I absolutely love this city! And with extremely nice apartments in the city and nice beach side homes for around $60k, not to mention the amazing people I have been meeting, I will return to this wonderful place through out my life. However, there are some aspects of the city that just cannot be ignored. I would never say these things are deal breakers, but none the less, they must be respected or fall victim to the horrible consequences.
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Living in Izmir, Turkey, I spend my free time trying to tame the local language. I would take classes, but the cost and the incompatibility with my work schedule precludes than plan. So I’ve followed the course set in Teach Yourself Turkish, by David Pollard. I find it to be easy to follow and effective. Only rarely has the knowledge I’ve procured turned out to be some anachronistic Ottoman slang, most of the time it is relevant, contemporary Turkish. I also use flashcards extensively, it’s all about verbs and nouns, baby: they are the building blocks of the sentence. You may be just throwing out words with the hope that the recipient is intelligent enough to piece together your gibberish and understand you, but usually, an extensive vocabulary gets the job done. Anyways, as any native speaker of English who is abroad will tell you, people looove to speak English to you. Anything from the helpful waiter to the obnoxious solicitor hawking his wares, I mean really, I either need a spatula or I don’t, you saying ‘spatula for you’ isn’t going to push me into an impulse-buy. At first I was annoyed; how am I to learn Turkish when everyone is desperate to practice there English with me? I’ve come to accept some facts: Continue reading Türkçe Pratik Yapmalıyım A great question to ask somebody is “when were you most scared?” I find it can be a very revealing story and always interesting. I have heard stories having to do with being underwater for way to long, watching a loved one receive a serious injury, high speed collisions, falls from tall places, animal attacks, waking up from bad dreams, and many more. Interestingly many have to do with near death situations. We are all terrified to die it seems and quite rightly so when we have such a lovely world around us. I will have to elaborate more on my theory on death in a later entry but now is no time for philosophy. Here is the time when I was most scared. In Turkey, a traditional method for remembering the recently deceased, which I really love, is that of the mourning-donut (Lokma in Turkish). When a beloved family member dies, it is customary for the surviving clan to set up a booth/tent on the sidewalk and give away free donuts for a few hours. Meet Charles Perth Pearson. My history with Charles Pearson began in high school Spanish class. I was a lanky and awkward sophomore and he was a junior with a godfather like grip on the school. At this point in my life I was still trying to identify myself as a person and a . . . → Read More: Bienvenido Charles Perth Pearson! In the last few years it has become very popular to deep fry a turkey in the United States or at least in southern California. I suppose this is due to the fact that we are all getting lazier and claim to be so busy that we do not have the time to cook such splendid feasts anymore like the ones we have been having with Kurt and Jamie the last few years. (Thank you both for the splendid memories.) So my Dad is a pretty good cook, I will admit that he can make a killer roast and a spectacular gravy. And for an English man these are two very important things considering a roast is a national staple food, and gravy is mandatory to hide the fact that the English haven’t used salt since world war II. One Thanksgiving, with the help of my good friend Pat, we attempted to deep fry a turkey and the following picture I find to be very revealing of how it went. The time had come once again to pack up my bicycle and head off into the campo (fields) of the state of Buenos Aires to seek victory and fame in my beloved sport of cycling. The race was early on Sunday so I needed to take a 3 hour bus on Saturday to find a hotel, assemble the bike, prepare, and beat every Argentine I could possibly find in front of me, on the track of course. Heres how it went down. There is a phenomenon here in Buenos Aires that I have alluded to in a previous post but I feel that it deserves a little more attention now that I have become a surfing junkie on the streets of BsAs. A lot of people here in BsAs think that I am a little crazy for riding a $2000 bicycle around the streets of a town with roads the width of our highways back home, all one way, intersected with small veins of cobblestone streets, and filled with thousands of taxis and hissing buses that will send a shiver down the spine of the bravest individual when they breath down your back waiting to pick up their constituents and spit you out along the way. Although I save on transportation costs (buses and the subte cost $0.30 and taxis are no more than $5 for a half hour ride), transportation time, and I get some exercise, here is the main reason I love riding around here. Something I learned traveling around Europe and will never forget is the fact that it is Never a good idea to stay up all night to avoid staying in a hotel or catching some early morning event like a train or a race. Well this story is a tale of a group of travelers about to leave Sweden on a 6am train and have decided to stay up all night to avoid the ludicrous exchange rate of the Swedish Kroner. While traveling around Europe, our group coined the term ‘dupe’ which is basically to be tricked. Dupes happen all the time especially in a foreign country where you do not speak the language. Thus far I have been rather lucky and I have only been duped twice. Here they are… |
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