Turkish Muse

The Region's The Limit

"For all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three." -- Alice Kahn

The nearest electronics store to my house is a Teknosa, which you would think would be oh so convenient if you didn't know how I felt about Teknosa, that awful place where insult is added to injury because in addition to Turkey's horrendously high taxes on imported electronics, Teknosa then tacks on a hefty profit margin, making it the single most expensive place in Turkey to buy something simple like a DVD player or a blender.

And yes, I know I am spoiled, coming as I do from a country in which you can find a microwave at Target for $30 and a hair dryer for $20. I find it absolutely appalling when I walk into an electronics store here and see that a coffee maker -- a very simple drip coffee maker -- is priced at more than 150 TL ($100). Makes no sense to me.

So when our DVD player crapped out on us last month, my heart sank. I suspect that in the move to Izmir last August its delicate wires had been bumped around and it started to go haywire. As these things tend to happen, the DVD player broke just after the left speaker of our stereo system, which was a gift from a friend last year, also started to peter out.

Needless to say, we were not happy campers.

Eschewing the nearby Teknosa, we decided instead to try Darty, which is a short taxi ride away from our house. Settled amid concrete tower blocks and sprawling Carrefours and cinemas, Darty is housed in a single hideous building that is also home to a Koctas, a Burger King and a non-descript furniture store.

I went in with high hopes. We were hoping to find a DVD player and stereo system, an all-in-one surround sound system that would blow us away when we watched  "Dollhouse" and "Mercy" on TV.

Sadly, the store's offerings were slim. Darty didn't offer much in the way of stereo systems; there were, in fact, only two models and one didn't have a HDMI cable, which rendered it completely useless because that meant the system was not digital and required an analog TV. Who has an analog TV anymore?

Our other option was a Panasonic surround sound system with a DVD player, on sale for 400 TL. A bit pricey in my opinion, and I didn't know that we really needed six speakers, but what the hell? We'd certainly put it to good use.

Before buying it, I asked a sales rep where the ATM machine was. I always prefer to pay in cash in Turkey if I can -- as opposed to using a debt card -- because it's so much easier to handle if there's a problem later.

But lo and behold! There was in fact no ATM machine in the building! Or anywhere  nearby! I stared in minor shock at the sales rep. "What?" he said. "You can just pay with your card."

In the end that's what we did. I paid 100 TL in cash and then paid the rest -- 300 TL -- with my US debit card. As the cashier rang up my purchase, I gazed up at the wall behind the register and took in the large red sign with the store's guarantee. "If you find a lower price anywhere else, we'll refund the difference AND give you a box of chocolate," the sign read.

I paid easily -- the store was only too happy to take my US debit card, though sometimes the fact that it is associated with a credit union and not a bank causes me some problems.

We hauled the huge box home in a taxi, mixed a drink and set about putting the system together. (It amazes me that in 2010 we still need wires to do everything; I mean, seriously, can't things be wireless nowadays?)

When we put in our first DVD, a "Simpsons" disc from the US, the DVD player spun and spun before the screen turned bright blue and said in bold white letters: "REGION NOT FOUND."

My heart caught in my throat. Oh. My. God. You mean to tell me.....it's not region free? You mean, it will only play discs from Europe and not the US? How did we miss this? But on the box there is a picture of the globe and it says ALL, meaning all regions, right? RIGHT?

Sadly, no. What we had not realized when we bought the system was that the little symbol of a globe was actually Panasonic's worldwide guarantee, NOT a symbol that the DVD player could be used worldwide. Confusing, I know.

Without a region free DVD player, see, we cannot play our American movies. We can only play ones that we purchase here -- and seriously, when we do we ever purchase a DVD? That leaves a rather large chunk of our media off limits to us.

Our only alternative was to return the system, knowing full well that the Darty had nothing else like it and we would be right back where we started: with a broken DVD player and a half-hearted stereo system.

So back into a taxi we went, receipts in hand. Jeff fretted and moaned that we were simply not going to get our money back, that this was Turkey and they just didn't do that, receipt or no. They'll just give us store credit, he said, and there is absolutely nothing else that we need. I was more hopeful. Of course they will refund our money, I said, this is an international store following international standards and of course they will simply refund our money the way I paid it.

Little did I know how wrong I was.

Check back for part two of our story on Friday in which we discover that stores in Turkey don't necessarily subscribe to a "Satisfaction Guaranteed" customer service model.

In the Spirit of the Season

I have decided that I am definitely celebrating Christmas this year.

I am putting up a tree (actually, that part is already done), am baking Christmas cookies, stringing lights, and singing yule tide carols till the cows, errr, reindeer come home. I'm even hosting a Christmas holiday party!

I have spent the last several Christmases somewhere other than with my family and this has made me sad and depressed every single year. Well, no more, I say! It's time for me to make Christmas my own, regardless of where I spend it, whether that's Philly, Kansas or Turkey.

Last year Jeff, in a noble attempt to stave off my annual holiday blues, bought us a cute little artificial tree about a meter tall along with a string of lights and some ornaments. We put up that tree just a few days ago.

Of course, Frankie wanted in on the action too.

 

I bet you're wondering how long exactly that tree stayed up there on the table with four cats in the house.

Not long at all. In fact, since putting it up, we've decided it's easier to leave the tree on the floor and only put it up on the table with the lights on when we're actually in the salon to enjoy it. Otherwise, I could spend all day picking that damn tree up and rearranging the lights and fallen ornaments.

 

Isn't it cute? The cat, I mean, not the tree. I think the tree needs a bit more work. Maybe another string of lights and some more ornaments. And definitely a star on top. That would make it more festive.

So, as I attempt to celebrate my own infidel version of Christmas, complete with homemade eggnog and a Victorian England-era party, I'll post here on how it goes. I've asked my mom and mother-in-law for some cookie recipes, many of which I've never made before even though I've spent my whole life eating them every December! To start us off, in a few days I'll post the most amazing -- and the easiest! -- sugar cookie recipe ever! (And you can do it all with local ingredients!)

What about you? Do you celebrate Christmas in Turkey? How do you do it?

Musings on Opting Out, if Only for a Weekend

Let's face it: there are going to be times when an expat just doesn't want to be living in Turkey. It has less to do with Turkey itself, per se, and more with expat life in general.

I have a friend who, while living in Romania several years ago, would stock up on groceries on a Friday evening, then hunker down at home all weekend long, only to leave on Monday morning to go to work. That's pretty much what I did this past weekend, except I went out for groceries on Saturday, not Friday. But the first time I did leave the house in more than 48 hours was to go out for lunch today, which is where I wrote this post from. You gotta love Turkey's embrace of wireless EVERYWHERE.

My "opt out" this weekend, as I like to call it, stemmed more from the fact that since I stopped taking my anxiety meds late last week, my brain has been doing somersaults inside my skull. I can't seem to concentrate on anything these days, and I cry at the drop of a hat. On Saturday afternoon when Jeff and I were making mac and cheese, I put the macaroni into the pot, then covered it with water and put it on the stove to boil. Then I looked at it and thought, that doesn't look right. Immediately, I started to cry, but luckily Jeff just lovingly, quietly said, it's ok, we're just going to drain the macaroni out and boil the water first.

Oh dear.

But back to the topic at hand: disengaging from the expat life for a little while. It happens to all of us, at one time or another. You get tired. Tired of speaking Turkish, of dealing with a culture that, after two or 10 or 20 years, is still foreign to you in many ways. Some days you wake up and think, my god, if I have to deal with my nosy neighbor/the crowded pazar/the gym that refuses to open the windows/the wine that is taxed 200% at the grocery store/insert something that annoys you here ONE MORE TIME, I'm going to scream.

That's when a weekend spent indoors speaking nothing but English, watching only American television and eating peanut butter and marshmallows is good for you every once in a while. It grounds you, keeps you from getting lost in this foreign land where not everything is clear 100% of the time.

I pride myself on being pretty good at getting out there, learning and speaking Turkish, really getting involved with my community and my neighbors and embracing the way of life here. I moved here so that I could live a different lifestyle that wasn't available to me in the US, and I completely avail myself of it here, believe me.

But sometimes....oh sometimes....I wish that I could get an electrician who understood that when you tug at a cord plugged into an outlet, the outlet and all the wires attached to it SHOULD NOT pull away from the wall. Sometimes I think I will catch the next flight to Philly if one more person tells me that my cats' hair will get in my brain (which is why, of course, I must get rid of my kitties before having children). Sometimes I really do want to slap the woman who rams me in the ankles with her pazar arabasi (grocery cart) at the market because she wants to get to the broccoli ahead of me.

And those are the days that I go home, close and lock the door, put on my pj's and The Philadelphia Story, eat a chocolate chip cookie and pretend that I'm somewhere else.

How about you? How do you cope when you just can't handle the stresses of expat life?

Did overseas voting just get easier?

The US Congress -- sorry if you're not American, this post won't have much relevance to you -- recently passed a bill making it easier for American citizens overseas to cast ballots.

From an article in the New York Times:

Congress gave final approval to legislation requiring all states to provide overseas voters with the new option of getting ballots electronically and no later than 45 days before the election. This is so voters have adequate time to complete and mail them back to the United States

The bill, attached to the Department of Defense authorization legislation, was introduced after a survey last May showed that as many as one in four ballots cast by overseas voters went uncounted in last year’s presidential election.

Yowza! One out of four ballots cast by overseas voters went uncounted in the race between Obama and McCain?! Eeek! Makes me wonder if my vote even mattered....?

The bill is expected to take effect before 2010's federal elections, which will hopefully make it easier for Americans abroad to vote for their Senator.

Personally, I don't bother voting for local and state elections. I figure that even though my official home address is in Pennsylvania with my parents, since I don't pay state taxes, it doesn't really seem fair to me to vote in the small-town stuff. (Also, I don't really care. Sorry!)

Now, voting for the president, whoo boy, that's a must-do. No way I'm going to miss out on that. Hopefully next time my vote will have a better chance of being counted.

My American Stash

There are some things that I simply can't live without: my husband, my cats, fresh air, clean water and a roof over my head.

Then there are the things that I truly can't live without: chocolate chips, pure vanilla extract, brown sugar and black licorice.

Every expat has their own must-haves, the things they fill their suitcase with when they travel outside of Turkey. Some people I know fill their bags with bacon and sausages on their return from the UK, and other people bring boxes of instant oatmeal home from the US. Other people buy a certain brand of potato chips abroad and then cross their fingers they don't all get crushed in their return to Istanbul.

Me, I'm a simple gal. I have long gotten used to being without good Mexican food here in Turkey and Hershey's chocolate kisses. That doesn't mean that I don't miss those things, of course, just that other things are more important to me.

Take, for instance, brown sugar. No, not raw sugar, which is also brown but is vastly different from the brown sugar sold in the US, which is white sugar mixed with molasses (another thing you can't get here in Turkey).

I use brown sugar to make cobblers and chocolate chip cookies and certain cakes. There is, I don't think, no substitute for brown sugar. Turks don't use it in their baking, so it isn't sold here, which is why anyone coming to visit me must bring a bag of brown sugar with them. Since my mom was recently in town, my stash is doing pretty well right now.

 

Another thing I make sure to keep on hand is pure vanilla extract. You can find powdered vanilla flavoring in Turkey, which I think is just disgusting. It simply doesn't have the depth and concentration of flavor that pure extract does. (I can't be sure, but my guess is that the reason Turkey doesn't sell pure vanilla extract is because it is made by extracting vanilla beans in an alcoholic solution, usually vodka, which is frowned upon here.)

 

And of course, you can't forget chocolate chips. This is probably a silly thing to keep bringing back from the US. I mean, it's not like you can't find chocolate in Turkey; it's just that you can't find chocolate chips in Turkey. At least not the kind I grew up with. And if I'm going to make chocolate chip cookies with brown sugar and pure vanilla extract, then darn it, I'm going to make chocolate chip cookies with real chocolate chips!

Last weekend I had a friend in town and while we were shopping in Alsancak, we stumbled across a store that sold products from the US. You could tell, however, that the products were not meant for export because there was absolutely no foreign language writing on the packing. I suspect that the products in this store had been purchased from the American commissary associated with the NATO base here in Izmir, then sold to the shop at a mark up. (I've read that kind of thing happens often here.)

You wouldn't believe what they had in there: marshmallows, evaporated milk, Quaker oats, Oreos, pure vanilla extract, Duncan Hines cake mixes and canned frosting. I was in heaven for about 3 seconds before I discovered the prices of these things. YOWZA!

But I did walk away with something....

 

I know, I can hardly believe it myself. I mean, of all the things on offer, I bought a box of taco shells, which in all likelihood, aren't even made of real food? I can make the exact same thing from scratch with tortillas, homemade salsa and diced lettuce and tomato, but it wouldn't be the same! The white corn and water shells totally make this dish!

Was it worth the 14.50 TL I paid for the box? Hell no. Jeff and I would have been better off ordering kofte in.

Would I buy it again? Probably not for a loooong time, if ever.

What about you? What things do you stock up on abroad that you can't get here? Or have you found a place in Turkey to get your fix at reasonable prices or discovered any substitutes?

You Know You're a Cat Lover in Turkey When...

In honor of National Cat Day, which is technically October 29 in the US, but somehow I missed it -- but who cares, right? we can celebrate cats every day of the year! -- let's look at some of the ways to identify the cat lover in your life.

You know you're a cat lover in Turkey when...

You choose a different table than the one at which you want to sit at a restaurant because you see a sleeping kitty on one of the chairs.

You choose your entree at a restaurant based on how much of it you can give to the street cats circling your table.

No matter what you end up ordering, half of it goes to the street cats anyway.

You stop to love up any friendly kitties you meet on the street.

  

You promise to purchase all of your books at a specific shop simply because they're nice to cats and let them sleep on the books. You also do the same thing with coffee shops, restaurants, bars, hair salons, any place really.

 

You take pictures of random cats sleeping in parks, hanging out in trees or doing anything cute.

You have a habit of picking up wounded, sick or otherwise hurt animals on the street and taking them to vets to get better. This particular kitty was rehabilitated in our bathroom and then went on to a new home!

There is never any place for you to sit in your own home because the cats got to all the good seats first.

After having brought two street cats of your own into Turkey, you pick up two more on the street and bring them home forever.

Obama's already in Turkey, apparently....

Yesterday after work I stopped at Cevahir Mall to pick up a few things and noticed this in the Sisli/Mecidiyekoy metro stop:

It's an advertisement for Garanti Bank's new credit offer with a 1.19% interest rate. The picture of Obama, though, is what gets me.

It is, of course, a complete knock-off of this stencil drawing, which according to what I've read online, has made its way to Washington DC's art museums. Obama-inspired art is even being used to decorate people's homes.

But what I've never seen before is Obama's likeness used in an advertisement. What message, exactly, is Garanti Bank trying to convey here? Hope? Renewal? The promise of low, low interest rates?

Given that Garanti Bank is one of Turkey's best private banks -- and as a card-carrying customer I feel I can say that -- and its only one to cater to expatriates and foreigners, I can see how the ad might appeal to a certain kind of expat. Like, I don't know, an American Democrat? But in my view, using Obama's likeness in an advertisement to sell credit seems a cheap way to garner customers. It seems like a complete misappropriation of trust and loyalty.

What do you think? Have you ever seen Obama's face in an advertisement before, either in the US or elsewhere overseas?

Bending it like Beckham, or trying to, anyway

When I was a kid, maybe around 12, 13 or 14, I spent a miserable two years playing municipal soccer. I can't remember why I decided to play soccer. I was already taking dance classes at the time, had been for years, and loved them. It wasn't as if I needed something else to do. But like most teenage girls in the suburban central Pennsylvania township where I grew up, I got roped into playing municipal soccer because, you know, I wasn't good enough to play for the school team. Soccer, and field hockey of course, are almost like rite of passages for middle-class teenage girls in the United States. They are the only girl-friendly sports you can play and girls are, in fact, applauded for doing so.

But I turned out to be a terrible soccer player. I played a position called halfback – is that what it was called? – and basically I ran up and down the field for an hour and a half. I couldn't play defense on account of having a peculiar knack for getting smacked in the face with the ball. I swear, that happened to me three times before the coach realized I SUCKED AND SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ANYWHERE NEAR THE GOAL. Incidentally, this is the same reason I never played forward.

It took two years for me to finally quit soccer, at which point I happily returned to ballet and tap classes as my sole after-school diversion.

Despite my sorry experience with soccer, I am nevertheless delighted that Turkish women are beginning to play. It has always seemed odd to me that in a country full of futbol fanatics that girls didn't play. But now there's a new women's soccer league in town. Problem is, it hasn't been easy to get this thing up and running.

A recent article in the New York Times by Yigal Schleifer points out that though Turks are "soccer mad," "there is a deep ambivalence in this socially conservative, predominantly Muslim society about women playing the game."

The story goes on to quote Nurper Ozbar, the coach of Marmara Universitesispor, who says, "Football is seen as a man’s game in Turkey. We’ve had men come to watch our practices and yell at our players: ‘What are you doing here? You should be at home, cooking!’ It’s going to take time to change this.”

There are signs of hope though, particularly in a place called Sakarya outside Istanbul where some 3000 people attend games. It's a good start, but more work needs to be done to change people's perception of the effect playing soccer has on girls, the article points out.

Take, for example, Selin Odabas, who has been named to Turkey's national women's team. Selin's mother said she was afraid playing soccer would make her daughter a lesbian.

“In the beginning, we didn’t want our daughter to play,” Odabas [Selin's mother] said. “We were worried that it would affect her posture, her character, even her sexual orientation. We put her in volleyball, in track, but nothing could stop her.”

Right on, Selin.

New era

Obviously, Phoenix does not understand the significance of this historic occasion.

Today marks the beginning of a new era for the United States, and though we aren't in the country to celebrate with our compatriots, we have taken the opportunity to raise a glass of Turkish "champagne" to share in the festivities.

"'Bush Shoe' Gives Firm a Footing in the Market"

I just had to share this with you all this morning:

"When a pair of black leather oxfords hurled at President Bush in Baghdad produced a gasp heard around the world, a Turkish cobbler had a different reaction: They were his shoes."

Check out the whole story.