Next time I go to Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city situated on the Aegean coast, I have to take a short skirt. Or shoes with high heels. Or even better, both. I was in Izmir this week, and wearing jeans and sneakers made me feel totally inelegant. I didn’t only feel inelegant, I was. At least, compared to the girls …
While I’m typing this blog post, there is black dye in my hair. Twenty more minutes to go, then I can wash it out. The grey hairs that stick together in the front of my hairdo will be black again. And I wonder if in let’s say twenty years (I’ll be almost 60), I’ll be proudly grey like most Dutch …
Prefab houses and tents are being sent to Elazig, the area in the east of Turkey that was hit by an earthquake early yesterday morning. And in the coming months, the people affected by the earthquake will have better houses than they had before. Not built of sun dried mud bricks like before, but of solid concrete.
In all the stories …
A friend of mine visiting Turkey commented on a squat toilet with the words: ‘Well, things are just less hygienic in Turkey than in the Netherlands, aren’t they?’ I smiled and didn’t bother trying to convince her otherwise. I mean, she had to go back to Holland and still feel okay using public sit-down toilets, so I thought it would …
Now and then it happens to me: I end up in a living room full of women. Last night I found myself in such a situation again: eight women between the ages of 17 and 54, and they were doing all the women’s things you can think of. One was knitting something for a baby. Another asked the others which …
My love and I stand on the balcony of the house he grew up in. We look out over the village. It’s been snowing, everything is white, and the sun that has made the snow sparkle all day, is slowly disappearing behind the hills. It’s cold. Then I notice that only a few houses have a smoking chimney. It could …
Pictures, people want me to take pictures of Istanbul in the snow. It’s been snowing rather heavily for a few days now, and I guess the people who request pictures imagine the most beautiful views: mosques covered with snow, the old city turned white, narrow streets with snow flakes coming down.
But that version of Istanbul in winter doesn’t exist. At …
‘I cannot take that coin’, says the dolmuş driver. He hands back the fifty kuruş coin to the passenger in the shared taxi and mumbles: ‘It’s old money, you know’. The passenger knows: as of the first of January, the ‘new Turkish lira’, which was replaced by the ‘Turkish lira’ on January 1st 2009, is not valid anymore.
The new …
An economic crisis and high gas prices: it’s not a good combination in winter. Because, what do people do when their income goes down and the gas prices are higher than the price of coal? Exactly: they stop using gas and throw the dirty black stuff in the heater. Optimist that I am, I always tell myself that living very …
‘It’s okay, just throw it down’, I hear my love say to the guys who are putting new windows and window frames in the kitchen and living room and who are not sure what to do with the old frames and glass. I want to protest: Are you crazy, you can’t just throw things down from the balcony! But I …
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