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.".