BasBasBas.com

Author: Bas

  • Google Friend Connect

    Still apartment hunting. Quite exhausting and boring at the same time. You have to be ready to rush from apartment to apartment, but sometimes you’re simply waiting for people to contact you to tell you about new available flats.

    So, while I was waiting yesterday, I set up Google Friend Connect, which allows me to directly connect to the community/readers of the blog, but also for you to connect to me, or even each other. Google seems to be rolling out a lot of options for Friend Connect, with which it aims to turn the more static media on the web into social media, or even integrate them with the existing social media, such as Facebook.

    I’m going to activate some of them, for you (and myself) to play around with. First thing I want to experiment with is a wall on which community members can write their messages or even post YouTube videos that might be interesting to me or other people that visit this site. Not sure how/where to integrate it however, since I can’t reduce the width to less than 280 pixels. I’ll be looking at that. For the meantime get connected. Scroll to the Google Friend Connect widget in the left sidebar and join up!

    Bas

  • How I Got Robbed in Istanbul Pt. 3

    After being robbed we went on a manhunt with some bad ass Istanbul cops dressed in even more bad ass civilian clothes. The adrenaline started to subside and feelings and thoughts arose… The aftermath of a robbery, including what happens if you don’t learn your lesson the first time.

    How I Got Robbed in Istanbul part 1.
    How I Got Robbed in Istanbul part 2.

    After making sure we’d keep in touch over the next few months, while I was living in Istanbul, we said goodbye. It was now morning and I got on the bus, full of people ready to go to work, or wherever people go at 7 in the morning on a Sunday (and it couldn’t have been church, because it’s Turkey). On my way home the events of the night kept going through my mind like a film. Even when I got to my bed, it was tough to fall asleep. My mind was noisy…

    Could I have intervened? Why had I been so calm during the robbery? Did I put myself at risk by refusing to give the robber my stuff? I also felt a kind of compassion for the robber, which surprised me the most. When we were looking for the robber with the police, on one hand I hoped we’d find him, so that we could get my friend’s phone back and that justice would be done… However, I also knew that justice would not be done if we found him. He’d most likely get the living crap kicked out of him and with a few broken ribs and maybe a broken limb he’d be put together with hard criminals, murderers and rapists for a few months. That doesn’t seem like justice to me. So I sincerely hoped for the robber that we wouldn’t find him and that he might change his ways.

    I started to feel like the guy needed help. I was unimpressed by him and he seemed like a total rookie, so maybe something could still be done. I believe that if the guy had felt that he had a choice, he wouldn’t be out robbing people. Imagine having to threaten people’s lives for a living; I don’t think this can make a human being happy. I have all the chances in the world. I’m more likely to be happy than the guy who robbed us, I’m more likely to achieve my dreams, to attain a certain level of spiritual development even… while this guy has no prospects at all. I felt very sorry for him, but at the same time I felt guilty for feeling sorry for him. I guess it was human and societal values colliding.

    Over the next days I started getting a little scared. I realized that anyone can rob someone successfully quite easily. All you need is a knife and a quiet spot… and it only needs to be quiet for one minute, that’s all. I grew very wary and my previous feelings of sometimes being uncomfortable in certain situations in Turkey, which arose from culture shock, were now transformed into fear. I constantly kept my guard up during my time in Istanbul.

    A week after the robbery, a friend of mine and I went to a club in the party district of the city again, Beyoğlu. It was a cool underground place, but they were charging 8 lira for the beers (EUR 4.- / $6.- more or less). So after trying to bargain, we decided to get some alcohol outside and drink it somewhere in the street. My friend suggested drinking it in some sidestreet, but I insisted that we’d drink it somewhere in a very busy area. We walked down to a big road where a lot of taxi’s were waiting for customers. Most of the taxidrivers wait outside their cars and talk to each other. We judged it as a safe place, even though the ghetto started just at the other side of the road.

    After about 5 minutes, some dodgy looking guy came over and started talking to us in Turkish. I tried to tell him that I don’t speak Turkish and he should go away, but my friend insisted that it was fine and nothing would happen. Everything would be alright, as it always is with him and I’ve got to admit, this friend really knows how to deal with sketchy people. So apparently the dodgy guy spoke German, as did my friend, and they started conversing. We shared some vodka and some beer, but the whole time I was filled with adrenaline and extremely on guard… my body even shaking.

    At some point I was talking in English to my friend and I noticed the guy tapping his finger on my friend’s pocket… I immediately told my friend, since I assumed the guy would try to pickpocket him. Some taxidriver joined the conversation and another guy. I figured we were safe from getting robbed, but we should still be completely on our guard… I couldn’t enjoy the alcohol anymore and wanted to go back into the club.

    We tried to have some fun with the guys and we even ended up taking a picture with them.


    The dodgy guy on the left, my friend in the middle and a friendly guy on the right (sunglasses came from us). The guy on the right actually showed me pictures of his children which he carried around and really wanted to share to show me who he is and what’s important to him. Or possibly because he didn’t speak English and I didn’t really speak Turkish, so it was just the easy way out.

    At some point this guy left and an acquaintance of the dodgy guy came by. They said hi and the guy joined the conversation. It was now him, a friendly taxi driver (who seemed a bit wary about the guys we were speaking to), the dodgy guy, my friend and I, in a street with plenty of people around and a lot of passers-by. I really wanted to go back in and was just waiting for my friend to finish his conversation… At some point I heard my friend saying “hey hey hey!” in a strict tone and saw the guy passing a phone to his acquaintance who was standing behind him, but right in front of me. I got up with a new rush of adrenaline in my body.

    The urgent tone in my friend’s voice might have scared the guy and he got the phone back from his acquaintance and passed it back to my friend. The taxidriver had disappeared. My friend told the guy in German that he would be very friendly, but he should not try to play tricks like that on him. He was very strict on him and the guy (more or less sincerely apologized). Then immediately police showed up and asked me if there was any problem. I told them to ask my friend if there’s any problems. My friend said there are no problems at all, but the cops still asked the dodgy guy for his ID and they stuck it in their pocket after giving it a glance. Guess he would have to report to the police station to get it back. Then I saw the taxidriver again. I think he had warned the police immediately. Very friendly.

    The police told us to get our beer and get out of there, so we did. 10 meters down the street two angry men approached me and told me to throw away my beer… I hesitated, but they showed their ID’s and were cops in civilian clothes. Wow, so much police presence, yet so much crime.

    So this had been the second time I was out drinking on the street in that area and both times someone had tried to rob a friend of me… Once successfully, once not. This made me even more pessimistic about the safety in Istanbul. The city’s safe if you play by its rules… but I’ve never been the type of person to follow the exact rules.

    The next months I felt caged… I didn’t feel free at all, scared to write too critically about the Turkish government and getting my site blocked or getting charged for “anti-Turkishness” (a law once useful perhaps, but now often applied in fascist ways by corrupt politicians and judges), but also scared to be alone on the streets at night. It was the final push I needed to fall into a culture shock that would last for about two months.

    Towards the end of my stay I really started to enjoy myself again and feel alright, but it was too late.

    The good part however: I learned how to deal with culture shock, I got some life experience and I learned to be a little bit more careful at night.

    This was the final part of the three piece series. Thanks for following.

    BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • My Old Neighbourhood in Istanbul

    Still looking for my new neighbourhood here in Sofia, which is taking up quite a bit of time. It’s not as easy as 1.5 year ago, since the city got remarkably more expensive. I’m not worried though, patience and perseverance are the key to the keys of a great flat, in a great neighbourhood. If you know something good however, not more than 10-15 minutes by public transportation from the center, you can email me at .

  • How I Got Robbed in Istanbul Pt. 2

    We had just been robbed… I had gotten off with just being threatened with a knife, but my friend had just lost an expensive phone. After chasing our robber we decided to go to the police and a new adventure was about to start.

    Click here for part 1.

    We headed to the closest police station. We got there and my body was still filled with adrenaline… the rush started subsiding and I started to feel a bit weak. I realized I had to sit down for a second or I would faint. Funny how you can switch from a clear, calm and focused mental state to nearly passing out in such a short time, but then again I’ve always performed well under pressure.

    We were told we had to take it to a different station, so we went there. That’s when we found out we were robbed just 3 corners away from the main police station of the district. We went in and told the cops about what had happened. We were sent to some office where there were a few people telling their accounts to police officers. My friend translated that the basic attitude of these guys was that it’s people’s own fault if they get robbed; they shouldn’t have been in that place, at that time. We were sitting in a waiting room and there was an older man (in his 50s or 60s) whose head was bleeding. My friend talked to him and apparently he had been mugged by the same guy. Apparently he had also held the knife to the head of the guy and had cut him. We told the police that it was probably the same guy and they told us to wait. They said they would send some cops in civilian clothes out to act as bait.

    After about ten minutes we were told to come along and we were introduced to two super bad ass cops in civilian attire. The one had hair until his shoulders and a long red leather coat. The other was shorter and had a black leather jacket and looked like he had a mix of coffee and whiskey as blood and ate burning cigarettes for breakfast.  They told us to get in their car and we started driving. Their attitudes were dead serious. I knew that if we found the robber, they’d beat him up quite badly. Turks hate thieves intensely and many people condone the violence they endure when they’re caught.

    We drove back to the street where we were robbed. Nothing there. We drove through the street where we were drinking beers. At some point we passed some people who were sleeping on the street under a blanket. They stopped the car and told us to get out. We got out. The guy grabbed the blanket and uncovered the people in a rather rough manner. He asked us if it was one of  them and we said no. We then got back into the car, blanket still lying on the street. The cops were definitely a bit rough around the edges.

    We drove down to a neighbourhood which is right next to Taksim, not more than a 10 minute walk from the main street. We entered the neighbourhood and immediately we were in a different world. From the nicest, and one of the richest and most modern sites of Istanbul, to one of immense poverty with a high degree of f—ed upness. The streets were no longer asfalted or paved… There was trash everywhere along the dark or dimly lighted streets. There were prostitutes and transexuals in some streets and murky guys standing around in others, even though it was after 5 in the morning.

    At some point we stopped in the middle of one of the streets, a rather crowded one. One of the cops got out and went into a building. As he stepped into the entryway he disappeared into the darkness of the shadows. Neither of us knew why he had stepped out to go there, but after a few minutes he came back, got into the car and indicated that we hadn’t found him. We drove around for a few more minutes and then went back to the police station.

    That neighbourhood is the worst place I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen quiet a few bad places. The most alarming side to it however is that it’s right next to the area where people go out and get drunk. Robbers can just come out of the neighbourhood, go back to their neighbourhood where nobody will follow them and they won’t be found.

    The next post will be about the aftermath… What I realized afterwards, how it might have affected my stay in Istanbul and the opinion of the Taksim district, and another similar event… Leading me to the conclusion there’s a 99% chance someone will try to rob you if you hang out in certain parts of the district at night. Follow the rules kids, don’t f–k around in this area! Especially at night.

    What are the best and worst experiences you’ve had with police officers? What do you think about the officers in your country? Do you have similar areas next to the most important party district of your city?

    BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • How I Got Robbed in Istanbul

    I waited a long time with writing and posting this story. I did not want to worry my parents, brothers, family, girlfriend, friends, or readers. Now that I’m in another city, in another country, I feel that it’s the right time to share this. It’s an interesting story, exciting, entertaining, but also serves as a warning. These are not any of the reasons for me writing this however. Through my blog, I want to share my experiences of the intensity of life. Some moments are too private to describe, others are impossible to put into words, however, after this event occurred, I knew immediately I had an exciting story to share. Although the enthusiasm about what I had experienced soon changed into fear.

    I was meeting an old Turkish friend in the party district of Taksim, or Beyoğlu to be more precise. We met on Istiklal Caddesi and it was fantastic to greet him in his country after us two having met in my country. We walked down to an alleyway where a few of his friends were getting drunk. The alley was a bit of a twilight zone, some very strange types there, but we soon finished our beers and headed to the club.

    We had quite a few beers, talked the whole night and also met a few interesting people. As the club was closing we headed out, but decided it was too early to call it a night. We bought ourselves two beers and decided to chat some more while we finish our beers and then we’d go in our separate directions. We decided to look for a safe place to drink our beers. Drinking alcohol on the street is not allowed in Istanbul, as in Holland, so we wanted to get off the main street since you don’t want to mess with the Turkish police (and I’ll come back to this later). We walked around for 10 minutes, searching a spot that was out of sight enough to not be bothered by police, but in sight enough to be safe… We both had heard warnings about having to be careful in this area, so we took extra care. As we found our spot, my friend nodded towards a guy at the end of the street and joked “this guy could kill us”. We laughed and started chatting about music.

    After about 10 minutes, two guys came by. My friend told me he’d be speaking in English and pretending not to know Turkish, since he figured that troublemakers looking for a fight were more likely to leave foreigners alone. I agreed. The guys asked for some money. I told them in Turkish I had none, threw out some more Turkish phrases in a playful way and after this they left. No trouble at all, but my friend was right about not speaking Turkish. There was a certain tensity.

    About 10 minutes later another guy came. He spoke to us in Turkish and apparently asked if he could use on of our phones with his SIM card, because he needed to make a call. I’m not going to hand my phone over to anyone in the middle of the night, so I said in very broken Turkish that my phone’s in Holland, because in Turkey I can’t use it. He kinda stayed around like any socially awkward guy would in the middle of the night. I threw out some more Turkish phrases, he replied… It was fun. My friend told me he was impressed with my Turkish. I offered the guy a sip of my beer and everything was cool.

    When we finished our beers we decided to get out of there and get back to Istiklal Caddesi, the main street in the district, always full with people – and police. As we indicated we were leaving the guy once more asked us for a phone for his SIM card… I told him again that I had no phone. My friend still pretended to not understand a word of Turkish. We started walking and indicated that we were going to Istiklal Cad. The guy then also started leaving. He said something in Turkish and when he wasn’t paying attention, my friend said that the guy was also going to the same street, which was just two streets away. The guy walked about 5 to 10 metres in front of us and my friend and I resumed our previous conversations, mostly about music and Istanbul.

    We turned the corner, and another one. We were now looking at an L shaped corner. The guy in front of us walked to the corner and turned back and said something in Turkish. My friend said that the guy had said Istiklal Cad. was in the other direction. We turned and as I was talking, my friend wasn’t beside me as soon as I expected him to. Always an awkward moment when you think you’re talking to someone and they’re not there. I turned around and my friend was in the middle of the street with the guy holding him. I was wondering what was going on, but didn’t assume anything bad… The hold didn’t look so tight and I figured they were just messing around, after all, if you share your beer with someone, they’re your friend. All naive ideas, but retold it sounds a lot different than when it’s actually happening.

    Next thing, the guy had my friend against the wall and I noticed the energy had shifted from jolly to something more serious. I walked around them to notice that the guy had a knife to the side of my friend’s head. I understood what was going on, but remained very calm. I had imagined before what it’s like to get robbed, but never thought it would be so casual. I contemplated for a second, to run and get help… To start shouting… The grab the guy by the wrist of the hand that was holding the knife with one hand and to punch him on his nose with the other… Instead I figured it was best to just stay right there and do nothing. I looked for loose stones or something that I could use as a weapon, but didn’t see anything. I was very surprised by how calm I was and how assertive. I took a step closer and said things like “hey man, you don’t want to do this”, “come on, stop it”, et cetera… Trying to find the reasonable guy in this obvious rookie.

    My friend was noncooperative, so the guy put his hands in my friend’s pockets and fished out his phone. He then turned to me and while pointing his knife at me he said “telefon, telefon!” I looked him straight in the eyes and said “hayır, yok.” His eyes were nervous. He didn’t know what to do… it was obvious. He turned to my friend again… hesitated… and then he ran off. My friend and I caught our breaths… uttering “what the f….” And then suddenly… my friend started chasing the robber. I ran after him, but I was tired from the night out and my shoes were very loose, so I couldn’t keep up well. We ran through a few streets with people closing their bars and as my friend yelled out to stop the robber, nobody did anything. At some point we reached a crossing and just stood there… figuring out in which direction the guy had went. When you watch foot chases in Hollywood movies, you always get the moment where the good guys are chasing a bad guy and the reach a crossing, look around… 360 clockwise, 360 counterclockwise… and then curse because they know that they lost the guy. That’s exactly what it was like.

    We weren’t finished however. I convinced my friend that we should go to the police station. People in Turkey have very little confidence in the police and so did my friend and so did I… but I also figured that even though there’s a small chance we’d find the robber and the phone… It was also a good chance for some closure.

    A new adventure was about to start… Thieves are absolutely hated in Turkey and as I said earlier, you don’t want to mess with the police in Istanbul. Check back tomorrow for part 2!

    Have you ever been robbed? How did it happen? Did you expect being robbed to be like actually getting robbed, or was it different?

    Lesson learned here: if you’re in a big foreign city and get warned about certain things… Take it very seriously. Never think about it lightly!

    BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • Bye Bye Istanbul!

    Packing is done… So is cleaning. I’m about to head to Bulgaria for half a year.

    Let’s hope Russia puts the gas back on, but it looks like it might be a week before normal gas supplies can be restored.

    Bye bye Istanbul!

  • Fukkk Offf

    A while ago I attended a concert by Fukkk Offf to do some video journalism for SPIN Magazine’s new online video platform, SPIN Earth (beta). The video I made was a bit too long for them to use, but haven’t had time to cut it down since. I figured it might be appreciated by some of the blog’s audience, especially since you can meet the real me. 😉


    Fukkk Offf in Istanbul from Bas Grasmayer on Vimeo.

    Shot at Club Dirty, 13-Dec-2008 for SPIN Earth.

    Music by Fukkk Offf (Rave Is King): myspace.com/fukkkofff

    More of these?

  • Downtime

    Last night BasBasBas.com got shut down by Bluehost over performance issues. The site’s back online now, but to prevent future account suspensions without notice in the future, I’m going to be changing the layout of the site to make it more simplistic. Since I’ll be moving to Bulgaria next week and the site’s current layout was mostly geared towards my stay in Istanbul, the shut down came with great timing to motivate me to change the site once again.

    Ulterior goal: to increase the pleasure of the reading experience.

    Sit back and don’t worry too much about the layout for now. It might be a good idea to subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox free of charge of course. 😉

  • Politics 2.0

    The influence of new media on current day politics

    An essay by Bas Grasmayer

    The 20th century was the age of mass media. The impact of radio during the first half of the century and that of television during the second brought politics closer to home. Starting from people grouping around the one radio in their neighbourhood, to the radio in their street, until the point that everyone had a radio in their home. The same happened for television and through these media politics entered the living room. Through sound at first, but later through moving images which became more detailed and more accurately coloured over the course of the last century.

    We’re now close to ten years into the new century. Television and radio are still important, but there is a new player in the field of mass media: the internet. This essay will look at how the internet has already influenced politics and hopes to answer, in part, the following question:

    How is the World Wide Web as a medium influencing
    politics and the government right now?

    New Media

    In the 2008 US Presidential elections, politicians were seen embracing new media. Barack Obama became microblogging service Twitter’s most followed user and YouTube set up a site called You Choose ’08 dedicated to the elections. On the latter, campaign teams posted videos hoping they would go ‘viral’, a term used to describe the phenomenon of certain content on the internet being spread out through huge networks of users, which is often initially an exponential process. Ron Paul, who was running to become the Republican presidential candidate, had so much support on the internet that TIME magazine at one point commented that due to “his  success  recruiting  supporters  through  new  social  media  channels” he was “the  new  2.0  candidate”.

    (more…)

  • Bulgaria’s Public Opinion on the Turkish Minority

    This Tuesday I’m giving a presentation for my course in Public Opinion accompanying my essay on Bulgaria’s public opinion of Turkey. It’s already finished, so I figured I’d put it online. I’m moving from Istanbul to Sofia next week, so it’s double-appropriate 😉

    I stripped it from some of the images, because SlideShare was not displaying them properly (eg. overlapping the text etc.)

    Public Opinion of Turkey in Bulgaria

    View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bulgaria turkey)

    Slide 10 should say: “Turkish people abuse their position as an ethnic minority to get rights even normal Bulgarians don’t have”.

    Hope you enjoy. More updates soon. Heading into a very busy week.

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