Turkish people seem to view children as public property. It is expected that cute kids will be admired and entertained by strangers. My Russian teacher has a three-year-old son and a baby son, and she talked about how strange it was when she first arrived to have her kids manhandled without her permission. We sat together in a tea house outdoors, and one homeless man stuck his fingers into the stroller and started petting the baby's hands, a lot of people stopped and leaned over the stroller smiling and baby-talking, and a few people tousled the three-year-old's hair. Sasha said that in Ukraine the toddler was friendly and outgoing around strangers, but now is shy and reserved and uncomfortable being touched. In America, a woman would freak out if a strange man picked her baby up out of the stroller and started cooing at him! But here it seems perfectly normal and harmless.
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In almost all countries in the world with the exception of the US and maybe Canada, soccer/football is the national sport. Everyone watches it, learns the chants, bets on matches, buys jerseys, and basically bleeds the colors of their favorite team. Turkey takes the love of soccer to a whole new level- here it is a way of life. Istanbul has 5 professional teams that all play in the top league in Turkish competition, and everyone has a team that they support- no one seems to be impartial here. When there is a match on, all the bars and cafes are full of people facing the TV, glued to the game, passionate about the result. Every vegetable stand and mini-market has a tv inside so that even men stuck at work can see the game in its entirety. The best games are the "derby" games between rival Istanbul teams. You can tell when those games are on because everyone is wearing a soccer jersey, and shouts drift out of the windows of cafes and homes when goals are scored or great saves are made.
Mike is big football fan and his favorite team is Manchester United, and he was ecstatic (as ecstatic as a British man gets) when he found out that they were coming here to play Besiktas, Turkey's champion from last year. We bought tickets online in the Besiktas section and I got to experience my very first soccer game. It was the perfect game to go to! Even if you hate soccer, you would have enjoyed this game. Besiktas fans recently received the title of "the world's loudest fans" at 132 decibels, and it was amazing to see the devotion for the game that all the fans had.
The stadium is designed so that 90% are home fans, with just a tiny section in the corner reserved for away fans. This section is fenced in like a cage, and even has a net over the top so that no one can throw anything at them. We could have gotten tickets to be in the Man Utd section, but they cost 123 pounds, compared to 75 lira in the home section. We also thought it would be a better cultural experience to sit with the Turks. Who really wants to spend 90 minutes with a bunch of British soccer hooligans anyways? :)
We got to the stadium an hour and a half before the match started, and already some people were there, eating bags of sunflower seats and every so often chanting Besiktas chants in response to the Man Utd fans in the cage. Once the game started, all the fans were on their feet and remained standing for the entire 90 minutes. Building up to the kick-off, all the fans were chanting and jazz-handing, getting louder and louder. At the moment the first kick was made, 32,145 (minus 2 because Mike and I didn't know what was going on... 32,143) fans simultaneously said, "Shhhhh" and then again built up into louder and louder songs. Everyone knew all the chants, and we discovered about halfway though that in the section opposite, there were 3 man standing up facing the spectators and leading the chant. Their section would start a chant, and then it would go around the stadium like an echo. These men are called "amigos" and their job is to plan and choreograph new chants and songs. Before the match, hardcore fans meet up to learn the chants for that game. The only chants we understood must have taken them hours to think up "Fuck you Manchester" and "Fuck you Rooney" (yes, very original).
Having heard horror stories about violence between Turkish and English fans and seeing the away section cage made me quite frightened to be a white faced, non-Besiktas-jersey-wearing, English speaking girl sitting voluntarily in a sea of hardcore Besiktas fans. We got some weird looks by the ticket collectors and security staff for clearly being foreigners in the Turkish section. The only fans we talked to were totally nice about Mike being a Manc and a Man Utd fan, and didn't make us fear for our lives even in the slightest.
The game was definitely not the most exciting game in history, but the atmosphere more than made for it. Manchester won with a goal 13 minutes before the finish, so Mike silently cheered while the entire stadium silenced for the first and only time all game.
Here is a video taken during the quieter second half to give a taste of what the stadium was like- imagine this x100 in your ears for 90+ minutes!
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Mike got a haircut in a Turkish barber shop, and it was a great experience for me to sit and watch and learn about the 'secret' world of men's barbers. There were 6 or 7 barber chairs, and just as many barbers. The place was busy- every seat was taken and men were waiting for their turn. Mike went in just for a haircut, but most men were there getting shaved too. It seemed that the normal procedure goes like this: a man sits down in the chair and presumably tells the barber what he wants done. The barber slathers shaving cream on his face and neck using an oversized makeup brush and fits a new straightrazor knife into the handle. He proceeds to shave face and neck entirely, or to shape the moustache/sideburns into some ridiculous and very Turkish shape. As he shaves the hair off, he wipes the blade every few strokes on his non-shaving hand between thumb and index finger. He goes over each part of the face a few times to make sure all the hairs are gone, and then goes over it carefully again when he's done to make sure he hasn't missed anything. He rinses off the shaving cream and puts on one of two kinds of facecreams. Some men opt for a peel-off facemask- warm green goo that looks like leg wax and is applied using a tongue depressor, and some preferred a seafoam green cream that dries and is washed off 5 minutes later. Then, if the man has facial hair that wasn't shaved off (like a moustache), the barber goes through it with a comb and tiny scissors, trimming and shaping it symmetrically. Then he pulls out a spool of black thread, and proceeds to pluck the man's eyebrows using a procedure known as threading. One man even had a "tram line" cut into his eyebrow using a tiny razorblade. Once the beard/facial work is all done, the barber finally moves onto the hair. The cut is standard enough, except the barber uses no less than 3 different pairs of scissors, a straightrazor on the neck, and a mini-trimmer. The hair is then dried and styled using a hairdryer and round brush to spike or curl the hair into the silliest style possible. It seems as though every man then got a gob of hair gel and/or wax smeared into his hair and enough hairspray to kill the entire ozone sprayed on just in case the gel hadn't held the hairs in place enough.
Mike as a foreigner wasn't spared any of this barber shop tradition! Check out the style he got:
We can't decide if the barber was giving him a legitimate "normal" Turkish style, or if the fact that Mike is a Manchester United fan and he is a Besiktas fan made him give Mike an intention wanker style. I guess we'll never know! Once Mike washed out the tons of product, he was left with a good cut so it doesn't matter with what intent the barber styled him.
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Ramadan (Ramazan in Turkish), Islam's holiest month, just ended on Friday. Even though Istanbul is a Western city where most people claim to be non-practicing Muslims, Islam is much more noticeable here than in Kyrgyzstan. There are mosques in every neighborhood, and 5 times a day, the multiple calls to prayer can be heard. Guidebooks warn that during Ramadan most shops and restaurants are closed because people should be fasting from sunrise to sunset, but the vast majority (if not all) shops in our neighborhood and in the center were open. We moved into our new apartment on the first day of Ramadan, and were awakened at 2:30 am by a drummer. He walked down our street and we heard him from other areas of our neighborhood too, always with the same beat and just a few seconds in between each. Groggily we couldn't figure out why a salesman would choose a drum and the middle of the night as a way to sell something, and were slightly disturbed that we were stuck in a neighborhood with midnight, drumming salesmen. Eventually we put two and two together and decided that he must be a human alarm clock, waking people up for the pre-sunrise meal. We heard him every morning for the whole month of Ramadan. A few times we got up to watch him walk past, and sometimes he had a child with him, sometimes he knocked on doors trying to get money, and sometimes he even sang to himself. We got used to him and even sort of like being in a traditional enough neighborhood where that kind of thing still goes on. You can read more about this tradition here.
Mike and I both have jobs now, and we start this week. Mike works at a university and I work at a primary school. We will both have regular schedules, lots of holidays, and evenings and weekends off. Much better than the Istanbul language center life where you work all weekend and only know your schedule a week in advance. We are not ready to get back to work after almost 4 months of vacation and traveling. Wish us luck!
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