excuses excuses

A lot of things have happened. I haven't updated in a while, and you may have been thinking that I proven to be one more person who starts a blog, and then abandons it when the novelty wears off, contributing to the vast net-fill of junked sites. Well, no! I've just been a little busy that's all.

1. My boyfriend came to visit and we trawled about town and took some day trips to nearby lakes, mountains, and a monastery carved into a mountain. We became minor celebrities wherever we went. See I can pass for a Turk (Turks come from various ethnic stocks due to the historical diversity of the region and the empires; some look Eastern European, some look Asiatic, some look Middle-Eastern), but he cannot. Everywhere we went children stared- actually everyone stared. After the initial shock passed, we were treated to a barrage of questions, smiles and general astonishment at our existence. I have to say I felt a little bit like there wasn't room in this town for the both of us. Now he's gone I'm the most interesting foreigner again. Yeah.

2. I went to see a Macedonian modern dance performance. It's part of a "theatre" festival hosting groups from various bordering countries. No details of the different performances are offered in the program; you just turn up and hope for the best. Seems like I got lucky. These Macedonians weren't actors but proper dancers. The production featured well-chosen costumes, fresh micro-beat and clicky music, and the artful use of a camera to project an aerial view of the dancers behind them. It was refreshing to have some non-Turkish input. Diversity is what I miss most about London. It's nice here but it's something of a mono-cultural deal.

3. I went to my friend's house and she cooked enough food for five people. We had borek (feta cheese pastries), a yogurt with carrot and garlic dip, green beans with olive oil and rice, orange cake, semolina pudding, apple-filled cookies, and glass after glass of tea. The Turks are some of the most hospitable people I've met. If you have a way in, ie. you know one person, all of their friends are instantly your friends, and they kiss you on the cheek (if you are of the same sex) and treat you like an old pal the first time they meet you. There are no separate words for colleague, classmate, flatmate- all the people you associate with who are not in a position of authority or dependence to you, are called friends. And friends get looked after. I have never seen anyone eat or drink anything, even gum, without offering it to the people around them. Even a candy bar will be broken into pieces and shared among five people if need be. The important thing is that everyone is included. My students are all so nice to each other- there is little of the cliquiness of American high school and college culture here. There aren't loads of competing "types;" there is just one perceived type: Turkish.

4. I accidently erased all the music off my I-Pod this evening. And I've realized first-hand what the A in apple really stands for. If you don't have an I-Pod the following is probably a ticket to the depths of dullness, but I just gotta complain about this or I won't be able to go to sleep for the knot of regret in my stomach, which has lately replaced the numbness of denial. See, I opened up I-Tunes and it presented me with an option to automatically update my I-Pod with my I-Tunes library. Without thinking too much about it, it sounded like a good idea, so I said ok. Then, without further warning, it erased everything that was on my I-Pod that wasn't in my library- like 90% of my music. Design flaw you might think. But I'm pretty sure it's a deliberate design trap. People like me, who have (had) perfected their I-Pod, filled it up with all their favorite music, spent countless hours creating playlists and labeling and ordering all the tracks, make Apple no further profit. But poor suckers like me who so easily and without a warning message lose all their music have to start over again. I guess Apple is hoping I will replace my lost music at the I-Tunes music store. Well they can fuck off. And another thing. I have done a little research and found that the newest version of I-Tunes doesn't allow for the automatic update option to be switched off. This ensures two things - that you can't use third-party software like I-pod Rip to get music off your I-Pod and onto a computer where you can share it, and that you risk wiping your I-pod every time you plug it into a computer that doesn't have all the music on it that you have on your I-pod. Well, luckily out of sheer laziness I never updated to version 7, and I never will. So in making one error, I became aware of a second more grave error in time to avoid it. I guess the moral of the story is don't fool around with stuff if you don't actually know what you're doing. But I always operate like that, and even though it leads me to do careless things sometimes, it still feels like a good approach for some reason. I like fooling around with stuff.

5. My computer knows it's in Turkey. Ok, it's probably more accurate to say that some web sites, like google and blogger, know when I open them from Turkey. But I get pleasure from personifying my computer. It makes me feel almost as it there's more than one American in this town. Actually my computer seems more British. Probably because I bought her at PC World. Right. Well I better go to bed. But I just want to add that although blogger knows that I am in Turkey, it doesn't know that I don't speak Turkish very well, so it's just a big pain in the ass when I want to update my blog and everything is in Turkish. Get it right blogger. I'm on my guard with all you blood-sucking, money-grubbing, music-eating companies from now on.

There. That ought to placate the yahbiquette-starved masses for a while.