The D40 finally arrived yesterday, and it’s totally sweet, but I’m still a little scared of it. It has 7000 buttons and switches, and they all have multiple functions that I’ll have to get used to. We went out last night so I could photograph some neighbourhoods in the dark— Antalya has pretty lights and a lot of bright colours and it all looks especially nice after the sun goes down. I don’t have anything spectacular yet, just the above shot. Right now I’m working with a ratio of about 200 shots per 1 keeper. That’s the magic of digital, you can play around all you want and not feel like you’re wasting film.

Bear with me, this is the first camera I’ve ever owned that had a learning curve.

Apropos of nothing: Kexi has a great set of Istanbul photos you should probably have a look at. If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s worth it to come to Turkey on vacation, these shots should convince you.

In other news, after the longest extended spring ever (someone used the term “Junuary”), we’ve finally burst through into summer. The temperature outside is 40° today, and as you know this is just the beginning. Luckily, this year we finally invested in that luxury of luxuries— an air-conditioner! It’s an amazing device, I don’t know how we survived all those summers without it. I’m dreading next month’s electric bill, but at the moment I’m relaxing in a 25° room and trying not to worry about expenses too much.

We went to the bank yesterday, and as we were sitting around waiting for our number to be called, I was reminded of a cultural difference I often notice but fail to report: the Turkish inclination to flash money. Now, perhaps it’s not so strange to see people holding money in a bank, but in most banks in the United States and Europe, people would keep their money concealed until they got up to the counter. In Turkey, if you look around the bank waiting area you notice that most people have their money out where everyone can see it. Check this guy, for instance— even though he has an envelope in his hand, he has taken the money out of it, and as you can see, it’s a stack of hundreds about half an inch thick. If I measure, for example, the first hundred pages of a book, it’s about the same thickness as that stack. So that’s, what, $10,000? I saw him counting the money at one point, and can confirm it’s not a stack of singles with a hundred on top.

I guess in the bank itself, my Western panic about “don’t give people a temptation to mug you” is a bit silly, since there are two heavily armed guards at the bank door and no one would be stupid enough to try mugging someone. Still, I don’t feel comfortable displaying my cash. I was raised to think that finances are a very private thing, and that you should guard any information, including how much money you have in your pocket, from prying eyes.

Turks seem proud of how much they have— I have Turkish friends who have absolutely no problem telling strangers how much they make every month and how much is in their bank account at any given moment, even if it’s not a lot. And if they come into some unexpected money, they announce it as they would the birth of a child, and everyone celebrates the good fortune together.

Me, if I won some money or had some other windfall, I wouldn’t tell anyone outside my household. Aside from the fact that I don’t feel it’s anyone’s business how much money I have, I have a healthy dose of cynicism in me— I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of people coming out of the woodwork, and in my experience the only way to avoid it is not to let people know when you’re unexpectedly flush. Most of the Turks I know would be happy to tell everyone how much they won, and give a loan to whomever asked for one. They’re so much nicer than I am.

Sundown at the bazaar is a strange time. It’s impractical for most of the vendors to try to carry on after dark, so when the sun starts to disappear behind the mountains, that’s the home stretch. For the food vendors especially, they don’t want to have to take home a load of produce that may not be in salable condition the next day. So in an effort to get rid of it, they drop their prices to rock bottom. Of course, everyone knows this is how it works, so people wait until sundown to come out and do their food shopping.

That last bazaar rush of the day is mayhem, and for an introvert like me, it’s also hellish. I’ll pay the extra ten pennies per kilo for onions in order not to have to deal with mobs of shouting people, pushing and shoving and getting in each other’s way. I’m happy to go late morning or early afternoon, and get the choice of the produce without having to fight other people for the best of what’s left.

At closing, some vendors find they haven’t sold all their stock, but financially it’s not worth it for them to lug it all back home. So they leave it on the sidewalk— huge piles of tomatoes, oranges, and whatever else didn’t sell. You’d think there’d be a mad rush for all this free stuff, but no. It’s a kind of unspoken rule that the leftover food on the sidewalk, still in perfect condition, is for those who can’t afford to pay. Well into the night, the poorest families and the homeless rummage through the piles of vegetables and fruits, filling huge bags until they have what they need for the week. No one stops them or bothers them. They come in quietly, they leave quietly, and by morning all the food is gone.

I didn’t photograph the night shoppers, though it would have been easy enough; I think if you’re willing to swallow your pride and accept free food on the sidewalk to feed your family, then I’ll give you the dignity of not being cheap blog fodder. We all do what we need to do to take care of our own. Nothing wrong with that.

Dear Turkish government:

I’m not sure exactly what point you’re trying to make with the intermittent blocking of whatever web sites you’ve chosen to block this week, but stop it. Just stop it, really, it’s silly. It’s annoying having to fire up the proxy every time you can’t handle a little criticism and decide to throw all your toys out of the sandbox. Come on, nobody respects a crybaby— suck it up and show them that you’re better than that. Sticks and stones. Blocking entire web sites when someone says something you don’t like is the internet equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting, “LA LA LA NO ONE EVER SAYS ANYTHING NEGATIVE ABOUT US LA LA LA.” You see how that doesn’t really work?

No, I guess you don’t. But I think you’re going to have to learn soon, if you want to play with the big boys over there on the left-hand side of the map.

I see a lot of weird things at the bazaar that I take photos of, but they don’t really fall into the same category as the funny/weird t-shirts, so they never end up here. Anyway, a friend of mine pointed out that you might like to see some of the behind-the-scenes oddities as well, so I’m going to make more of an effort to share.

Yeah, it’s a three-wheeled, single-occupant truckette. It’s street-legal and everything— not that anyone pays attention to things like street legality here.

Just so we’re all on the same page about this competition:

The Turks are obsessed with rose gardening, and they’re good at it. A friend told me yesterday that it makes sense they would choose roses because there’s a lot of history there, that roses were first cultivated in the area that is now Turkey. I can’t seem to find anything online that confirms or denies this (though admittedly I didn’t spend much time looking). Can anyone fill us in?

In any case, I went out and took some photos of local roses a couple of days ago (small flickr set here), and it’s a good thing I did it when I did— last night we had the mother of all hail storms. It was the first time in four years of living here that I’d ever experienced hail in this country, and it was pretty violent. The streets were flowing with ice pellets. I’m afraid if I go down and look at the roses today, it’s going to be a sad sight.

Considering it’s almost May, we’re having weather more consistent with early March. After having packed away the duvet and the winter clothes a couple of weeks ago, I had to dig it all back out yesterday so that we wouldn’t freeze, and I had to bring the plants inside to protect them. I’m not particularly a global warming conspirator, but something is certainly going on, whether it be global warming, or a strange series of coincidences, or, from the looks of it, a coming ice age.

I saw this sign at the Shakespeare Bistro today:

What, the Los Angeles Kings? I think it’s unlikely they’ll be eating in Antalya anytime soon. But it’s good to know my meal would meet their standards.

Seriously though, this particular sign struck me as odd, because although Shakespeare Bistro is a Turkish company, they always go out of their way to print everything in English as well, and their English signage is usually perfectly worded. It’s rare to see them blunder, but it’s cute when they do.

Incidentally, I had a wonderful meal at the Shakespeare this afternoon, and the service was impeccable. Highly recommended if you’re ever in this neck of the woods and you’re having a day where you fancy something other than Turkish food.

In English-speaking countries, and throughout many parts of Europe, there is a simple way to distinguish left from right on products that require it— L means left, R means right. Simple.

But in Turkey, the word for left is sol and the word for right is sağ. S and S. So I always wondered how they marked it when necessary.

Well, today I learned one way they do it (though perhaps not the only way). I purchased a new bottle of contact lens cleaning solution, and it was one of those that has the free lens case inside. My old lens case says L and R on the caps. The new one, however, just has different coloured caps and has nothing printed on either one. Ah.

Although it seems like it would be a great idea to erase the international problem altogether and use colour-coding instead, I’m not sure how well it works in practice. For one thing, you have to remember which colour you decided was left and which one right. That might be easy enough if you use the case everyday, but if you sometimes wear your glasses several days in a row, it would be pretty easy to forget which lens cap was which. I’d probably resort to a sharpie marker and mark one of the caps with an L. I guess Turks would have to write the entire word sol, unless they have some other clever way of indicating it.

The other issue is, whatever system you choose for remembering only works if you’re the only one who needs to understand it. What if you’re a Turkish company shipping out a self-assembly product for a Turkish market, and it’s important that every end user can easily identify the left parts from the right parts? How do you mark those? You can’t just expect everyone to know that the one with the blue sticker on it is the left one. My guess would be you’d just have to mark them with the full words, providing there’s enough room to do that.

Can any of my Turkish readers shed some light on this, or does anyone else come from a place where the words for “left” and “right” share the same initial letter?