Street Banging

Culture and Brains

Recently I posted on the internet what was intended to be a short comment about loosing 2 lovely cats from our home. In addition to my self-pity it brought about some comments that have compelled me to "put paper to pen" as it were.

Culture (and Language)

What I quickly learnt living in this country, and still struggle with, is the massive difference between the way people think here as opposed to other countries I've visited. 

To get some insight into the comparison, I've travelled to: 5 states in North America, most of western Europe, all of the UK, a little of Asia, and of course Oceania. The obvious absences are Central and South America, although I've had a deeper insight into Colombian culture in New Zealand than I might have had from travelling there.

Also to take into account is the fact that I've only stayed longer than one month in the following countries: New Zealand, England, Scotland, Turkey, Guernsey, Sweden, Malaysia (listed in order of time spent). And of those countries I've worked in all of them but Sweden. My point is that as a tourist you learn very little about a nation's people and are usually already prejudiced by stereotypes so that's what you tend to see.

To give a very simple example: in some countries it's accepted practice to say "I'd like a cup of tea, please."; in others "I want a cup of tea." They are in fact equivalent requests in their own languages. If you were to say the former in Thailand, for example, they'd think you were strange. Conversely stating the latter in England could cause offence.

Something that affronted me when I first arrived here was the rules for walking on pavements. I found myself constantly bumping into what I perceived to be very rude people. Common practice here, I have learnt over time, is to at the last second twist your shoulders about 30 degrees to avoid crashing into your on-comer. Also it's acceptable to some people to brush against the other person in passing even though there's plenty of room to avoid this.

Brains

This second point is very close to my heart. What I mean by "brains" is how they work and how they might not work under certain conditions.

People, generally, aren't able to fully comprehend how dramatic an impact these conditions can have on a persons day-to-day life. I'm of course talking about stress, depression, anxiety, and the like. I'm not limiting this to people with severe cases of these conditions - the same rules apply to anyone facing a stressful, or similar, situation.

I've found that people without their own experiences to reflect on tend to assume that your brain works the same as my brain. Let's face it - this is a problem in any situation even ignoring any form of illness.

The actually reality is that when in a state of anxiety, for example, a persons brain could be trying to solve 15 problems simultaneously. As, naturally, none of them are resolved, this often leads to stress which often leads to depression. Once at this stage the brain can simply stop to function at all. Or even worse, your brain is bombarding you with every negative though you've ever uttered or heard.

So What?

Well, you may or may not agree with what I've said. Either way perhaps consider there might be a totally different approach to something that the one you have. And neither your view nor another persons is necessarily the "right" view. Philosophically there is no "right" view. There is just "a" view.

You can talk!

Indeed. It would be nice to think that I approached issues like this all the time. It's entirely possible to do so with other people's situations but with my own, alas, I'm just the same as everyone else.

I still get mad sometimes when I bang into someone on the street.

Freedom of speech

Politics again: … and to think when I was young I couldn't imagine ever having a view on something strong enough to want to tell someone. Youth eh?!

I find myself reading the columnists articles in Turkish newspapers because there's very little of interest in the rest of the news. It's, IMHO, based on whatever political view the paper has (nothing new there I agree) and tends to be very bland.

As yet, and inşallah (hopefully) in the future I'll be able to, I can't read Turkish so I'm left with the scraps that is offered to the "expats".

I say scraps because we don't get the same news as the Turks. It's something that's perplexed me since I started reading and I can only guess it's for reasons of propaganda or such like. Actually that doesn't really make sense. Why do it? A few times I've found some interesting articles that I've wanted my Turkish friends to read (most aren't up to the newspaper's English standard) and so go searching for the equivalent article on the Turkish site. Lo-and-behold it's nowhere to be found!

And so today I started to read this article and ground to a halt because the English was way to complex for me to be able to follow. There's a general tendency here to show off how good your English is by using as many 3-4 syllable words as possible. Words that people like me, a lay-person, can't really follow.

I admit that my vocabulary seems to be lower than most and I'll also stick my hand up for sometimes using words I don't really have a full understanding of.

That being said, am I expected to have a Ph.D. in English (as I'm sure the columnists do) in able to understand the newspaper?

Whilst I'm on my little hobby-horse I'd also like to rant about this:

Your comment will shortly be read by the Today's Zaman Internet editorial team. If it is selected for publication it would normally appear on the site within the next few hours. Due to the high volume of emails received by us we cannot guarantee that your comments will be published. 

On second thoughts I'll leave you to muddle over this one yourself. I will say however that rarely have there been more than 1 or 2 comments on any columnists' article (they are 0/1 on posting my comments thus far).

Shit! What am I complaining about? This is after all a country that has sent journalists to prison. I sincerely support them for making a stand. I'm certainly way to wussy to do such a brave thing.

(8 hours later): Don't worry about me - given that Turkey has had 4 coups in the past 50 years I thought I'd have my own wee military coup in my bedroom just before I go to bed.

Flip Flop

I've just experienced what has to be the ultimate metaphor for my life here in Istanbul, Turkey.

Due to going through a rough patch recently I've started living a flip-flop life. That is to say I sleep during the day and play games or such like during the evenings. For various reasons I've not been sleeping well so needless to say I'm tired most of the time, but I'm not going to go into that here and now.

Because it's summer, and those who can afford to pay for English lessons at private schools are away on their summer holidays, there has been very little activity on the teaching front. At one stage I was down to 6 hours work per week!

I ended up prostituting myself around the schools and picked up some work at a second school. Then they decided to close down their evening classes due to Ramazan (Ramadan) and so I was back to scraps for work. 

Luckily I got some new classes but I"m still at only 30% of what I need to get by.

Anyway I didn't intend on rabbiting on about that but it's useful to paint a picture of sorts.

One of the things I've been doing is immersing myself in a particular game that involves strategic thinking, acquisition of talents, and some complex thinking about how to form a useful team. In addition to this it's had me dive into my wallet to get ahead of the competition and shortcut the process by buying some of said talents.

One particular facet of this game involves me competing with others across the internet in tournaments. Generally speaking my results have been pretty poor. 

Whist I seem to start well I usually find myself at the bottom towards the end of the tournament. There's been no Olympic medals for me that's for sure.

Contrary to past experiences I hit a winning streak and some luck last night buy gaining a great talent that made my team fairly powerful. In fact I was by-and-large demolishing most of the opposition.

So for the first time ever I found myself challenging for 1st place. In fact I held 1st for a while and then dropped to 2nd.

At this point there was 24 minutes left on the game clock which was more than enough time to make a good go at first. I felt that coming 1st was well within my grasp and so registered for another challenge when low-and-behold there was a power cut. Now I won't say that's unusual here, but it's been quite a while since we had the last unscheduled one.

The point being that it perfectly summarises life in Istanbul. I think I'm safe in saying that most of my yabanci (foreign) friends would agree they have had similar experiences.

Uncharacteristicly (new word?) for me I just laughed it off and thought "Typical.".