(I went to Gülyazi this week, one of the villages in the Uludere district where 35 villagers got killed in an airstrike of the Turkish army. Read this news agency article I wrote about it here, and a blog post here.)
In the old days, says one of the smugglers, there were no …
And there I found myself, in a café in Istanbul with a book in my hands and tears in my eyes. It was the banned book by Ahmet Şık. I just bought it and really, really wanted to read it. But the first two pages not only took me an hour, they also drove me nuts: …
‘One more hour?’, I asked in despair. ‘Are you sure? This can’t be! I need to get out of this train! I boarded in Diyarbakir, please, it’s enough!’
The train was going very slow, and almost arriving at a station, but again not the station of Adapazari, the destination I had in mind. The time: 1am. I desperately wanted to get …
The most difficult thing about living abroad
Of course people often ask me if I miss my home country the Netherlands. No, not the country, but I do miss people. Not the Dutch people in general (even less since I’ve come to know them better from a distance), but the people close to me. My family, who has known me for fourty years. Friends since my teenage …
‘Are there any tea wanters?’ That’s the example sentence I often use when explaining how different the structure of Turkish sentences is from West Germanic languages, like Dutch. The sentence is a literal translation of how Turks ask whether anybody wants tea. Years ago I didn’t know that and would build some rudimentary sentence myself in such a situation. Turks …
‘Spring has started, you don’t need wood for the heater anymore, do you?’ I asked my neighbour when I saw her chopping wood. I knew what she was chopping it for, I just needed to start the conversation. ‘It’s for the barbecue, why don’t you come and join us!’
The first real spring weekend in Istanbul seemed a good occasion to …
‘Now please, stop talking and listen to me!’ I can hardly believe this is me talking. To my cleaning lady! But I have reached a limit. The paintings are still very dusty, she didn’t take the hair out of the shower drain, the windows haven’t been cleaned properly, there is still a huge stain on the small table and she …
‘In this hall’ – and the muscled guy switches on the lights – ‘you can follow crunch classes, or yoga, or pilates, or aerobics.’ I don’t want aerobics, yoga or pilates, and what the hell is crunch? Something with muscles, I understand. I ask where the swimming pool is. ‘There is no pool, but we are the biggest sports centre …
It’s not the train that is old fashioned. The train itself is modern and comfortable, and the seats spacious. Nevertheless, travelling by train gives me an old-fashioned feeling. The sound of the wheels on the iron tracks! The noisy and always a little bit scary passages between the wagons! The view of the front of the train when it takes …
I was exhausted after travelling, after talking Turkish the whole day and after meeting too many people. The last visit Rosarin and I paid was to yet another village family. The TV was too loud, the coffee too bad, the talk too long – and for a big part in Kurdish so I didn’t understand a word. I know it’s …
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