Urban Oasis: Istanbul's Anadolu Kavagi

When Cagatay's grandfather came to visit about a month ago, his sister suggested that we take a mid-week afternoon excursion to Anadolu Kavagi, a little fishing village located on the Asian side of the Bosporus. It's pretty far north on the coast and has (so far) escaped the merciless urbanization that Istanbul has undergone. I've heard that Anadolu Kavagi can be quite crowded on the weekends, but on a late Thursday afternoon, it was nearly empty and gloriously serene.

There's not all that much to do but sit at one of the waterfront restaurants and eat and drink. So that's what we did. At one point, we took a stroll around town, but since "town" is only about three streets, it didn't take us long.

Turks generally enjoy sitting around the table, making dinners a lengthy process. We probably arrived there at 4:30pm and stayed until it was dark. This meant, of course, that we got to see the sunset, a rare treat in Istanbul. Usually, day just passes colorlessly into night here -- there's almost never the red/pink/orange/purple sky you see at home, and I'm not sure why that is. The same was true in Anadolu Kavagi and the sunset wasn't particularly colorful, but the light was such a strong orange in the latest part of the afternoon, shimmering off the the ferry building. It was just so tranquil, and I imagine this day will remain as one of my favorite memories of here.

Turkish art at Sakip Sabanci Museum

Some weeks ago, Cagatay and I headed to the Sakip Sabanci Museum on the coast of the Bosporus to catch the last day of an exhibit of Dutch Golden Age paintings from the Rijksmuseum (because we didn't see enough when we were in Amsterdam, ha). But since that's irrelevant now that the exhibit's over, I thought I'd talk about the grounds and two permanent exhibitions there.

The museum, formerly a residence, is in a gorgeous location, a bit up on a hill and overlooking the water. The view actually reminds me of Lake Como, which is a place I have never associated with Istanbul, though it's perhaps because the house was designed by an Italian architect, in 1925. It was built for an Egyptian family but acquired in 1951 by Turkish businessman Haci Omer Sabanci, and it eventually passed to his son, Sakip. (The family-owned Sabanci Holding is one of the largest companies in Turkey.)

Sakip Sabanci was apparently a large collector of Korans, illuminated manuscripts and calligraphic panels, which make up the appopriately titled Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection, a permanent exhibition housed in the mansion. We saw this section last, and I'd thought it would be really boring, but I was actually quite impressed, both by the works themselves and the presentation. Before you go into that section of the museum, you first pick up an iPad, and there were probably about 10 different panels to click on. Some of them featured these funny little animated scenes using the illuminations; others featured the books themselves, that you could scroll through, and it was really cool to be able to see the real book in front of you, behind the glass, while flipping through it on the screen. I've been really impressed lately with the way museums have been integrating technology with their exhibitions, reminding me of the amazing Dreams of Nature: Symbolism from Van Gogh to Kandinsky exhibit we saw at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Before the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection, we'd gone through the museum's exhibition/collection on Turkish painting, While a Country is Changing: Turkish Painting from the Ottoman Reformation to the Republic. I don't think of Turkey as being particular Western -- it's really it's own unique place, a mash-up of East and West, with (currently) strong religious tendencies -- and I was so surprised to see of a history such obviously Western paintings from Turkish artists. Even more interesting, according to one of the information panels, the museum sees it as a continuation of the calligraphy collection, "reflecting the transformation of visual representation in Turkish art, changing concepts of art and the artist, and the process of modernization between the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republic periods."

From left to right: Hikmet Onat's Landscape with Bridge (1922) and Osman Hamdi Bey's Kokona Despina (1906) 

The collection starts with works from the mid-1800s, which was when Western literary forms were introduced to Turkey and Turkish painting started to reflect Western styles. According to the panels, artists gave up Ottoman miniature painting and started working on canvas, painting landscapes and still lifes. They also began to paint portraits of real people, whereas before, they could only paint the sultans. When Turkish artists went abroad, they -- gasp! -- also learned about painting nudes, which was forbidden in Turkey. (The exhibit has a whole wall devoted to this genre.) Many of the paintings were undated, but I'd say the exhibit ran through about the 1930s (though one of Fikret Mualla's paintings was from 1957).

From left to right: Nazmi Ziya Guran's Taksim Square (1935), close-up from Guran's Backgammon Players, and Cevat Dereli's Mevlevi Dervishes

Two paintings from Fikret Mualla: Moda and Street -- Blue 

I didn't realize it at the time but I'd apparently managed to soak in a lot of this information; we went to Istanbul Modern yesterday and saw their (much larger) exhibit New Works, New Horizons, presenting "the evolution of modern and contemporary Turkish art from its earliest stage to the present day." It all looked pretty familiar, and I even managed to recognize some of the artists by their style.

Urban transportation: Istanbul's Metrobus

There were many reasons why I quit my job, but one of them was that it was taking me more than an hour each way to get to and from work. From our apartment, we'd walk about 20 minutes to the metro, which I'd take two stops, then I'd get on the Metrobus for about 35 minutes, and then walk for another 5 minutes or so.

Ah, the Metrobus. Inaugurated in 2007, it runs on the European side, in its own dedicated lane in the middle of a highway. It's a great concept. And at some point in the spring, the IETT started running a TV ad on the Metrobus to remind everyone how great it is:

Doesn't that guy look happy? (If you didn't watch the video, you need to click on it, really.) And in the morning, it wasn't so bad. I got on at the first stop, so I almost always had a seat, and it really required only the slightest bit of aggression. In the evenings, though, it was hell on wheels...which is why a lot of people took exception to the ad. Some clever folks even spoofed it, and unfortunately for all of us who live here and have to ride the Metrobus, it's not so far off the mark:

Working in Turkey

I've been out of my Monday-Friday (+Sunday!) job for almost two months now, but it's probably never a good time to blog about your workplace, past or present. So I'll just say this for specifics: I worked as a copy editor for about six months at the English-language version of a conservative, pro-government Turkish newspaper. If you're here in Istanbul, you probably know which paper I mean.

When I first got the job, I found the workplace to be like Mars -- that is to say, an alien world. First off, Turkey has a six-day work week (45 hours), which is unfortunate since studies have shown that an employee's productivity peaks at 40 hours and minimum wage here is a mere TL 700 (which I've also heard cited as the average wage). For most Turks, that sixth day would be Saturday (at the paper, however, we had Saturday off and worked most Sundays). And so, funny enough, when Turks want to take time off, they have to count the Saturday -- Cagatay, for example, doesn't actually work on Saturdays, but he still has to count it in vacation time.

One of the other things that shocked me was that employers pick your bank. The company is affliated with a bank, through whom you'll get your paycheck; if your previous employer used a different bank, when you get a new job you'll have to switch. The company also provides lunch -- at smaller companies, you get a lunch card that you can then go out and use at restaurants, fast-food joints and even the grocery store. Our company was quite large, so we ate downstairs in a cafeteria -- though I heard the cafeteria shuts down during Ramadan, and during that month (July-August this year), the foreigners eat out.

I can't say though that every workplace shuts down its cafeteria -- as I said above, our company was very conservative, which in this context means religious. I worked with expats and Turks on the English-language newspaper, and we were all in the same area, and things always seemed quite normal and relaxed. I never noticed a division in the sexes, but then at lunch, all of the men would sit together on one side of the room while all the women sat together on the other. EVERY SINGLE DAY. (Fittingly, the expats usually sat together in the middle.) The gyms were also segregated. The building had two gyms, which three groups shared -- the executives, the men and the ladies. And the women had their own workout time, a very limited time (eight hours over the week, as I recall). Apparently the regular guys and the executives couldn't work out together in the same space -- but of course, I wouldn't know, SINCE I WASN'T ALLOWED IN.

It all just seemed so, so strange at first. There were other workplace issues, too (ahem, plagiarism), but after awhile, I got completely used to it and couldn't remember what initially seemed so strange. Which seemed even stranger. :)

My One-Year Anniversary

As of yesterday, I have been in Istanbul for a year! Can you believe it? I certainly can't. I know it's a terrible cliche, but I can't help wondering where the time has gone...

Well, one year down, one to go... :)

Dale Chihuly at the Dallas Arboretum

Filing this under better-late-than-never, when I was home a couple of weeks ago, I went with my friends Emily and Stephanie to the new Dale Chihuly installation at the Dallas Arboretum. I thought it would be great, but it defied my expectations.

Of course, you can go to the Arboretum during the day -- the 32 pieces are strewn throughout the park's 66 acres -- but it seemed more than likely that the installation would be most spectacular at night, when everything is all lit up. During the summer, the Arboretum is open three nights a week -- Tuesdays and Thursdays feature music (most cover/tribute bands), while on Wednesday, it's just open, but you have to buy a ticket for either a 6pm or 8pm entry. We went for 8pm on Wednesday, thinking -- rightly -- that we'd see the installation in the (waning) daylight, at dusk and at night.

Of course, this is a post better written with photos, though I don't think mine do the installation justice. The combination of the gardens, the warm summer air and Dale Chihuly's glass works was enchanting.

I was curious about whether Chihuly had made the pieces specifically for the Dallas Arboretum (the presence of the blue-and-white ball above called the Dallas Star seemed to indicate yes, though as it turns out, only 15 of the pieces were made for this particular installation) and in looking for the answer, I came across a pretty negative review from Gaile Robinson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She wrote, "For this traveling body of work, as for all of his pieces, he says, 'I try to make something no one has seen before.' In that he has succeeded, but there may be room on the dais soon, as Chihuly seems to care more about his traveling garden circus and not always in the best way." Ouch, huh? She felt that Chihuly's pieces overwhelmed the flatness of the Arboretum, calling the art "pushy," though from the last paragraph, it also sounds like she went during the day.

That aside, everyone else seems to have enjoyed the exhibit thus far, including us. And it's running through November 5, so there's still plenty of time to check it out.

Turkleywood in trailers: Taken 2, Bond and Ben Affleck

It seems like October is going to be a prime month for Turkey on film, as the three big Hollywood films shot within the last year in Istanbul are all being released that month. Taken 2 is out October 5, Ben Affleck's Argo October 12 and the Bond film Skyfall October 26. [Update: Skyfall is apparently only coming out in the UK on Oct. 26; IMDB has it slated for November 2 for Turkey and November 9 for the US.]

The trailers for all three are out, and it's interesting to compare the ways Istanbul is featured -- or not.

The plot of Taken 2 once again revolves around ex-CIA agent Brian Mills (Liam Neeson) and his family -- but instead of his daughter Kim jetting off to Paris with a friend, where she was kidnapped in the first installment, this time Kim decides to surprise him in Istanbul, and mom ends up as the victim. (The moral of the Taken stories? Never leave home.) In this trailer, Istanbul starts out looking pretty fancy...and then gets a little gritty:

At minute 1:29, Mills/Neeson is running along a very familiar-looking rooftop, one that was featured quite prominently (and similarly) at the end of the Clive Owen film The International. Apparently, it's the roof of the Grand Bazaar and also used in Skyfall in a motorcycle scene.

Argo is the true-life tale about the attempt to rescue six Americans during the Iran hostage crisis that started in 1979. Since filming in Tehran would be inconvenient, if not impossible -- although ironically, apparently the Americans pose as a Canadian film crew in the movie -- Istanbul is standing in for Iran; according to IMDB, the airport in Ontario, California is standing in for Tehran's airport. Not surprisingly, it's a little hard to identify Istanbul in the trailer, although at minute 1:15, Ben Affleck is standing by the water in Eminonu and then entering Yeni Camii:

But of course, the Bond filming was the really big news here. They filmed in the city of Adana (where some local teenagers snuck into the train station and managed to film an action sequence taking place on top of a train) in the coastal city of Fethiye, and of course, in Istanbul. I believe they were here for at least two months filming and yet, when you watch the trailer, what do you see? It looks like most of the action takes place in either England or Asia. Erm...