Category Archives: Istanbul move

Favorite reads of 2011

Posted on January 1, 2012 | 1 Comment

It’s the first day of the new year, and I may have missed the time for year-end lists, I wanted to first compile a list of my favorite articles and blog posts of 2011. Living in a foreign country and having a baby isn’t conducive to reading books (something I’m hoping to change in 2012, regardless of baby or country), but I do read a lot of blogs and online media. Getting an iPad this summer was the best pre-baby gift ever, since it means I can read in the dark during the many middle-of-the-night feedings, and I also recommend the Instapaper app for offline reading.  Thanks to the new Facebook timeline, I was able to review a lot of favorite links that I’ve posted, along with a search through Google chats, sent mail, and other archives.

In no particular order, these are the stories that I found most interesting, funny, thought-provoking, and forward/Twitter/Facebook/Google+/conversation-worthy:

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Posted in internet linkage, Istanbul move, Personal, Social Media, travel

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Expat lesson learned: there’s a Turk for that

Posted on June 3, 2011 | 2 Comments

The most striking thing I’ve found about living in Turkey is not so much the east-meets-west cliche, but the fact that the modern world and the old school of doing things coexist. While I can order food delivery online, you still see many Turks lowering baskets into the streets and getting passersby to go on a beer run (okay, more likely an Ayran run) for them. I can shop or eat at nearly any multi-national chain, though there are also tons of tea houses women haven’t entered in decades and shops that have probably have been running in the red for as many years. I’ve also learned that nearly any task or errand can and will be performed by a specialist with a job description that you may not find anywhere else. No matter what you need done, chances are, there’s a Turk for that. Continue reading →

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Posted in expat, Istanbul move, russia, travel, Turkey

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Knocked up abroad: into the home stretch

Posted on June 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

If you’ve been following me on any sort of medium that I update regularly, you’ll know that I’m expecting a baby here in July (just under 7 weeks away now!). H and I haven’t quite decided on what to call this baby girl yet, referring to her as Rasputina or the Young Turkess (though she’ll be as Turkish as I am, which is to say, not at all). I’ve been documenting the pregnancy on Gadling on a series of posts called “Knocked Up Abroad,” a name inspired by our favorite documentary series ever and conceived long before the actual baby. Here’s a recap of the posts so far:

As I head into the home stretch and don’t have any further travel on the horizon, I’m debating on what to post next. I’ll have plenty to share about childbirth and traveling with a young baby (we are already planning trips when she’s 6 and 10 weeks) but not for another few months. My third-trimester travel consists mostly of subway rides to the grocery store, though the Southeast Asia trip was right on the cusp of seven months. I’ve yet to do any actual baby shopping as I haven’t decided on what we need and it’s baffling enough for a first-timer, let alone in a foreign language, but that might come up. Also have been thinking about attitudes toward pregnant women and babies in various countries (Turks LOVE the babies, New Yorkers can’t be bothered to give you a subway seat and sigh loudly at the sight of a stroller), though I’m reluctant to start any debate after reading all the hateful comments on my first post. Anything you’d like to read about being pregnant abroad?

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Posted in Istanbul move, meta, Personal, Turkey

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Expat lesson learned: pantomime and broken Turkish

Posted on December 15, 2010 | 2 Comments

I’m going to ignore my many pending posts and excuses about not blogging and just post about a typical Istanbul experience. Months ago, Husband got the bright idea to apply for a mortgage refinance on our Brooklyn apartment. Due to annoying coop rules about subletting, it has been sitting empty since we left in April and with lower interest rates, he figured it would be a good way to save some money on the place while we’re away in Turkey. With visions of a few hundred dollars more in my bank account each month, I agreed and applied online through our bank. A few weeks after getting approved for the lower interest loan, I received a letter by email outlining the many pieces of paperwork I’d need to provide the bank, and then realized my coop board would require even more. Thus became the first of many times in which I burst into tears of frustration over the refi.

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Posted in Istanbul move, Personal

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Now even more Notorious on Gadling

Posted on July 6, 2010 | 1 Comment

As of today, I’m pleased to join the team of one of my favorite travel blogs, Gadling.com. I’ll be writing about the Istanbul expat experience as well various/sundry travel news. I’ll still be posting updates on this blog regularly but please feel free to subscribe to my Gadling RSS feed here. My first posts included a Q & A on my travel favorites and a look at expat bloggers and how they can help travelers. Stay tuned for more!

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Posted in Istanbul move, meta, Personal, travel

Expat lesson learned: you don’t have to go home but you can’t bank here

Posted on June 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

Another bit of frustration I’ve experienced here has been financial, and not just the exorbitant prices I’m willing to pay for wine and pork products. While banking and international transactions can be tricky whenever you travel, it gets more complicated when you are traveling long-term and don’t know when you’ll next be home or near your local bank branch.

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Posted in Istanbul move, Personal

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Expat lesson: the concern of Turks

Posted on June 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

I’m hardly the first to point out how nice, hospitable, and gracious Turkish people are, and beyond the typical tourist interactions of waiters, guides, and hotel staff, I’m finding out how deeply their concern runs for foreigners. Each Turk that I’ve met and asked for recommendations on restaurants or help on getting errands done has offered to make calls for me or accompany me to the cell phone store, which I often happily accept. In a few situations, I’ve found the concern of strangers to be a little much, albeit well-meaning and thoughtful.

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Expat lesson learned: say okay and pay

Posted on June 10, 2010 | 2 Comments

After six weeks, four visitors, and two trips out of the country, I’m beginning to settle into expat life in Turkey. It’s a bit like being a retarded child: you speak in stilted and monosyllabic sentences, simple tasks take hours or even days, and you can get away with things regular folk can’t because they know that you don’t know any better. Occasionally or even daily if you try hard enough, you will have a small victory and learn something new about your new city.

One of my favorite (and few) Turkish words is tamam, which means okay, all right, perfect, etc. Most of my transactions here begin with me asking for something in broken Turkish (“Shoe. Fix. Please. Yes?”), them giving me a lengthy response I don’t understand, me smiling and saying tamam, offering what I think the price is, and eventually leaving with more or less what I needed. Once I realized that there is little chance of agreeing to something serious in another language when you are in a shoe shine shop, I figured it was okay to just smile and nod. Additionally, every business that I have had even a mildly successful transaction with has earned my full loyalty. The first time in my local cobbler, I left one shoe to have the sole repaired with no idea how I would claim it or when it would be ready, and returned an hour later to find it fixed, shined to a blinding sheen, and paid about a dollar. I’ve been back several times since with similar results. And maybe eventually the old man’s words will sink in through osmosis and I’ll actually understand the long stream of comments he is making about my shoes.

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Istanbul apartment: a tour!

Posted on May 28, 2010 | 6 Comments

I’ve started to upload my photos of Istanbul including some pix of our temporary apartment in Osmanbey/Nişantaşı, so I thought I’d give a little tour.

Our street is lined with wholesale fabric shops, making me think of Tim Gunn saying, “Teşekkür ederim, Mood!” every time I walk by. Each afternoon, the fabric salesmen stand outside smoking and drinking tea intensely, and staring at me as I walk home like I’m the Queen of England.

Apartment view

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Posted in Istanbul move, Personal, Uncategorized

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Discovering Istanbul as a tourist

Posted on May 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

Just another day at the office

Thanks all for reading and commenting on my pity-party post, I wanted to dispell the myth that I’m sitting languidly at a cafe and having charming shopping expeditions to local fish markets.  After two weeks in the city (first at the airport and now in an apartment), I’m starting to adjust to living in limbo a foreign country. A week in an airport hotel made me a crackerjack Istanbul transit user, well-acquainted with all of the hotel staff, and adept at running across highways, and now we’ve been moved to an apartment in Nisantasi for at least the rest of the month. I went to Milan for a few days and returned to Turkey with my mother to play tourist for much of last week, along with running the many errands that come along with settling into a new place. Unfortunately, the internet in the apartment building was down for much of last week, making any updates infrequent and my “to look up when I have internet” list a mile long. Every day as a new expat is a series of major and minor fails, a few satisfying wins, all in a constant state of bafflement and very different from just visiting a city.  More on life as a new expat to come, but first a few observations/discoveries from my time as a tourist here.

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Posted in Istanbul move, Turkey

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