Friday night was incredibly fun. We all took cabs down to the Bebek Pier and took a ferry across the Bosphorus to Kandilli, where my friend's boyfriend was waiting in his car to take us over to his house for the night for a barbeque. We managed to fit 8 people in his tiny coupe, seatbelts on. I was in the passenger seat with my blonde friend sitting on my lap. She had to stick her head out the window because the car's roof was so low. It was hysterical. The area around Kandilli is a bit more conservative than our neighborhood, and so the mere fact that a girl was on my lap is scandalous enough, not to mention the fact that I have fiery red hair and hers is intensely blonde. When we were driving away, a group of older guys were sitting nearby and had been watching us all climb in, so I flashed them a huge smile and a thumbs up as we passed with my friend on my lap, and they all laughed and waved. When we arrived, the driver started to roll up the windows and my friend was like "Aaaaah!" Her head was getting caught. It was hilarious. She said "That would be the lamest decapitation ever."
The house was incredible. Four stories, furnished like a fancy hotel, with an elevator, a backyard, and a huge TV, not to mention the rooftop balcony. Pictures will come later. We basically spent the entire night drinking beer, eating BBQ (köfte, sucuk, eggplant, etc.), and chips. Lays has a chip here called "A La Turca," and it basically combines the best qualities of Cool Ranch and Nacho Cheese Doritos on a slightly thicker corn chip. Incredible. The setup was great, with beanbag chairs and nice weather, and the view from the house was of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, and of the castle right next to our campus. Fantastic. The best part, though, was the fact that a lot of the people at the party were Turkish, which meant I got to practice Turkish the entire night. I learned some great slang, like the quicker way to say "I'll fuck your c-word" and the equivalent of "dropping a deuce." These are the slang words you won't get in Lonely Planet, much less from the top linguists in Turkey, who teach us.
Saturday morning, we had planned on going to the Old City to meet up with our program-organized tour group. We arranged with the director to meet up around 11:00am, but our friend had to drive his brother to SAT prep-class (yeah, SAT) so we couldn't get there until around 12:00. So we called them to find out where they would be so we could meet up, and she said to just not come, and not worry about it. We asked "are you sure?" But she said to just not come. We felt bad, but she insisted. So instead we got a huge börek breakfast feast and then caught some cabs home. The plan was to regroup, shower, and then go see Harry Potter at 7:00 at Kanyon.
Before that, though, Jessica suggest that it was an "Alo Servis" kind of Saturday, which I totally agreed with. Poor Nihan spent 9 minutes on Skype with the McDonald's people trying to place our orders. The idiot man asked for my name 3 times, since it was my cell number. She had to spell it out using "K as in Kanyon, E as in Evet," blah blah blah. Three times. It was hilarious. So my name was turned into a pretty badass string of Turkish words:
"Beşiktaş Ocean Dolphin Revolution!"
After enjoying McDonald's and "Ocean's 11," we managed to take the bus toward the theater, but missed our stop and ended up walking for 15th minutes the wrong way (well, the right direction but wrong road). Instead of the mall, we found a go-cart park and a dead end. We then caught a cab and the driver was explaining to us that he was very happy because he was going to a wedding that night, and that there would be a kemençe there, the Black Sea fiddle, of sorts, and that he loved those very much. He definitely took us the longer way, but it was worth it to see the back streets of the area, really narrow, dark, and dirty. It's hard to imagine (but here very easy to find) that such a crass monument to wealth as Kanyon can exist next to such poverty, but it does.
Harry Potter was, as expected, entertaining and well put together. I really enjoyed the way they designed the dream sequences, that was very cool. I haven't read past the third book, and hadn't seen the last movie since it came out, so I was asking Sydney every couple of minutes who some people were and what was going on, but I got the gist of it. I have to say, the scene in the cave was genuinely creepy. Naturally, there was a smoking break. There was also a commercial for spreadable cheese that featured a talking puppet brain with one eye asking small children why they liked the cheese. Let me see if I can find a picture of it...OR A VIDEO.
So there you have it, the brain shouts at children.
Right after the movie we took the subway to Taksim to hang out and go dancing. The subway stations here are absolutely enormous and unnecessarily so. You have to walk five minutes to get to the exits. And once we did, for some reason I was getting pissed off at everyone on Istiklal. Not sure why. Maybe I am getting ready to come back to the states, and that was just a flash of homesickness. Maybe it was because I felt pressure to pick a place to eat and also wanted to make sure none of us got stabbed. Add to that the assholes who stand outside of their restaurants speaking English to every gringo that walks by, and you've got a headache. We eventually settled on a place called "Otentik," which means, you guessed it, authentic. It featured (I found out after we sat down) an old woman in the window making bread and gözleme, what I have deemed Turkish quesadillas. That's what I ate, and it was great. Thin bread stuffed with goodies like olives, cheese, or meats. The place was furnished with fake rocks, fake plants, and a little waterfall thing. It was pleasant, if only because it got us off the street. In case you can't tell, I probably wasn't in the mood for Istiklal last night.
We wandered down toward Tünel to the cheaper bars, and there were no tables available for us, so we walked all the way back to the old standby, 7. Kat Teras. We ran into someone from our program there, who is Turkish and whose sister lives here. She was surprised we knew about it. We had a few beers there for cheap, and then headed to a place called "Jolly Joker," which we had heard would have live music. We got in free (because there were four cute American girls and me in our group), and there indeed was a real live Turkish cover band. They sang American top 40 songs and Turkish top 40 songs. They were actually really good, but the place was a bit too much like America for me to get totally into it.
But actually, it was also a bit too Turkish at the same time, because there was no shortage of creepy, sad men trying to manage to sneak up behind the girls and dance on them. I got tired of playing surrogate boyfriend and they got tired of having to pay attention to where they were dancing, so we left. One of the guys was following us, until we lost him in a crowd by the exit. Afterwards, we went to Araf, that Balkan dance club that ex-pats just adore. The vibe there is always great, but last night it smelled like a woodland creature's vagina. We stayed about 30 minutes and then finally made the trek back home. Our cab driver, shockingly, admitted he didn't know how to get there, but I told him I would show him and he agreed to give us the daytime rate. We arrived at Superdorm at around 3:45am. I was supposed to drink tea with Hakan, the gatekeeper, when we got back, but he was at the other entrance (to the parking garage). I slept until 2:00pm today, because we didn't get much sleep Friday night.
I showered and got a text from Sydney saying she and Michael were down in Sultanahmet and wanted to meet up to go see Küçük Aya Sofya, one of the places we really wanted to see on the tour we missed. So I hustled down to meet them. Had to take a bus, transfer buses in Beşiktaş, hop on the tram at Kabataş, and then walk down the hill in Sultanahmet to find them. Asked directions once, and the guy gave them accurately, but I passed a really old, formerly Byzantine-looking mosque and thought that might be it, so I stopped by and asked a guy there if it was Küçük Aya Sofya. He said yes, so I called Sydney and asked where they were. Turns out, that guy was an idiot. I continued down the hill for another 200 feet and found them and the mosque. It was beautiful, and is in the process of being restored, like every other mosque here, in preparation for Istanbul being the cultural capital of Europe next year. I love that, if not for the fact that it probably is one of the cultural capitals, then for the fact that Europeans are probably so pissed about it.
We drank some tea and read through a newspaper we found there for a bit. Apparently some Turkish girl found out her boyfriend of 2 years had been cheating on her with her best friend, so she posted a photo of him jokingly wearing women's clothes on Facebook and sold a bunch of his stuff online for 1 TL, including a soccer ball signed by the Turkish national team. Note to self: Turkish women do not fuck around. We got lunch at Doy Doy, the great restaurant near the Blue Mosque that I went to with Emmie and Kent and Cole three years ago. We got to hear the call to prayer from the Blue Mosque, which is one of my favorites. After we ate, we walked to the mosque and had a look around inside. It's huge and beautiful, but not my favorite. Süleymaniye still is. Now it's time for homework and maybe some hookah later. This week is "yoğun" and "meşgül," or dense and busy with school business. Excitement abounds.
Take care, have a great Sunday!
No comments:
Post a Comment