiting room.

Today was our third annual visit to the Emniyet for this purpose. We approached it with confidence, given that we have a self-promoted reputation as a Bureaucracy Usta. Clearly, our skills have slipped because it took us two separate trips, approximately six hours of waiting and a side excursion to the bank just to file the correct paperwork. But those details are boring.

What's important about this story is this: Turkey is becoming more civilized before our eyes.

The first year we went, hundreds of foreigners of all nationalities scrummed at each of 17 windows, waving documents at sullen clerks who pointedly ignored Russians and Bulgarians. Every window looked the same but had a different purpose which would only be revealed after you visited every one at least twice looking for the stamp you needed. Our effort was inelegant but ultimately successful. Obtaining our residence permit without speaking one word of Turkish was probably our greatest achievement in 2007.

Last year at renewal time, a feeble number system had been implemented. Our Turkish was advanced enough to understand that even though we were given a number, it was little more than a meaningless gesture toward the concept of chaos reduction (recognizing this scenario requires far more than language skills, by the way).

This year, the 120 people ahead of us when we arrived waited patiently for their number to be called in a room specially designed for this purpose. In a nod to the comfort of children accompanying their parents, a Turkish cartoon looped on a plasma screen. After approximately 15 viewings over four hours, we knew the dialogue by heart. A policeman ensured that every new arrival received a number. His gun deterred potential violence inspired by the six hour-long wait facing the fools who showed up after 10am.

While we acknowledge that the new system treats everyone the same, the old system rewarded the aggressive, the highly emotional and the clever. And even though the Yabancı Şübesi was in dire need of Stalinesque order imposition, it's sort of sad to realize your skills have become anachronistic.

Still, it's reassuring to note that you can still be sent on a wild goose chase for missing documents, be forced to make at least two visits, obtain random stamps and spend a metric assload of cash to obtain a permit that, in the end, confers few meaningful benefits. That part is still refreshingly Turkish.

And really, all this new Yabancı Şübesi order means is that yabancıs are capable of waiting for their number to be called. Nothing suggests that Turks have developed these skills, so maybe all is not yet lost.