Bring on the central hitting! 😉
Category: media
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September Topdroppers!
For those of you that are not familiar with Entrecard, click here.
Ok, time to do a roundup of this month’s topdroppers. With the moving abroad and the travelling, it’s been tough to always drop back, so an extra thank you!
Topdropper: Wonderful Pic Collection (you get 500 ECs!)
Second place: iWalk,U2? (you get 300 ECs!)
Third place: Juliana’s Site (you get 200 ECs!)
I think most of you are aware of the 12.5% tax introduced by Entrecard for the credit transfers. I won’t deduct that, I’ll pay for it myself! Keep dropping and earn credits!
Other topdroppers:
Picturing of Life – My Imaginary Travels – Beyond Taiwan – From a Yellow House in England – Zen Tricks – Iconz World – WebFrap
Go check out my Entrecard page and leave a recommendation/review!
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24 Hours of Ups & Downs
Well, just a quick update about the last 24 hours. It’s a perfect display of bad and good things coming hand in hand, as they should. 🙂
Most importantly is probably having more or less sealed the deal with our landlord. He will put in some extra furniture, provide more cutlery, some bowls and some other stuff. Besides that, he will get the window I broke repaired… I don’t have to pay for it. What a load off my shoulders. 🙂
After that I went to eat somewhere with my flatmate Daniele, from Italy. We headed over to a particular place where I knew they offered vegetarian dürüm. They recognized me and the theory I called ‘The Vegetarian Sandwich‘ seems to be true. I noticed before that upon returning to the same place a few times, they give you more and more for the same price. Here was no different. We ordered food for about 18.50 lira (about 10 euros). When we went to pay they charged us just 15. A nice surprise, so we paid and I figured we got our drinks for free. As we were standing outside, somewhere down the road, one of the guys from the kebab place ran towards us. I figured they had realized their mistake. They had… He gave me back another 1.50, so in total we only paid 13.50 and thus got 5 lira off… That’s more than a quarter of the price. Awesome. I don’t care so much about the money… It’s just great that they show your appreciation for coming back. You’re not just customer #2739.
Then we went to a house party… When returning home it was quite cold outside. Still being a little sick, my body didn’t enjoy it (understatement) and my stomach started rebelling quite seriously. We got a taxi, because I needed to be warm and home as fast as possible. Now I’m quite sure that I actually have some flu or viral infection related to either my stomach, or more likely, intestines. Even though physically I feel worse, mentally I feel slightly more comfortable since this is something I had before in Spain (5 or 6 years ago). I was lying on the beach as it was getting cold and windy and contracted this flu. It kept me inside my holiday apartment the whole week, never more than 20 metres away from the toilet. This is a bit different, but last night was a good wake up call that I should take it really easy this weekend. It also stopped me from being so stubborn and listen to my girlfriend’s advice of what to eat and what not to eat. 😉
I think I’ll go to the infirmary this Monday, which is on-campus… If that’s the appropriate place to go. I just need antibiotics I suppose. But this weekend is for resting and taking it easy. No parties. I need to travel next week.
So a typical Istanbul day for me… filled with ups and downs 😉 I’m so looking forward to get rid of this sickness though… It has been holding me back since I got here (yes, I’ve had it for about 3 weeks now – sometimes almost absent, but now very present). I don’t have a picture to go with this post, but imagine how you’d feel after drinking the juice in the picture below and you’ll know (more or less) how I’m feeling right now 😉
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What’s this guy saying?
So a few times per day this guy, and similar guys, come through my street selling 2nd hand stuff from their carts. To let people know they’re there, they yell something like “Yehhhhhhh”. It sounds really weird. Like a very, very sick mule.
Besides these, we have accordionists walking the street, stopping on every corner to give their concert and wait for people to throw money out of the windows. Men that sell bread (they carry a huge stack on their head), gypsy women that sell flowers, people that collect water tanks to get them refilled for you… and I’m sure I’ll be seeing more of these professions soon… (and recording and uploading them of course ;-)).
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Entrecard Topdroppers get EC’s!!
For those of you that are not familiar with Entrecard, click here.
For all the visitors from Entrecard, I have a special deal for you which I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Add my blog to your daily dropping rounds and get credits! At the end of the month, I will spend 1000 credits on the top 3 droppers.
Number one gets 500 credits.
Number two gets 300 credits.
Number three gets 200 credits.So get to dropping on my Entrecard widget and please try to participate on my blog. I have SezWho installed, so it’s yet another way to earn credits… Oh and if you drop, I follow! 🙂
Happy dropping!
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Beautiful Istanbul Sunset
As said in the previous posts, I live very close to the sea. The first evening that I was in my apartment, I got a bit bored and went to walk around a bit. I found a gorgeous sun setting in the sea. Check out the video below… It’s really soothing, relaxing, meditative. 🙂
Sorry for the crooked horizon… see it as artistic expression.
Subscribe to my RSS feed now! 🙂
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The Apartment!
I have my flat and here’s the video! Enjoy!
Oh, and within the first 24 hours I:
- Locked myself out while my music was on waaaay too loud. Leading to complaints (in Turkish) from my neighbours when I finally returned to my flat with another set of keys. Of course I couldn’t explain the situation.
- Shortly after that I broke the cable of my laptop.
- At about 5 o’ clock I decided to close some windows to keep the noise out. There is one central open area in my building that connects the windows from all the bathrooms and kitchens. Quite noisy in the morning I imagine. Apparently I didn’t close the window properly, so imagine how noisy it was when it opened again and fell down and shattered in my kitchen… I think I woke everyone up. Way to go Bas!
Let’s hope that’s the last of my bad luck in this apartment. 😉
You can read about my struggles finding it by clicking here.
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spacescape – FrigginChicken (Eclectic Mix Download!)
As I’ve stated before, in my free time I love mixing music and DJ’ing, especially if I can get a little creative and experimental with it. I made a mix the other day in the dormitory I blogged about and I’m very happy about the result.
Eclecticism at its best in this set containing dub, minimal, breakcore, dubstep, grime, world fusion, breakbeat and psychedelic. Not much to add. Just exploring the waves of electronica. Enjoy!
Tracklist
Omar Faruk Tekbilek & Steve Shehan – Ya Bouy (Shulman Remix)
Headphonics – Corrupt & Immoral
Nagual Sound Experiment vs Ital Roots – Forward
Younger Brother – Sleepwalker Part 2
Shulman – Fromage
Ed Davenport – Apples
Dave Seaman – Gobbledygook (Jori Hulkkonen Remix)
Combichrist – Red Signal
The Bug – Murder We ft. Ricky Ranking
Mood Deluxe – The Living Receiver
Beat Bandits – O.I.T.S.
Venetian Snares – Öngyilkos Vasárnap
Ott – Evil Do’ers
Venetian Snares – Senki DalaClick to download as MP3 (VBR), 78 minutes
Enjoy! And support the artists when you get the chance!
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Turkish Prison (Video!)
Since I’m hoping to move out of my dorm this Monday or Tuesday, I decided to make a video last night to be able to show you where I’ve been living during the first two weeks of my stay in Istanbul. In the video I just show my floor and the floor below. The building has 7 floors, 5 study areas, an internet café, cafeteria (a crappy one), laundry shop, crappy recreation basement, big iron fences around it, security, and a few hundred men living in it.
I’m sure you’ll understand I want to move out of here as soon as possible 😉
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The Vegetarian Sandwich
Being a vegetarian in Istanbul is quite the challenge, but it can be done. This however, is not the topic of today’s post. I want to talk about bar/café culture here.
In Holland, or most North-Western European countries, if I go to a place to eat a sandwich where I’ve never been before, the next time I come back they won’t even remember I was there before. Small towns or villages are (generally) an exception to this rule, but in this 15 million population metropolis called Istanbul, you are remembered and valued.
The first time I went around the corner here to get a sandwich, I tried to get a vegetarian one. I got a sandwich with some cheese. I liked their attitude though (it was very hospitable and accommodating) and told my friend about it and took him there. When I came back I could see in their eyes that they were happy I not only came back a second time, but also brought another new customer to the place. My vegetarian sandwich now contained cheese and tomato.
Today I went there again and I heard the one guy say in Turkish to the other something along the lines of “look, he’s back again”. It’s nice to be noticed and it’s great to see how much Turkish business owners value returning customers. This time I got the same sandwich but with cucumber and salad. Next time maybe some fries? Another example.
In Istanbul there are many places to have some tea with friends, smoke some nargile (hookah/seisha), and play some games (mostly backgammon). Last week I already spoke about going to a nargile traditional waterpipe place in Taksim with some friends. We decided to go there again and I think we’ll be having weekly meet-ups at this place once we’re all spread out over town at different universities. Well, so far we already have weekly meet-ups 😉
Anyway, we sat down, drank some tea, ordered a banana flavour nargile which had milk instead of water in it and started playing backgammon. After one game, we put back the board and brought out Balance, probably known as Jenga to most Westerners. We played a few games, but the concentration and energy that goes into this game is magnetic and we soon had the attention of the staff. We invited them to come play and had a lot of fun with them. Great!
It’s important here to form a bond with people. Not just for the free tea, nargile, or having many friends, but for the simple fact that the customer / staff relationship is rather different from in Holland. In one way you are treated with more respect and more formality, in the other way more personal. Maybe because of the more personal touch there is more respect between staff and customer. People don’t just see each other as their roles (there are exceptions of course) or as numbers, but as actual people and treat you as such.
Except for in Turkey’s mobile phone network provider Türkcell’s shops where they treat you like someone who doesn’t mind having to “come back tomorrow” for seven days per week to avoid getting cut off from the network. Big thumbs down to Türkcell and how their staff treats foreigners. (Just wanted to vent)
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