Horsed Mansion!

Well it is 7:11pm here, and I am having a little siesta after the soul-crushing return journey from our "gezi," or small trip, that we took after class with our TA. Class went well today. The same cat returned to the classroom via a different window. Again, I was largely ignored. But this time, it jumped onto Shiho's lap and it was the cutest goddamn thing ever. Kawai neko! Sebahat Hanım was our teacher for all our classes today, since our writing teacher was at the graduation ceremony with her students. She brought us some sigara böreği, which is a type of Turkish pastry stuffed with spinach and cheese. It is IDENTICAL to spanikopita, which the Turks call börek, these ones are sigara because they are shaped like cigarettes. So there you have it. 

Our class went down the Murder Hill through the back of campus, and bussed it to the Sabancı Museum, which is an art museum housed in the grounds of the old Sabancı family mansion, which the English translation of the sign inside says is called "The Horsed Mansion." The Sabancı family, along with the Koç family, basically own everything in Turkey. Both families have universities with their name, and are the kind of holding groups you find in Japan and Korea too. Self-made industrialists who then turn into the machine they struggled to beat in the first place. Anyway, they have more money than God, and a lot of it went toward endowing this great museum and amassing a huge collection of Islamic calligraphy. The exhibits we saw were of late Ottoman and early Turkish Impressionist art (they kind of jumped on that wagon a bit late, and were still making it into the late 1960s). Some of it was fantastic, much of it was mediocre, but significant for introducing the medium to the country. The next exhibit was of landscapes and portraits from Lisbon, Portugal. The point, I gather, was to demonstrate that Istanbul and Lisbon have a lot in common, in terms of geography and the historical role they played as points of cultural exchange. Mission not accomplished. I will look into it, though. 

The guards at the museum must have been really bored or really afraid of losing their jobs, because they were SUPER attentive. Shop attendants here will follow you around while you look at clothes, but these fuckers were tailing me as I looked at fine art. What did they expect, that I had come to Turkey, red beard and all, to steal one of the mediocre paintings on display? Interestingly enough, I could have. The power in the museum flickered and then cut out entirely about 3 times while we were there. We're talking perfect conditions for someone to grab a painting off the wall and run for it. At one point, I was sitting on a bench, pondering this awesome modern Portuguese rug mural with a friend, and I said "watch the guard while I stand up." I got up off the bench, and the guard spun around so fast I'm surprised he didn't fall down. 

PS: one of the Portuguese portraits of a woman in a green dress looked so much like Michael Jackson it was terrifying.

Outside, I saw and heard a Turkish couple above me in the museum cafe pointing me out and chuckling. I think next time I will turn around and shoot daggers at them with my eyes. Or throw knives with my hands.

I decided to walk back with Shiho and Megan along the water, past the Rümeli Hisarı (Mehmet the Conqueror's Castle) and got some tea/Cola at a small spot on the way. One man's shirt read "NOTHING REALLY MATTERS." Another woman's said "MY NAME IS HEART." I want one that says "YOUR SHIRT SUCKS." After the tea, we braved the narrow/non-existent/car-covered sidewalks and then ascended the Murder Hill the back way, through campus. Fuck that hill. Oh my God. It is awful. They might as well just have a rope ladder instead of steps. It's basically the Winding Stair from Tolkien. I did a little research, and discovered that its real name is actually Şehitlik Tepesi, or MARTYRDOM HILL. Of course. Along the way, and probably only because we were on that hill, I managed to finally get a Japanese person teach me a bad word. "Kuso!" It means "shit" in English, and is said only by men. So now I have to say that every time I see Shiho. 

I just wolfed down some more börek and need to take a goddamn shower. The Turks have a phrase to describe how you look after something like what I just did. Sucuk gibi ıslandım. I got as wet as a sausage. I honestly don't know what that means. I think it means "I was drenched with sweat." I hope.