Weekday

Today, like yesterday, as you all know, is a weekday. Now that I am getting into the groove here, weekdays will likely be largely uneventful. This means you won't have to suffer through long, boring, plot driven posts, and instead get to suffer through my non-linear thought process.

I am running out of clean clothes. Please send socks and underwear. I don't trust the laundry woman here. Not only does she charge $7 per load, but last time she lost all my socks. That is a risk I cannot afford to take this time. I tried hand-washing my unmentionables, which have spent the last two days sun-drying in my living room. I'll let you know how they feel on my jock. My guess is "not good." 

We have been reading poems by Nazım Hikmet in class, and I really enjoy them. He is what Wikipedia calls "a romantic revolutionary." Personally, I like him because he is both easy to understand and a leftist Turk. He met and impressed Atatürk with a poem he wrote to inspire troops on the front lines of the Turkish War of Independence, which makes his deportation from Turkey a couple decades later REALLY ironic. He had his citizenship revoked, and only recently was it reinstated (posthumously). Actually, this past January. Here is a bit of his poem "Otobiyografi," first in Turkish and then I'll translate it:

bindim tirene uçağa otomobile

çoğunluk binemiyor

operaya gittim

çoğunluk gidemiyor adını bile duymamış operanın

çoğunluğun gittiği kimi yerlere de ben gitmedim 21'den beri

camiye kilisiye tapınağa havraya büyücüye

ama kahve falına baktırdığım oldu

I've boarded trains, planes, automobiles

The majority can't

I've gone to the opera

The majority can't go and have never even heard the opera's name

Since '21 I haven't gone to the places most people go:

to the mosque, the church, temple, synagogue, and folk healer

but I have had my fortune told by my coffee grounds

So anyway, I dig that bit. Just wanted to give you a taste. 

A cat climbed the fire escape three stories and came into our classroom today through the window. He walked up to the cassette player and was trying to figure out what the hell it was, and then curled up in someone's lap (the Turkish word for "jealous" is kıskanç), and then decided to just sleep in the back of the room like a homeless guy in a courtroom. I talk a lot about cats, probably too much, but goddamn it if they aren't a delightful feature of this fair city. The dogs I could do without. I had to yield the sidewalk last night to a dog literally the size of a wolf. It gave me the stink eye as it walked past, too, as if to say "damn right, bitch." But what can I do? He's got teeth and a med school textbook's worth of diseases.

Today I woke up with my alarm, because my alarm was my laptop blasting M83's "Unrecorded" using a crappy little widget I found. Bada boom. 

I realized today that Istanbul must be a nightmare for hipsters who travel here, because everyone between the ages of 18-30 wears tight jeans and ironic t-shirts. But the ironic part is, they aren't wearing them ironically. They are wearing them because ironic t-shirts here are actually high fashion, and are often sold for ridiculously high prices at the nicest stores. Everywhere you go, you see an old Batman logo, or a Daytona 500 1972 shirt, or some sort of pun. And as for the thrift store crowd, everybody else here still wears their work shirts and driving caps, so the shelves are probably empty. And just last night, I saw a girl in a headscarf wearing thick-rimmed glasses. Terrible haircuts are the norm, and hookah is everywhere, along with small, locally owned coffee places. And the city is far too hilly and dangerous for bicycle messengers, so they use scooters. Perhaps worst of all for the hipster, gentrification here is progressing at a snail's pace. Poor people still live in poor neighborhoods, and nobody here is looking to change that. 

I guess I'll leave it at that for the day. But before I go, I want to share some video I took at the Istanbul PRIDE Protest last Sunday with you. It is before the police gave them permission to march, and I share this bit with you because it was the most fascinating. They all stopped shouting (it was very loud) as soon as the call to prayer started, which I thought was very interesting. It seems here like the struggle is less between organized religion and the LGBTQ community, and more between the LGBTQ and state institutions, eg: there was no counter-protest, as far as I know. Also, the woman in the bottom right corner at the end is hot.