It’s not easy to live in a smokers’ country as a non-smoker. Like tonight, on the boat from Kabataş back to home in Üsküdar. The weather is still nice, so I decided to sit outside to get some fresh air. I should have known better: in Turkey, people don’t sit outside for fresh air, but to smoke. So there I
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I had some good intentions when I moved from a central Anatolian town to Istanbul at the beginning of August. In Istanbul I was going to find a gym and get some serious exercise. Of course I haven’t done this yet, because, well, it’s a fact of life that before you start getting fit there’s a lot of postponing to …
Sometimes, when I’m on a boat on the Bosphorus, I want to litterally scream. Scream because of the happiness working in this city and in this country gives me. A few days ago, I felt it again. I came back from an interview with Cetin Altan and Solmaz Kamuran, married and both writers. The interview was about publishing in Turkey, and how (un)free writers and publishers are in Turkey. Altan’s writing carreer is long: 60 years already. He is 80 years old now, but is everything but finished with writing. Besides books, he published essay’s and is still regularly writing columns for Milliyet newspaper. His wife Solmaz Kamuran writes novels and is a translater.
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