Category: Action/Thriller Publisher: Jack Scott
Copyright: Jan 18, 2013
"Tenko" without the guards, guns and barbed wire.
In 2009, Jack Scott and his civil partner, Liam, sold off the family silver and jumped the good ship Blighty for Muslim Turkey. They parachuted into paradise with eyes firmly shut and hoped for the best. When the blindfolds were removed what they saw wasn’t pretty. They found themselves peering over the rim of a Byzantine bear pit. Bitching and pretension ruled the emigrey roost. The white-washed ghettoes were populated by neo-colonial bar-room bores who hated the country they’d come from and hated the country they’d come to, and were obsessed with property prices, pork products and street dogs. Expat life was village life where your business was everyone’s business. For Liam, it was the barren badlands of the lost and lonely. For Jack it was the last stand of the charmless Raj - 'Tenko' without the guards, the guns and the barbed wire. It took them a while to find their feet and separate the wheat from the chavs but, determined to stay the course, eventually they found diamonds in the rough and roses among the weeds.
Welcome to Part Two of the mini-series which includes previously unpublished material together with Jack’s personal recommendations of the must-sees that Turkey has to offer to visitors and residents alike.
Excerpt
PREFACE
Have you ever dreamt of stepping off the monotonous treadmill, binning the wicked world of the waged and bagging yourself a pretty little place in the sun? Have you ever wondered what it’s really like to live as a jolly expat in a balmy foreign field? To get a real feel, you need to ask someone who’s been there, done that and bought all the fake t-shirts. In 2009, Jack Scott and his civil partner, Liam, sold off the family silver and jumped the good ship Blighty for Muslim Turkey. They parachuted into paradise with eyes firmly shut and hoped for the best. When the blindfolds were removed, what they saw wasn’t pretty. They found themselves peering over the rim of a Byzantine bear pit. Bitching and pretension ruled the emigrey roost. The white-washed ghettoes were populated by neo-colonial bar-room bores who hated the country they’d come from, hated the country they’d come to and were obsessed with property prices, pork products and street dogs. Expat life was village life, a place where your business was everyone’s business. For Liam, it was the barren badlands of the lost and lonely. For Jack it was the last stand of the charmless Raj - 'Tenko' without the guards, the guns and the barbed wire. It took the hapless couple a while to find their feet and separate the wheat from the chavs but, determined to stay the course, they eventually found diamonds in the rough and roses in the scrub. Regular replenishing trips back home to the warm bosom of friends and family became a vital tool in their expat survival kit. Jack wrote it all down in a blog for the world to ignore. He called it Perking the Pansies. Against the odds and quite by surprise, Perking the Pansies grew into the most successful blog of its kind in Turkey, attracting an international audience, the attention of the Turkish national press and hatching an award-winning autobiography. Jack raised a satirical mirror. Sometimes the reflection was funny, sometimes it was sad, and sometimes it was just plain ugly. His witterings struck a global chord: expats are expats wherever they pitch up.
After four glorious and inglorious years, the ties that bind eventually drew Jack and Liam back home to where the heart was and the health care was free. They upped sticks and paddled back to Blighty on the evening tide. They now live in the English cathedral city of Norwich set within the flatlands and big skies of Norfolk. With their Anatolian adventures firmly behind them, Jack has published the best of the blog from the Turkey years as a two volume e-book – Turkey, the Raw Guide and Turkey, Surviving the Expats. Welcome to Part Two of the mini-series. The uncensored director's cut includes previously unpublished material together with Jack’s personal recommendations of Turkey’s must-sees for visitors and residents alike. Jack likes to be functional as well as decorative.
ACT ONE
EMIGREYS AND OTHER ANIMALS
La Crème de la Crème
Sunday, November 07, 2010
The evening of Clement’s supper soiree arrived and we waited in our still empty house until most of the guests turned up before venturing next door. We approached with some trepidation. Neither Liam nor I are good in crowds of strangers and as new kids on the block, we sensed an added frisson to the occasion. With a cordial welcome, Clement led us like condemned lambs into the body of the kirk. There assembled were the congregation, the crème de la crème of the ex-pat community.
We grabbed a drink and bravely resolved to mingle. I occupied an empty seat on the patio next to butch Brigit from Brisbane, whom I rashly assumed to be a lesbian. I threw myself into conversation and our little tête-à-tête tripped along nicely until I innocently but unwisely enquired if she had a girlfriend. Her glacial glare said it all and she quickly rebuked me with “I don’t know what you mean!” Brigit ignored me for the rest of the evening. This was to be the first of many social gaffes, though in my defence it was an easy mistake to make given the lack of make-up, masculine attire and crash helmet hair-do. Well, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a bloody duck. My next social intervention met with much greater success. I sidled next to Charlotte, a vivacious, energetic kind of girl with a bouncing cleavage that heaved in rhythm to her filthy laugh. We hit it off immediately. Charlotte and tall, debonair, silver-haired husband, Alan, are ex-pat veterans and have lived in Turkey for eight years. They sold up in England and built their dream house in Yalıkavak. It was obvious we shared similar values and I sense a friendship might develop.
Next up was lovely social worker Nancy, Charlotte's best friend visiting from London. Nancy is a shapely, sassy lass of Cypriot extraction who speaks Turkish with a Cockney accent. She has abandoned a barren and loveless marriage in search of romance and orgasms. Nancy is having a passionate but stormy affair with a local skipper and wades ashore every now and then for a white knuckle ride. ‘Shirley Valentine’ sprang to mind.
Liam hovered nervously in the background and spoke mostly to Welsh Chrissy, a scary bottle-blond from the Valleys with a frizzy home perm. Chrissy is a plain rugby ball kind of gal, fat thighs and thick-set ankles poking out from a glut of gut. Her podgy spray-tanned face was painted like a second-hand drag queen. Husband Bernard is many years her senior. The passage of time has been cruel. The old boy is a lanky stick insect with a small-bowled belly like a large pea wedged halfway down a straw. What is left of his thinning hair has been dyed jet black and swept back to compensate. A tangerine tan outshines Chrissy’s tango’d complexion. Its unusual hue and intensity rounded off his Berlusconi-in-a-shell-suit look. Chrissy talked ten to the dozen and, in between dishing the dirt on everyone in the room, told Liam her tale. She once worked as a Lancôme beauty-care consultant, overseeing the important goings on the slap and fill counter in a Cardiff department store. Apparently, she broke the House of Fraser record for her sales of Juicy-Tube Lip Gloss. Her prize was an all-expenses paid weekend to Paris. It was in a three star Parisian hotel bar that she’d met Bernard. They’d both hailed from failed marriages. Chrissy wed a hod carrier from Port Talbot. The marriage lasted a year. Bernard’s wife left him after four decades and moved in with Sandra, a prison guard from Holloway Nick whom she’d met in an internet chat room for ladies who lick. Chrissy and Bernard decided to forsake wet Wales, drop their fractured pasts at left luggage and begin life anew in the Anatolian sun.
Last to arrive, marching in with a confident gait, were Susan and her husband Chuck. Susan is a pretty Fulham girl in her fifties and had clearly been gorgeous in her youth. Chuck is a well built and striking older man with tattoos and warm blue eyes. Feisty and independent, Susan ran away to Istanbul in her teens and there she met and married a philandering academic many, many years her senior. The marriage ended in divorce. She then tried on a second older Turk for size. They too divorced. Following her dalliance with the Turkish branch of Help the Aged, Susan left for the New World, settling in LA where she owned a coffee shop and developed a curious mid-Atlantic accent. Yankee Chuck’s chequered youth perfectly matches his seventies porn star looks. Susan and Chuck’s eyes met across the Gaggia coffee maker; they fell in love and married. Despite (or perhaps because of) his colourful past, Chuck has become a reformed character, virtually tee-total and a bit of a born again puritan. Susan, on the other hand, likes a drink or three. We were left with the distinct impression that despite many pretenders to the throne, Susan is truly the queen bee in these parts.
After a few hours of polite inquisition, we decided on a strategic withdrawal and walked back to the holiday let for a final shandy and a de-brief. All things considered, we survived the ordeal relatively unscathed. But, are we the 'right sort?' we wondered. “Well, we’re not talking Monte Carlo” said Liam. This led to a more fundamental question. Is this disparate group of people thrown together purely by chance really our sort? And so, the stage is set, the cast assembled and we made it through the first act without fluffing too many of our lines.
Burning Bush
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
We have moved into our new house on the hill. The Vile Vikings’ upper terrace sits just beneath our patio. It’s a bit of a sun trap and shielded from the wind. Ragnild has decided to let it all hang out and we have a constant view of her gravity-ravaged baps. To be fair, she tries to hide her lower dignity with a string of dental floss, but she has a rather over-abundant bush sprouting out of the bog like a bed of reeds. It’s most upsetting. I’m thinking of presenting her with a jar of Veet as an early Christmas gift. Miserable Cnut continues to be a wretched little man and whines all day about everything and nothing. And I thought whining was a peculiarly British habit. For the sake of good community relations, I am resisting the temptation to tell him to bugger off.
Bulging Biceps
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
With the cooler nights approaching, Clement drove Liam to a local timber merchant to buy winter logs for our open fire. It wasn't entirely an act of neighbourly altruism since Clement lusts after the log man, a ruddy rugged chap with bulging biceps and a chest like a beefed-up Turkish wrestler. The log man delivered and neatly stacked the consignment. Clement supervised flirtatiously, lingering a little too close to imbibe the intoxicating blend of testosterone and sweat. I kept the smelling salts handy. Afterwards, Clement went to convalesce in a darkened room. I can't imagine what he was doing.
The Emigreys
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The ex-pats we've met are a select collection of friendlies and freaks. I have christened them the ‘emigreys’, retirees serving out their twilight years in the sun, most of whom seem to be just a little to the right of Genghis Khan and who bought a jerry built white box in Turkey because it was cheaper than Spain (well, it was at the time). Everyday emigrey life operates within a parallel universe of neo colonial separateness preoccupied with visa hops to Kos, pork sausages, property prices and Blighty bashing. The cream of the emigrey crop are the vetpats, veterans who have been living in Turkey for many years. Usually better informed than their peers with a less asinine view of the world, ‘vetpats’ have taken the trouble to learn Turkish and are better integrated into the wider community. A little noticed and discrete group of emigreys is the small cohort of ‘sexpats’, grey men of means who are serviced by young Turkish men in return for a stipend. The contract suits both parties well and the trade is conducted in secrecy, far removed from prying eyes and tittle-tattlers. We are trying hard not to get too involved and to cultivate a mysterious aloofness - courteous but distant - spectators rather than participants. We prefer to amuse ourselves with the obsequious wintering waiters, most of whom seem fascinated by our obvious union.
VOMITs
Saturday, November 20, 2010
The mirror image of the predatory Turkish male is a sub-species of the emigrey called the VOMIT, or Victims of Men in Turkey: vintage desperate ex-housewives with a few lira to spare who shamelessly chase younger Turkish men. They jump ashore like over-eager Shirley Valentines straight into the arms of the willing waiters who hang around the docks in the hope of a profitable ride. Predictably, such relationships rarely last once the money runs out. Listen up ladies. Have a little fun and shag the boys by all means, but never fall in love. While he whispers sweet nothings in your ear, he’ll dip his fingers into your purse and when the takings are spent, he’ll be off like a rat up a drainpipe.
The Semigreys
Saturday, November 20, 2010
The final clutch of exiles I’ve observed are the semigreys, people too young to retire in the conventional sense, who are living the vida loca on the proceeds of property sales. Plunging interest rates present quite a fiscal test to those trying to maintain a hedonistic lifestyle on dwindling assets while waiting for the pensions to kick in, assuming there will be a pension to kick in given the parlous state of the British public purse. That'll be us then.
EPILOGUE
School’s Out
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Travel may well broaden the mind but upping sticks and pitching your tent in a foreign field can blow it completely. The best laid plans may not prepare you for having the cultural rug pulled from under your feet, something that can throw the most balanced person off kilter. Becoming a novice expat is like the first day of school. All those childhood fears come flooding back. Will I fit in? Will people like me? Am I wearing the right kind of kit? Am I as good as them? As the naïve new kids on the block, we made the classic mistake of chucking ourselves into the fray without a thought. We didn’t dip our toes into the water to test the temperature. Oh no. We leapt in with eyes slammed shut, noses held and hopes raised. It was a salutary lesson in what not to do. The emigrey soap opera was, at times, a life-sapping experience and negativity stalked the smoky bars and over-crowded beaches. We spent the first six months trying to get to know people and the next six months trying to get rid of most of them. In retrospect, I don’t know why I expected a disparate group of people thrown together purely by chance to be our glass of gin. Eventually, our burnt fingers healed and we started to enjoy the sparkling company of a small cohort of like-minds. As with many things in life, less is more. Ironically, just as we colonised our own corner of the playground with a hand-picked gang, we returned back to Blighty to be grown-ups again. Some people are stalked by happenstance. Others have to grab fate by the throat and make things happen. Our brief moment in paradise was the best of times and the worst of times but we wouldn’t swap it for all the çay in China.
ACT TWO
JACK’S CRACKERS
Istanbul
No trip to Turkey is complete without tasting the wonders of Istanbul, entertainment, media, cultural and economic capital of Turkey with a population of 13.5 million (and counting). The political capital, Ankara, seems dull and provincial by comparison (think Canberra versus Sydney or Ottawa versus Montreal). Greek Byzantium, Roman and Ottoman Constantinople and Republican Istanbul, the city that straddles two continents is dirty, busy, loud, infuriating, sophisticated, exciting, chic and sublime. At its ancient core is the old city, Sultanahmet, where the majestic Hagia Sofia proclaims her seniority to the grand upstarts around her. Her 1600 year old dome seems to float effortlessly above the ancient marble floor like a weather-beaten UFO coming into land. Cathedral, mosque and now museum, Emperor Justinian’s greatest legacy is a part of the seductive silhouette of mosques and minarets that defines the world-famous skyline. Continue your pilgrimage to Old Soph’s baby sister, the curvaceous Blue Mosque, built 1,000 years later. Better outside than in, rest in the well-tended gardens, admire her sexy lines and listen to the call to the Faithful in thunderous surround sound. On the corner of the Blue Mosque is the Hippodrome, formerly the focal point of the Byzantine capital. This ancient arena was used for chariot racing, imperial ceremonies, coronations and parades. Sadly, you will need a lot of imagination to picture a Ben Hur-style scene in your mind’s eye.
Just spitting distance from Hagia Sofia is the Basilica Cistern. Like Hagia Sophia, it was constructed in the reign of Justinian and is the largest of several ancient reservoirs that lie beneath the old city. The enormous vaulted ceiling is held aloft by more than 300 recycled pillars. Two of the bases are carved with visages of Medusa, all bulging eyes and wriggling snake tresses. Don’t worry, you won’t turn to stone if you gaze at their ugly mugs. The cistern was used as a location for the 1963 film, ‘From Russia with Love’ which saw James Bond rowing through the waters. If you’re lucky, you may be serenaded by a string quartet as you saunter round. A short stroll from the cistern is the Grand Bazaar, a must-see on anyone’s itinerary. This 500 year old structure is one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world with 3,000 shops. These days, you can sip on a latte while taking in the biblical vibe dissonantly blended with the Chinese-made tat.
Set aside at least half a day to take in the splendid Topkapı Palace, epicentre of the imperial Ottoman court for 400 years. The enormous complex is laid out in four piazzas stuffed with a mishmash of stunning pavilions and mini-palaces built over its long history. Highlights include the Disneyesque Gate of Salutation, the pavilion containing the Relics of the Prophet (yes, the Prophet) and, everyone’s favourite, the salacious Harem. If it’s baubles and glitter you’re after, roam around the Imperial Treasury and when you’re all hot and bothered, wander through to the fourth court to take tea and admire the spectacular views across the Bosphorus. From here, you can see Asia. If ancient history and old coffins are your thing, the outer gardens of the palace complex are home to the impressive Archaeological Museum with its rich collection of Hittite, Hellenistic, Roman and Turkish artefacts, including the Kadesh Peace Treaty (1258 BC), signed between Rameses II of Egypt and Hattusili III of the Hittites. It is the oldest known peace treaty in the world.
After all that history, have a little fun in Beyoğlu, the increasingly hip shopping and entertainment district that looks proudly down on the old city from across the Golden Horn, Istanbul’s ancient harbour. Beyoğlu is where Instanbulers come to meet, drink, party and spend (and occasionally to demonstrate). From Sultanahmet, take the walk to the frenetic and noisy Galata Bridge and cross the harbour to the foot of the plateau on which Beyoğlu sits. The incredible panorama will more than compensate for the ugliness of the bridge itself. As you cross it will seem that all of Istanbul is crossing with you. Once on the far side, the fit and the adventurous can hike up the steep incline to the top through narrow streets, taking in the famous conical-topped 14th century Galata Tower on the way. The less mobile can ride the Tünel, the funicular railway (and the third oldest underground railway in the world after London and New York). The short ride takes you right up to Tünel Square where you can hop on the charming antique tram that trundles up and down Beyoğlu’s main thoroughfare, Istiklal Caddesi (Republic Street). This broad boulevard runs like a spine through the area and ends at Taksim Square, the beating heart of modern Istanbul. Apart from the tram, the street is largely pedestrianised making an easy if crowded stroll. Beyoğlu is the place to sup and shop ‘til you drop. Take the plastic. You’ll need it.
If you have time to spare, take afternoon tea and cake in the imposing Pera Palace Hotel, around the corner from Tünel Square. It’s a treat of old-fashioned English gentility. The hotel was once the opulent end of the line for the Orient Express (and where Agatha Christie is reputed to have written part of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’). Until recently, the hotel had fallen on hard times and the welfare line. However, following a multi-million lira facelift, this regal piece of Istanbul’s family silver has received a good buffing, restoring it to its former late Victorian grandeur.
A little further afield are the impressive and largely intact Byzantine city walls, gate and ramparts. Originally built in the 5th Century, the massive fortifications withstood a millennium of invasion and siege until finally succumbing to the overwhelming force of the Ottoman Turks in 1453, led by the 21 year old Mehmet the Conqueror. The event changed the course of world history. It was the final fall of Rome and the start of the Ottoman centuries. Finally, if you get the chance, take the ferry across the Bosphorus and step into Asia. Not many people can say that they’ve crossed continents on a European city break.
Maria, raised in the Mafia and educated by the gangs of New York, is hunting the man who killed her Akalina, and she will kill anyone who gets in her way.
