The good and interesting, the bad & the ugly

It has been a while since I last updated the blog, in layman’s terms it’s called being lazy and I am in a country that is newsworthy…. So in ‘ pulling my shit together’ I have broken down the article in 3 different formats i.e. the good and interesting (i.e. anything not offending), the bad & the ugly!

The Good…

…I and a couple of friends have been discovering little heavens in this amazing place, There is a nice restaurant in yildiz park (between Besiktas & Ortakoy) called Dahill…you can go there and get the best service I’ve had ever since I arrived in turkey 5 months ago, a great view of the bridge that connects the Asian side and the European side of the city while having a great a buffet…we had a bit of drama getting there though – a taxi driver dropped us in the middle of nowhere and we walked one hour uphill before finding the place with empty stomachs and when we did….boy did we eat :) !!!

After that me and an Australian colleague went to Istanbul modern art gallery in Topane…not for the art though…they have a restaurant that has an amazing view of the bosphorus aswell (but this time our view was distorted by huge cruise ships) and but we enjoyed our white wine anyway…
Then we headed on to a suburb called Cihangir (a trendy/cool place where all starts hang out…has nice cafe’s) for a Cay…it kind reminded me of Melville in Johannesburg.
This past Friday I was on a boat party along the bosphors, this city is nice at night – what a spectacular view…in our admiration I reminded a flat-mate that the night hides all the dirt & chaos that you’d see during the day though…I think I made that comment after my 3rd glass of red wine – don’t remember the brand but it was okay enough to have had a third glass…well actually I had no choice unless I wanted to jump ship and swim to a nearby bottle store – which cannot happen as I cannot swim so I enjoyed the glass of wine and it was not bad :) .

I must say when I got here during winter - I was longing for summer, but now that it’s here OMG…and someone told me that it’s going to get hotter! I get woken up by heat in the morning, when the sun comes up its already blazing its rays into the window and balcony sliding door of the room so I have no other choice but to wake up…otherwise I’ll be fried for breakfast because our room at that time is already getting hotter like a stove increasing heat on an omelet. I was joking with someone Turkish that I bet during the ottoman empire people used to walk naked because they had no air-conditions…and this is humid heat u can’t run away from it unlike dry heat which you can be safe from if inside a house or under a tree. I was telling family back home that I am getting darker by the day due to the heat – I look like I cook copper coins for some doggy government somewhere in the world….then i showed a friend in Switzerland my recent pic and she said I look sun-baked.

…been singing that I need to buy a hat, and will sing that song until thy kingdom come I suppose…

….and the interesting part…

I got the opportunity to be in Antalya…a really nice place with a stone beach (which was nice because you don’t get the irritating sand on your feet when you get off the beach)… during my stay there I got to interact with a couple of people and where is what transpired … the conversation is in a dialogue format - the names have been modified to protect the rights of the individuals..lol :

The 1st conversation
Honey: …so where are you from?
Me: South Africa
Honey: which country are you from?
Me: …thinking she did hear me the first time…; ‘South Africa’!
Honey: ohh…
Me: yes…a country at the end of the African continent

The 2nd conversation
Dick: which country do you come from…?
Me: South Africa
Dick: ok…we have like 5000 Nigerians at our University, I hear you have many languages. Do you all understand each other?
Me: In Nigeria maybe not sure, in South Africa we only have 11 official ones and are broken down into categories which means some are dialects of others.
Dick: ok…but English is what you use to understand each other, right
Me: Where in Nigeria or South Africa? …Nigeria is West Africa and South Africa is very south, but yes for both countries English is a medium of instruction and very well understood but I cannot tell you what Nigerians do as I am atleast 8hrs by flight away from them.

The 3rd conversation
Hairy: hi…where are you from
Me: from South Africa or rather the republic of South Africa
Hairy: no I mean which country do you come from….
Me: there is the region Southern Africa and there is a country called South Africa…google it!

The Bad

It was a nice summer day and therefore headed to this place called Limonlubahce (lemon garden) which was impressive as it felt like a little lemon backyard…they even had some tortoise and cats on the premises…it really looked like someone’s garden and was nice for a Sunday morning with the Herald tribune & Hurriyet international newspapers…and while reading I came across an article called ‘ deep abyss of discrimination in turkey – gender discrimination still exists today’…thinking to myself …well that’s nothing new – I was stunned a bit by the findings though:
74% - being a housewife is as satisfactory as working and earning money
59% - men are better political leaders than women in general
71% - The man should be the leader of the family in our society
67% - some wives may deserve to get beaten by their husbands
89% - It is acceptable that men can have more than one wife …where I come from this is legal & my current president is a best case practice - was wondering if I should say that out loud!
58% It is a sin for a women to walk at seaside or on the beach with a swimming suit…I remember being in Egypt at a resort – I was chilling out at the swimming and a women dived in fully dressed in black, my jaw dropped with horror & that was my first cultural experience about the dress codes of the moslim world.
84% It would be right for women to ask for approval of their husbands to work at a job
62% A muslim woman should cover her head outside of the house
78% It is right to stone an adulteress to death…I disagree with this, let he/she who throws the first stone be pure and not a sinner and besides who has a right to take another person’s life in this world?

The study was conducted by interviewing 1,715 people both men & women in 34 cities in turkey….as you can see the interesting part is gender equality or gender inequality…I must admit though that the number of people is too small to have reached this conclusion as Istanbul alone has about 15 million people…

The ugly

A while ago when taking a walk from a café along the bosphorus, we passed with horror as some 12 year old kid got up from a picnic sitting with family – marched to a woman wearing a vail (I assume it was his mother as she was the elder one amongst the other 2 ladies) and started punching and kicking her…OMG I had never seen something like that…a kid beating his mother. Anyway another boy intervened to protect I assume and got a beating himself then one of the ladies calmed him down by a slap and a thorough injection of her nails into his arm skin…he calmed down like an electrical device losing battery power…. I was stunned…loss of words – if he was home he would have gotten a beating of his life by some male authority passing by…even the police would have spanked the shit out him. I still believe in corporal punishment – these kids of today don’t have manners and respect & a good hiding always brings a child back to the straight line…some of us didn’t turn out so bad due to a good hiding now & again!

Let me know how you softies feel about corporal punishment, would love to hear how i should negotiate and have a round-table with children isntead of spanking them...