Touchdown in Taksim Square

We set down in Taksim Square and all our fellow passengers dispersed quickly. We followed the path down the hill through an open space where the city’s metro resurfaced. At the bottom was a festival which seemed to be setting up for the day. There was a stage, lots of food stalls and plenty of pop-up shops. After a quick browse, we went to inspect the monument erected to dedicate the foundation of Turkey. We took a short break in front of one of the traditional trams, then followed the tracks down the main precinct where a huge range of modern-day shops surrounded it either side. We then wandered south to take in the Galata Tower. There was quite a long queue to enter this which astonished us and other people. I followed the queue to the front to ensure that it was moving then we waited in line for about half an hour.   

As a European, if you could or have to live in the US, what state would you choose and why?

I’ve been to the USA on three different trips. I’ve visited a number of cities and met some great people. I think most people would commonly answer New York; and while I’ve visited and enjoyed the sights of New York; I wouldn’t like to live there. In some ways it’s the commercial cesspit of America. I think I’d like to be further west. I really enjoyed visiting San Francisco and regretted not having enough time there. I missed the opportunity to ride a trolley and didn’t get to go out to Alcatraz. But living in California would be difficult as I wouldn’t appreciate the heat all year round and I don’t have a beach body. One of my favourite cities was Boston and I did enjoy the city’s culture there; but I also enjoy travelling. If I’m choosing a state, I’d like to be in a central hub so that I can explore as much as possible. So I think I’ll settle in Colorado. It’s not somewhere that I’ve been but it’s central and I’ve heard excellent things from people that do live there. Time to sort out my skis…

The Big Bus of Istanbul

We decided to see a few more of the sights that were in the modern part of the city. Our primary destination was Taksim Square. I was all for jumping on a tram, but Mum wasn’t that keen riding on public transport with people that didn’t speak our language. I wondered if this was because of our tram mix-up yesterday but Mum didn’t confess to this. Instead, we picked up a map for a tourist double-decker bus and this seemed the best option as we could get a guided tour along the way. We approached the bus but there was a bit of confusion over the fare as it was advertised in both euros and lira, so I had to nip back to the hotel for more supplies. After boarding, it took us a while to get the on-board commentary up and running, but we recognised where our stop was and got off to explore.

 

Late for a not so Important Date #dreamdiary 102

I’m late for work with no excuse. I was due to start at midday, but I didn’t arrive until 2pm. What possible explanation could I have come up with? I actually awoke at midday but I still can’t account for the two hours that it took to travel the half mile journey. If this is to be a regular occurrence then it’s certainly going to portray something about my character and reliability. I’m tempted to lie but I just can’t think of anything that sounds reasonable and honest. Luckily, it’s been a well-staffed day and there’s enough people present to cover me. The managers aren’t mad but they are concerned about this behaviour, and we’re all standing outside the goods lift trying to figure it out. They’re not letting me go about my duties until I give a valid reason. Oddly enough, I don’t seem to care. I’m just waiting for them to make a decision about whether I should carry on, be let go, or be sent for a psychological evaluation. Fortunately, when I wake up, it’s just under two hours before I’m due to start a shift at 7am.

Kebabs and Corn

I love trying different foods. I like to eat with my eyes rather than by taste, and I hate missing out. That’s why I’d rather eat in a restaurant that I’d previously walked by and looked in to see what people are eating. But there were two must dos when visiting Turkey. The first is a kebab. You can order a kebab in any restaurant and it’ll come with as much meat, sticks and vegetables you can order, but the best is the donner kebab. The best ones are served in booths on the street where you can see that the meat has been grilling slowly all day. I had mine with yoghurt and he offered Turkish spice rather than chilli on it. I asked for a little to try and it was certainly a powerful spice! The other thing I tried was grilled corn on the cob; again from a street vendor. These came in various sizes and were fresh from the field and still had the green kern attached. They just add butter and pepper, and it melts in your mouth. Delicious! 

 

"If you're doing anything interesting in the world, you are going to have critics. You can't stop it. Move forward. It's not worth losing any sleep over."

 -Jeff Bezos.

People will always be jealous of your success. To them it seems that you’ve earnt your reputation overnight, but you know that you’ve been putting the time in to achieve your goals for years. It’s only now that people are beginning to hear of you, and success and fame also come with publicity in all forms. You might not be able to do everything perfectly, but at least you can learn from your mistakes. You can use the criticism to make improvements ready for the next time. If not, you need to put it behind you and move on, unless you can see that there’s a plausible gain from attacking your critics. You might get satisfaction from this, but it might also change other people’s opinions of you which could affect your future. And if you’re going to reflect on every little bad thing that happens to you, you’ll run out of opportunities to make progress.

Roaming About

I relied too much on technology for this trip. Sometimes it was out of sync, and sometimes it didn’t work at all. I’d downloaded a local map of the area to save data, but I still had to rely on GPS to ensure that we were going the right way. And because I was using a foreign network, it took a bit of time to update and determine the actual direction we were travelling in. This cost us quite a dash one morning as I thought that we were following the tramlines down to the harbour but what I didn’t realise that one of the stations that we passed fed into a second tramline. This meant that we had to turn around and make a dash so that we could catch our ferry. What also hit hard was the phone bill. It ran up to £50 for using data outside the EU area. Ouch!  

Hanging for Halfords

 It’s MOT time again, and as I’m doing more driving than usual over this difficult period, I decide that I’d better get my new tyres sorted out sooner than later. But for some reason they’d decided to test the car and fail it before fitting the new tyres. This seemed an odd approach as I’d ordered the tyres alongside the MOT and it just seems like a waste of everyone’s time. Unless that was their plan to give their mechanics more hours. It also seemed like the perfect plan to waste my day. After getting up early to drop my car off before heading to the gym, I thought that I’d at least get an update by lunchtime. By 4pm I’d heard nothing so I decided to head down. I had to join a queue of people waiting to collect their cars since they were only admitting two people into my office at a time. I never received an adequate explanation for the delay or of my advisories. It just seemed as if she wanted to process me as quickly as possible. But whether it was because of the situation or of the fact that it was close to quitting time remains to be seen.

Dossing with Dondurma

Ice cream in Turkey is an art form. It’s not the product itself but the way that they serve it. A typical stall involves the counter being stacked insanely high in cones and the vendor usually wears a decorative waistcoat and matching fez. The ice cream is usually fished out of a barrel with a gigantic ladle before the performance begins. The customer usually holds out the cone to receive the ice cream, but each wave of the ladle can differ from a gigantic portion that disappears in front of the customer’s eyes, a tumbling cone that’s scooped up at the last minute by the vendor, or a cone that’s stuck onto the ladle. We’ve heard that some people spend up to two years in training to master the performance. It would be a bit frustrating to wait in the queue to undergo the performance every time. Hopefully there’s a shortened version during busy periods so that waiting time is kept to a minimum but people still have time to enjoy the fun. And of course, hopefully, they’ll take the performance in good jest. After all, ice cream is a treat and not a necessity.

Lego Star Wars: The [in]Complete Saga

I love the humour of the Lego games and their animations. Some of the levels are huge and they’re packed with hidden features to find. My favourite one was discovering a disco version of the Star Wars theme. I didn’t really master the art of lightsaber fighting with the Wii remote, and found it much easier with the button pushing. What I do find strange with modern-day games is the lives structure. In old school games if you ran out of lives you had to start again. This would mean that you spent hours scouting out all the cheats to collect as many lives as possible. Nowadays, you just respawn where you fell. Mind you, for a game this big, that would drive you mad. It took me ages to find the missing minikit pieces in the timed levels, then it took me a while to work out that I hadn’t finished the Super Story either. Strictly, I didn’t finish the last level within the hour, but it still gave me the completion bonus. I was a bit disappointed with the 100% completion bonus which gave an anti-climax to the game, especially when I completed without the aid of any walkthroughs. I was hoping that it would be something a bit more fun. Perhaps they ran out of room on the disc. Of course, we all know now that there’s at least another three stories coming out. Whether this will be added to the next generation of consoles will remain to be seen.

Here's where you could have visited...

We saw some great sights on our ferry trip. We saw beautiful ancient mosques in front of tall skyscrapers which stretched up to the surrounding hillsides. We saw a beautiful castle with massive walls that looked like it would be a dream to visit. There was a fantastic waterside view of a palace grounds that we saw from our tour bus. We passed underneath many suspension bridges and wondered whether many of the adjacent cargo ships were too big to do the same. There was even a building shaped like a ship from a distance but appeared some sort of administrative centre as we passed it. But at the end of the day, we had no idea what we were looking at until we returned to the hotel and resumed our internet connection. We’d opted for the cheapest tour and we couldn’t get our audio guide working properly. Instead, we had old women trying to sell us scarfs. Maybe we’ll do a bit more planning next time.

Friendship

There were once two friends who would meet every day in the woods. The were supposed to be gathering food for their families but they enjoyed each other’s company so much that they never seemed to accomplish what they set out to do. So towards the end of their day, they would ask others for help who would gladly assist them with their load. Time went on and so did they. They struggled to get their tasks done even more and relied on the kindness of others who felt sorry for their age and inability to get things done. The younger folk replied but they started to get annoyed as they’d note how little the friends got done while they toiled extra hard so that they could accomplish their tasks too. They wondered how the friends would survive if they just focused on their tasks and said no. Perhaps the concept of the friend’s failure was too great a weight for them to bear, but it still meant more work for them. This meant that there were less friendships in the wood.

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this part of the saga a bit easier to follow. There’s still few action sequences and the events mostly take place through dialogue; but the majority of this book centred on a specific set of characters which made the story easier to follow which avoids the previous confusion of which characters held which roles. For a science-fiction story, there is a bit of assumed science here and Asimov doesn’t always explain his gadgets and the use of them clearly. I’m also beginning to sense a Star Wars parody here, only with extra politics. The Mule replaces Darth Vader and Bayta is Padme defending the republic. I did find it quite strange that a spy accompanied them at all times and felt that another character would have been more dramatic; though espionage seems to be evident in almost every chapter. I’m also disappointed to read that there’s still no robots; although that could still change and that could be a great part (or hinderance) of Seldon’s great plan. But there’s a great sense of hope here too as afflicted parties battle to avoid a pre-determined fate under their own guidance. The story continues…

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Meandering Miah

There was once a smart girl that I had the privilege to work with. She held the same supervisory position as me but in a sales capacity. She was small but had a cute face in all the right places and loved to chat in her Brummie accent. She loved to club and occasionally we’d venture out of our town and into the city and she’d always invited us to call in on her night out and she’d suggest great places for us to try. Because of her partying lifestyle, she managed to land herself a dream husband who held that perfect occupation that all women loved; a fireman. Then she downsized her time to begin a course in childcare. Then she left the company for a new career. She had a boy then some years later a girl. She still pops into the store occasionally when she’s in the area.

A bit of Bread

Mum wanted me to try some authentic Turkish Lavas. After leaving our hotel, she spoke to the first waiter that she saw and explained that she was after some balloon-style bread. ‘Ah, Lavas’ he said and invited us up his steep steps and into his first floor restaurant. We did want to sit outside at the roadside tables but he said the diners are upstairs. It was probably because they don’t like bringing food down the steps and meals take longer to prepare whereas a round of smashed drinks is replaced quite quickly. So we ordered the Lavas as a starter with some dips and sat at a picnic bench followed by some pizza and a burger. He also recommended some fries to which we agreed. Then we discovered that they don’t serve alcohol. To be fair not all Turkish restaurants do but when the food came out it was served on paper plates, so it seemed that it was for license reasons rather than a religious one. We had to wait ages, then the mains arrived with no Lavas! When the waiter realised, we just got sliced bread. We ate quickly, didn’t tip and vowed not to come again. We spent the rest of the trip looking in at all the restaurants and the food that they served before venturing into a premises again. 

Clangers Talk

I’m not a big fan of The Clangers. As far as I can see, it’s about a load of mice who squeak in a foreign language, or at least a language disguised as muffling. You can make out the phrase ‘Goodbye’ quite easily. It might have been entertaining in the days that anything cute and colourful that moved was considered watchable for children or at least a distraction for them. But nowadays there’s actions and plotlines and everyone’s looking for a punchline. For all we know, these mice could be swearing at us and asking us to pull our pants down. I wonder if other characters eventually materialise if you keep talking or if you get a new character each time. Or perhaps the algorithm just mimics what you say. It might be entertaining if you’ve watched the show, but for me it’s annoying rather than reminiscent and I remember that I have better things to do.

From Ancient to Modern

Can a city work with ancient architecture and modern functional buildings blended together? Will the infrastructure be able to cope with the demand? Or will it need to be abandoned together to make way for the new? If the ancient sites are to be admired, people will want modern facilities for better convenience. This means that space will have to be treated for them to be preserved, and these areas also need to be maintained. A case in point is the American tourist visiting Edinburgh and remarking how fitting it is that the Scottish built their castle next to the train station. But too many facilities without monitoring the ancient sites is a chance for crime and vandalism to occur, especially in times of political unrest. And if these sites aren’t encouraging the visitors that you want, you need to get rid of them or see about preserving them elsewhere. Sometimes you must make way for change. 

A New Year's Eve like no Other

The trouble with most New Year’s Eve’s is trying to stay awake until the big moment. This wasn’t especially difficult since I’d been at work the night before and decided to treat myself to a big lie-in. Once I’d got up, I decided to see if I could book a gym session. I usually do it on-line but my gym reported through social media that it was having problems with its booking system; probably because of the bank holiday and the fact that it wanted to close early. I gave them a call and wasn’t surprised to find the line engaged. It’s probably because we shifted up a tier the night before and people were making enquiries about their memberships and their group classes which are now postponed. I half expected the gym to be super busy because of this but I managed to book a session within the hour. So after that it simply a case of entertaining Mother with board games until the penultimate hour where we headed upstairs to our respective zoom parties.

Here's where you could have Stayed

Our hotel was a boutique hotel in the old part of the city. There’s no room in this area for a chain hotel or anywhere to cater for coach parties. But there were a lot of hotels of similar size. We spent our first few days wondering if we were returning to the front or the rear of the building, but it also gave us the opportunity to see where else we could have stayed. While these places were too small for us to randomly call in and see their facilities; we could still gain a sense of their business practice through their window displays. There was one that was covered with flowers and had a box window full of plant pots and plants stuffed into a pair of jeans and wellies. Another had a grand entrance but its corner view made the rooms from the outside look like a shantytown. It’s hard to say whether these businesses (our own hotel included) will still be trading in the near future. 

The Last Day of School #dreamdiary101

We’re in a sports hall for a final assembly. A speaker has wished us well and we’re all dismissed to return to our dormitories to pack up our things. I spend some time milling with the crowd saying goodbye to various people and faces that I recognise. Suddenly, the crowd thins out and I’ve got no idea where my home buddy is. A passer-by spots me and tells me that I’m to meet him in the car park. I drift through the corridors back to my room to pass, stopping outside a shop that sells sports racquets that’s randomly inside the corridors.  There’s racquets leaning against the wall underneath the windowsill, and a big tin bin full of tennis balls is being used as a doorstop. I reach my room and start stripping my red bedsheets and use them to outline the contents of my old blue leather suitcase. Then I start filling it with dirty clothes. At least when I get to my friend’s house I can just discreetly pick them all up as a sack and shove it into the washing machine and none will be any the wiser as to what’s inside. 

Swirling Durlish

There’s a famous Turkish dance known as the Whirling Dervish. It consists of a team of men dressed in conical hats and white dress robes spinning as fast as they can. It’s like watching human spinning tops. There was a restaurant close to our hotel that’s in a prime location just around the corner from two archaeological attractions and near some souvenir shops. Its sunken plaza away from the road certainly makes it a convenient spot. We’d pass this place most nights and we saw a ‘Whirling Dervish’ perform every night. The performer that I saw seemed to just turn in circles with his hands in the air. He wasn’t moving particularly fast and I didn’t sense much enthusiasm either. He seemed to draw quite a crowd as every table was full, but we managed to watch from the footpath.  I wonder what the restaurant’s footfall was and whether anyone considered a return visit.

Beauty & the Beast

This was the first of Disney’s films that I’d seen from animation into a live-action film. The sets look amazing, and it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s been digitally recreated and the set. I’d even like to think that Belle’s village exists somewhere (other than in a theme park) and that a team of location scouts were recruited to hunt it out. Watson’s skills as an actress were believable. This was the first time that I’d watched her in something other than wizards and it’s good to see that she’s grown out of her arrogance. And I didn’t spot Ewan McGregor as a candlestick either. But I’m not entirely sure why Disney has commissioned these films. As far as I can see, there’s no difference between plots other than a hole where Phillipe conveniently stays at the castle for Belle to make her escape. There’s no new songs or characters; even though the run time seemed to have increased. Perhaps they’re encouraging an older generation to reconnect with their movies and purchase the animated version to entertain their little ones. Even so, it’s a very enjoyable movie.

A Wander on the Rocks

As we’d had a large breakfast we weren’t really in the mood for a lunch. We’d seen the planned sights for the day so we decided to take a walk alongside the sea. We hadn’t really researched this far; but we headed south until we hit the coastline. What we didn’t realise was that because the historical part of the city had very narrow roads, the city had decided to build one giant main road alongside the Sea of Marmara. We ambled along as best we could until we could cross the road and walk next to the sea. There was no sign of a beach but we did see lots of rocks occupied by busy fishermen earning their keep. Sometimes there’d be an odd sunbather. We did pass an old lighthouse and sections of the walled part of the city. Occasionally we saw the odd boat offloading tourists from a Bosporus cruise, but these looked quite pricey as they included a banquet.  What we didn’t take was any water and our mouths were very dry when we returned to our hotel. 

 

Big Books

 Mum felt that we needed to try and create some more space in my room. She kept bruising her leg on the TV cabinet as she brushed by. Her plan was to mount the TV on the wall but this meant that I’d have no space for any DVDs or its player which was stored underneath. Instead, I proposed constructing a shelf which would house the TV on top of a chest of drawers which would allow the DVD player to sit underneath. This would then create room for a bookcase to sit in place of the cabinet which could hold any excess items and wouldn’t protrude out from the wall as much. The bookcase would also be able to hold any surplus items from underneath my desk which would be the host for my new PC tower. It also holds a pile of books on the bedside table. In fact, it’s quite impressive as to what it does hold.

Airborne Turks

Flying with a foreign airline can be a bit risky; especially if you haven’t flown with them before. I half expected miniature goats in cages to be loaded onto the plane or old women carrying hens that they couldn’t ear to be without. But to their credit, Turkish Airlines did a good job. Their staff offer service with a smile and are friendly and polite which is more than can be said for some of the major UK operators whose staff are willing to enforce the rules the moment you attempt to unbuckle your seatbelt. There was a good range of in-flight media; though Mum’s didn’t work so we switched seats as I was happy to read my book. The food on offer was Turkish fayre but it was complimentary, and you got a choice and it wasn’t bad. But the thing that made me chuckle most of all was the safety video. They’d got Lego to create an animation with its usual humour.

 

Fashion Show #nuclearmermaid 17

The key difference between her and the others were her flippers. If she could wrap her tail well, her fins could be used to portray the leather covers that the bipeds wore; even though this meant that she would have to stand up to move. This would mean that she’d need a stick to keep herself propped up. Fortunately, there was just such a stick next to the water with some shiny metal on its end. She’d still tower above the bipeds though. She hoped that the bipeds came in different sizes though she wasn’t too sure of this. She picked up a top cover and wondered if she could gather her long hair into it to make a headpiece. But the main thing that she’d need to hide were her beautiful breasts protruding from her torso. She didn’t know how best to do this since they’d only developed while she’d been in captivity and she couldn’t recall any sightings of the female bipeds.

Fountain of Misfortune

This fountain is set in a gorgeous square. I didn’t even note the mosaics in the fountain’s base; unless that’s a recent addition. At night it’s lit up with many colours. Oddly, I never got any shots of the fountain in daylight. It’s a very open area between the two churches; and for that reason it’s easy for the police to patrol it from a distance. There’s hardly any trees to offer shade or cover. It’s a public place and there are many benches for people to sit and soak up the atmosphere. It’s well laid out with its stone cobbles and its fences to discourage people from sitting in the flowerbeds; not that they don’t succeed. I wonder what mischief goes on around here; or whether it’s a social sin to disturb the peaceful atmosphere. Surely someone must have gone for a dip, begged for cash or attempted a heckle? Perhaps we went at the wrong time of year for that.

My daughter's iPhone had been stolen during class at school and caught someone who stole it, but her parents say that they will not pay compensation. What should I do?

 You’re not clear on what happened after the phone was lost and what the costs that occurred were once you realised the theft was discovered. Without this knowledge, it’s difficult to establish what compensation you are entitled to. Is the phone damaged or unusable? Is there an inconvenient situation which arose in the intermission between the discovery of the loss and the realisation of the theft?  Did you spend an appropriate amount of time searching for the phone that would have benefitted you in another situation? Was the phone returned to the rightful owner and in working order? For all I know, your daughter could have dropped it in kindergarten which begs the question as to why she had one at all.  It’s also very clever for an iPhone to have caught the person who stole it all on its own as you have alleged. Finally, you haven’t said why they will not pay compensation. Is it because they won’t or they can’t? If it’s the latter, is there a more practical solution that can be put into place so that the offender can pay off her debt instead of you screaming for $$$? So before we call on the lawsuits; let’s have some context and specifics please! This answer was brought to you by the department of common sense.

Just Checking

Mum had always wanted to visit Istanbul and sail up the Bosporus. She was due to visit as part of a cruise but the itinerary was changed. A Turkish TV station had been infiltrated causing civil disruption throughout the country, and the tour company felt that it was in their best interests not to visit and she missed out. So just before we began our trip there a few years later; our destination had hit the news again. So before we boarded our plane, we had to have our tickets checked again by a member of Special Branch to ensure that our visit was legit, and we weren’t up to mischief. When we arrived, we noticed that road blocks and check points were in place for vehicles too. As it was our first time there, it was hard to say whether these were a regular occurrence or because of recent events; and as tourists it would make us appear if we were to suddenly start asking all these questions.

"Few people become successful overnight at any endeavor. Most people have learned to stick with whatever it is they wish to achieve and to work step by step until they reach their objective. That has certainly proven true in my life.”

 -Chuck Norris.

It would be great if we could just download the next set of skills that we need for the following day; and delete the ones that we don’t think that ‘ll use. We’d suddenly be experts at everything. The only problem that we’d have then would be that everyone would be assimilated into having the same set of skills, and that there’d be no uniqueness left in the world. But back in the twenty-first century; following steps just sounds too easy and it’s like you’re following someone else’s plan. Some of us are still busy figuring out what the next step is and what it is that we should stick to; let alone knowing whether we’ll achieve our target.  Some of us may aim too high every time and will never reach it, while others want an award simply for getting up in the morning. It’s certainly bad news for anyone who fancies a change of direction. 

Bad Smell Day

Do you get ready to go to the barbershop? I suppose a pre-visit shower would be courteous and gives you the opportunity to get rid of any tangles as well for a smother snip. I wonder if body smells are amplified in close quarters or if they’re just more noticeable. I guess they’re used to it or it’s something that they have to put up with. They probably get people finishing their shift early and find the convenient time to call in on the way home; either before or after the pub. I suppose they have to consider the difference between a sale and a potentially loyal customer or setting standards for your service; especially if there are other customers waiting. But then you’ve got the after smell of freshly laundered fingers in your hair for the rest of the day (unless it’s the ammonia from the hairspray). So once again, do you tidy up before your trim or afterwards?