Here’s your Flickr set.

Like Nas said when he was in Istanbul, “I never sleep ’cause sleep is the cousin of death.” This place has turned in to quite the nocturnal city for me. There is constantly action, activity, and a bunch of people out late. I don’t go to sleep before 3:00 in the morning here, and it’s often later than that.

So what am I doing with myself on these late nights in Istanbul? How about an easily digestible list and a bunch of pictures?

1. Accompany Franz to Photo Shoots

I’m working on a video project for a club here called Indigo. This means that I go there on Friday and Saturday nights with Franz and “help” him shoot video. Essentially this means that I get in for free, hang out, and try to point out things that would make good video. Here’s Indigo:

We also go to a place called “Dogz Star” on occasion. Despite it’s stupid name, it’s a cool place — even when the music is eardrum-splittingly loud metal or electro-goth DJ girl. Three levels with the top level playing cool old American rock and some genuinely different music acts on the stage downstairs. We saw a guy called called “Art Dictator” who played guitar over pre-recorded drum tracks, and screamed with misogynistic comics he drew projected on the wall behind him.

This is Art Dictator along with some other Dogz Star shots:

2. Buy Flowers for my Turkish Mom

Roommate Hatice’s mom came to stay with us for five days. She was incredible. An unstoppable Turkish force of delicious cooking and thorough cleaning. She actually arrived at our apartment with bags of pastries. She baked a cake and brought it. She cooked us dinner every night and served breakfast in the morning. She cleaned places in our apartment that I didn’t know existed. I thought to buy her some flowers and Bryan told me how to say, “I love you, Mom” in Turkish, though it certainly doesn’t compensate for her awesomeness.

This is her and Hatice along with some examples of the delicious:

3. Enjoy my membership in the Spanish-American City Exploration Club

We’ve currently only got two members in the SACEC, but it works out well. Bryan and I go all over the place here. An architect, he’s like a kid in a candy store at construction sites or places with interesting architecture. Dude can talk serious shop when it comes to structures.

One day, we went to have tea during an open gallery at a contemporary art organization that is only two blocks from our apartment. The current gallery installation is a kitchen. Just a kitchen. It looks like a kitchen and works like a kitchen. It has tea. But this kitchen is special because it’s art. …. Eh.

After the disappointing art and uncomfortable conversation with the girls working at the gallery, we decided to just get on the Metro and take it to the end of the line. Fun and city exploration ensued. We do something like this every few days. We dubbed our first outing “Leventate!” (sorta like “levantate” en espanol) thanks to the name of the last Metro stop, Levent.

The SACEC also enjoys evenings on the town on weekends:

4. Listen to the Sounds of the Street Sellers

People are always walking down the streets with carts or baskets of stuff. Usually food, but occasionally random junk. They yell out whatever it is they’re selling and you just yell back at them from your window if you want them to stop. My favorite, though, are the gas trucks from the gas company Aygaz. They play a 4 second jingle on every block with a female voice that sings, “Ayyyygaz!” to announce their presence in case you need a new tank of gas for your stove. America has musical ice cream trucks, Turkey has musical gas trucks.

5. Hang Out with the Roommates

This takes various forms, but involves things like playing games, watching Hatice (who is truly the Turkish version of my sister) try on outfits and giving her feedback, taking in stray cats and then kicking them out upon Bryan’s allergic reactions, and home improvement tasks (with or without ninja garb):

6. Miss Colombia

Colombia remains tops for me on my trip. As my friend Steve put it, “Some places just fit.” It was just a place on a map until I’d been and now care about people that live there.

Flipping through the headlines on CNN yesterday, I got goosebumps when I read about a bomb blowing up in an area I used to hang out in Bogota and killing two people, one of them a 25 year-old girl. (The bomb was actually placed inside an ATM that I had personally used while in Bogota.) Despite the fact that the odds were minuscule that Mafe (pictured below in a photo taken a few blocks from where the bomb went off) was affected, I didn’t really feel at ease until I heard heard from her.

It’s interesting to reflect on the way I felt about headlines like this before I left and after visiting Colombia. Before leaving, headlines of this sort almost elicited a Devil-may-care laugh from me. That changes when you’ve got friends in a place and remember what it looks like because you actually walked around there. … And used the damned Citibank ATM that the FARC blew up.

… That’s all for now, y’all!

Here the Flickr set link again. I added a picture of Fantom Bar in the previous post, too, for the curious.

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