Some Eurovision excitement

Turkey is sending the Ankara rap/rock group Manga to Oslo for this year's Eurovision. No word yet on what the song will be, but it could be something like this:



Or this:



Yawn. It will probably be better than Hadise last year, but I doubt it will place as high.

Reviving the blog

Well, not the art of blogging in general, even though I think it's much more interesting than Twittering. I'm just talking about reviving this blog, albeit in a new form.

I'm no longer living in Turkey, so no travelogues or tales of expat culture shock. Instead, I'll be posting about Turkish arts and culture from time to time. Turkey has an incredible richness and variety of music, so I might write about anything from rap to arabesk to Turkish (or Kurdish, or Armenian) folk music to rock to, I don't know, cheesy Eurovision entries. Other probable topics include architecture, film, literature, and politics.

Watch this space....

Yes, another YouTube post.

This is Mor ve Ötesi, a Turkish rock band who are apparently going to be Turkey's Eurovision entry this year. If so, I completely approve, with the caveat that Hepsi would have been hilarious.

Why I don't take minibuses

For those of you who have never seen a minibus, it's kind of like a full-size van but slightly bigger and sitting much higher on its wheels. It holds about twelve people sitting but probably around 25 when full to capacity. They drive really slowly and pick up passengers from anywhere along their route, not just designated stops -- a major reason why Istanbul traffic gets so snarled.

Anyway, as I was waiting for the (regular) bus this evening, I noticed a classic example of Driverus minibusus tooling along the highway. He was smoking, talking on his cellphone, AND reading the back of what looked like a bag of Haribo gummy bears. (Or maybe they were a look-alike product of the thriving Turkish gummy industry -- Paul's the expert on that.) But no worries -- he did have most of one elbow on the steering wheel, and only two other minibuses had to slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending him.

Verb of the day

One of the billboards along my bus route home made my day. In Turkish, it said:

Siz hala Toyotalilastiramadiklarimizdan misiniz?

It is probably best translated as follows:

Are you still one-of-those-whom-we-have-been-unable-to-make-into-Toyota-owners?

Toyota adapted this delightful and mellifluous verb from an example made famous by Turkish language textbooks: Are you one-of-those-whom-we-have-been-unable-to-Europeanize?

Luckily for me and my sanity, Turks almost never break out with such fearsome examples of agglutinization.

Venting vicariously through Keith Olbermann

Turkish street food

I've been wanting to write a long post about Istanbul's many delicious (and a few not-so-delicious) street foods. Under this category I would also include the small shops where the food is only for take-out, like the wonderful variation on fried dough dipped in honey and sometimes sprinkled with pistachio dust or, my current favorite, kir pidesi. Kir pidesi is a flat, thin, foot-long rectangle of bread with warm but unmelted white cheese and bits of scallion inside. ("White cheese" is the literal translation of the Turkish -- it tastes similar to feta but a little less crumbly and not as salty.) I'm not a good cook, but I'm going to have to try to make kir pidesi when we come back to the U.S.

More on street food soon!

A happy Istanbul moment

Yesterday I saw a dolphin! I was taking the ferry from the Asian side to the European side, watching the waves and enjoying the strangely warm weather, when suddenly a dolphin popped up and went right back down again. The boat was unusually empty, with only three other people sitting on the right side (starboard, if you want to be all nautical about it), and I'm pretty sure I was the only person who saw it. It wasn't the only time I've seen dolphins in the Bosphorus, but the other two times were up north near the Black Sea, while this was at the opposite end. It made my day.

Sinan (the cat, not the architect)

For those who haven't seen our cat in action, this short video is a good introduction.

In case the Haghia Sophia, Blue Mosque, and Topkapi Palace aren't enough...

Istanbul is also home to what has to be the world's most beautiful Starbucks:



It even has a drive-through!