The Time Approaches

I now have less than one week left in Turkey before I head over to East Asia, and there is a lot going on – a lot of last minute shopping, a lot of goodbye dinners (most of my friends here are leaving at various points during the week), a lot of a lot.

As I’ve made very clear, I’m quite excited to be going back to China; however, things seem to happening one after the other. I have to do some planning before I head over there that I’ve hardly started as well as an application to take part in a company sponsored forum in Germany in October. This is, of course, on top of my work which so ruthlessly begins every morning at 7:15, only to end at 5:15. I also need to hunt down some films by my favorite director (Ferzan Õzpetek) who is Turkish-Italian before I leave.

One thing I will definitely miss as I venture 5 time zones further east is the musical taste here in Turkey. It’s almost as if the country is running on my iTunes… almost. You walk down the street and you hear some Alexandra Stan, or some “Englishman in New York.” I have actually discovered a whole handful of music while I’ve been here that I simply must get my hands on as soon as possible. Despite the excellent taste in music selection that seems to be pretty pervasive here, the placement of this music is not generally the best – sometime to quite hilarious results. By far the most shocking occurred when grocery shopping in a store that is attached to a neighborhood mosque. While selecting which of the thousands of similar looking cheeses to select, I hear, of all songs, “S&M” come on which could very well be one of the filthiest songs generated in recent memory. My fellow shoppers, clearly incapable of speaking English (like the vast majority of the population here), just carried on with the selection of their vegetables as if they were listening to a Beethoven piano concerto, completely oblivious of the North American women belting out line after line about “sex in the air” and how they “love the smell of it.” It was a classy moment. I think my jaw hung wide open for a good 30 seconds before I was able to regain my composure just enough to glance around for awkward facial expressions that would indicate some degree of comprehension among the others – there was, of course, none.

In more recent news, I had an excellent day of Shopping with friends this past weekend that took me for the first time to the Egyptian Bazaar where spices abound and make me wish that I had something too do with incredibly discounted saffron and vanilla bean. It also really makes me wonder what they put in the confection “Turkish Viagra” or “the sultans’ aphrodisiacs.”

Lastly, my concern: the Turkish Lira. Thanks to a vide variety of recent occurrences, the currency that was being exchanged for a bit under 1.5 to the US dollar when I arrived is now valued at around 1.72 (or at least it was at some point yesterday). As I am, of course, being paid in Lira, that wonderful little turn of events is going to really help me out when I have to exchange to Chinese RMB, Hong Kong Dollars, and Taiwanese Dollars very soon. Hopefully it will bounce back a bit.