Day 27 (3 July): Asıa and Back ın 20 minutes
This morning I took a ferry over the (mostly residential) Asia side of Istambul to meet up with Demet who a graduate of the UCSD IR/PS Masters program I attended that is originaly from Turkey. She met me at the Kadiköy ferry station. From there we drove around the Asia side of the city which is rarely visited by tourist and showed me some sights along that side of the Straights. We stopped by an authentically Turkish place by the water to get tea (since they actually rarely drink coffee here) and got some Turkish snacks: all bread of pastry based foods which were quite good as was the tea. We talked a lot about Turkey and also of course about the program we were in at UCSD and other Europe alumni from it. (She wants me to try to come back to a Europe alumni weekend in Istambul in the late fall.) After tea and snacks, we drove around a little more including to a park which looked almost exactlly like Mission Bay in SD near her apartment where I met her cousin.)
I took a late afternoon ferry back across to Europe. Returning to Istambul, I went to the Aya Sofia musuem which formerly was a Mosque and before that a church. I then ran across some touts that I had seen two times previously, actually the guys who told me they were Iraqi/Kurdish. They invited me to dinner at their house, so I went with them because by this point they seemed friendly enough and not that sketchy. Dinner was great, as I learned a lot about their tout business (which may be worth studying) and their family/history.
Observations:
1) Only about 15% of the 1.7M people who take the Turkish university acceptance exam are admitted to college which mean that only about one in thrity five people attend universities.
2) Turks abroad. Demet seemed very concerned about Turks abroad and understands why there is tensions with them and the countries they are in. Many of them particularly in Germany moved there in the 1960s for economic reasons but still only speak Turkish, which she believes, I think correctly, is wrong. She said that these people need to be brought back to Turkey to see what the country is like now before they should be allowed to move back to Turkey. Her take on the Turkish neighborhood, I went to in Berlin was that it was like a small Turkish village and not like a big city.
3) Islamic women wearing covers and veils are not just seen as practicing Islam but are actually seen as making a political statement. Recently more and more women have been wearing veils in Turkey. Women who do so are not allowed to attend school which means there are a lot that do not.
4) Japanese really like Turkey. Demet who also speaks Japanese was telling me that Japan actually has very strong ties with Turkey. She used to work for the Turkish economic and trade promotion agency in their East Asian department, so she speaks Japanese and has a number of Japanese friend in Turkey. Apparently, Japanese is also in the same language family as Turkish, meaning the grammar is identical. It is also in the same language family as Hungarian and Finnish, but nothing else is known to be the same.
5) Japan is definitely changing. I met another Japanese guy today who had quit his job in semiconductor manufacturing to travel to Turkey for 3 months. He expects there to be enough demand in the labor market for his job that he should easily be able to pick it up again when he goes back to Japan. This all seems strange to me given the lifetime employment practices Japan has.
5) Touts just like to learn. Many of them will spend a lot of time talking to foreigners and particularly Americans because they like to learn about the rest of the world. Considering that few if any attended school past high school, they are highly educated.
5) Multi ethnic acceptance. Turkey apparently is very good at embracing and absorbing and accepting multi ethnic people. In the family I had dinner with the mother was Kurdish (from near the Syrian and Iraqi border) and the father was Las from near the Black Sea.
6) Family ties are very, very strong in Turkey. The family I ate dinner with had all of the father's brother's over for dinner.
7) Helping others. They also accepted another man, named Mili, who worked in the same group of touts, into their family as his brother found him on a park bench in Istambul when he was only 15. It turns out that he is actually Kurdish and originally from Iraq. The family used him to gain business particularly from Japanese clients, as this guy had a Japanese girlfriend for several years who taught him decent spoken Japanese. It turns out he was particularly good at ripping off Japanese tourists, especially after he told me the margins he made on them versus the margins he made on English speakers. I guess less of the touts speak Japanese at any level, but none as well as him, so he is more welcoming. Studying this guy's business would be quite interesting, especially to see how much speaking a person's native language well helps with sales, and if the effects are stronger for one language rather than another.
8) Service orientation is extermely high in Turkey. Anywhere you go in Turkey the service is really great and people are extermely friendly and helpful. Somehow this works in a culture that does not tip. How strange, considering there is poor service in most parts of the US and we tip more than any other culture in almost a prefunctory fashion.
9) I am a Millionarie (in Turkish Lira.) Turkey introduced the New Turkish Lira only in January where one new Turksih Lira equals one million old Turkish Lira. This makes things a little strange for pricing because prices get quote all over the place. Sometimes they will say 750 meaning 0.75 New Lira or 750,000 Old Lira; the same price might also get quoted as 75, but 75 could also mean 75 Million Old Lira or 75 new Lira. The population seems to be quite good at accepting the new currency, however, and today was the first day that I have been given one of the old notes so far which made me feel rich until I realized what was going on.
10) Turksih acceptance to the EU. Demet seemed slightly positive on this happening, but not for a long time given the economic advances of Turkey (which are certainly greater than in much of Eastern Europe.) Nonetheless, she thought correctly that moving to EU standards would be a good thing. (As an example of progressiveness, people in Turkey actually accept Euros fairly readily, and certainly more so than in some of the Eastern European countries I was in that were already pegged.) Many of the touts and shopkeepers thought it was less likely that Turkey would ever be admitted to the EU based solely on the country being predominatly Islamic, wheras the rest of Europe is Christian.
I took a late afternoon ferry back across to Europe. Returning to Istambul, I went to the Aya Sofia musuem which formerly was a Mosque and before that a church. I then ran across some touts that I had seen two times previously, actually the guys who told me they were Iraqi/Kurdish. They invited me to dinner at their house, so I went with them because by this point they seemed friendly enough and not that sketchy. Dinner was great, as I learned a lot about their tout business (which may be worth studying) and their family/history.
Observations:
1) Only about 15% of the 1.7M people who take the Turkish university acceptance exam are admitted to college which mean that only about one in thrity five people attend universities.
2) Turks abroad. Demet seemed very concerned about Turks abroad and understands why there is tensions with them and the countries they are in. Many of them particularly in Germany moved there in the 1960s for economic reasons but still only speak Turkish, which she believes, I think correctly, is wrong. She said that these people need to be brought back to Turkey to see what the country is like now before they should be allowed to move back to Turkey. Her take on the Turkish neighborhood, I went to in Berlin was that it was like a small Turkish village and not like a big city.
3) Islamic women wearing covers and veils are not just seen as practicing Islam but are actually seen as making a political statement. Recently more and more women have been wearing veils in Turkey. Women who do so are not allowed to attend school which means there are a lot that do not.
4) Japanese really like Turkey. Demet who also speaks Japanese was telling me that Japan actually has very strong ties with Turkey. She used to work for the Turkish economic and trade promotion agency in their East Asian department, so she speaks Japanese and has a number of Japanese friend in Turkey. Apparently, Japanese is also in the same language family as Turkish, meaning the grammar is identical. It is also in the same language family as Hungarian and Finnish, but nothing else is known to be the same.
5) Japan is definitely changing. I met another Japanese guy today who had quit his job in semiconductor manufacturing to travel to Turkey for 3 months. He expects there to be enough demand in the labor market for his job that he should easily be able to pick it up again when he goes back to Japan. This all seems strange to me given the lifetime employment practices Japan has.
5) Touts just like to learn. Many of them will spend a lot of time talking to foreigners and particularly Americans because they like to learn about the rest of the world. Considering that few if any attended school past high school, they are highly educated.
5) Multi ethnic acceptance. Turkey apparently is very good at embracing and absorbing and accepting multi ethnic people. In the family I had dinner with the mother was Kurdish (from near the Syrian and Iraqi border) and the father was Las from near the Black Sea.
6) Family ties are very, very strong in Turkey. The family I ate dinner with had all of the father's brother's over for dinner.
7) Helping others. They also accepted another man, named Mili, who worked in the same group of touts, into their family as his brother found him on a park bench in Istambul when he was only 15. It turns out that he is actually Kurdish and originally from Iraq. The family used him to gain business particularly from Japanese clients, as this guy had a Japanese girlfriend for several years who taught him decent spoken Japanese. It turns out he was particularly good at ripping off Japanese tourists, especially after he told me the margins he made on them versus the margins he made on English speakers. I guess less of the touts speak Japanese at any level, but none as well as him, so he is more welcoming. Studying this guy's business would be quite interesting, especially to see how much speaking a person's native language well helps with sales, and if the effects are stronger for one language rather than another.
8) Service orientation is extermely high in Turkey. Anywhere you go in Turkey the service is really great and people are extermely friendly and helpful. Somehow this works in a culture that does not tip. How strange, considering there is poor service in most parts of the US and we tip more than any other culture in almost a prefunctory fashion.
9) I am a Millionarie (in Turkish Lira.) Turkey introduced the New Turkish Lira only in January where one new Turksih Lira equals one million old Turkish Lira. This makes things a little strange for pricing because prices get quote all over the place. Sometimes they will say 750 meaning 0.75 New Lira or 750,000 Old Lira; the same price might also get quoted as 75, but 75 could also mean 75 Million Old Lira or 75 new Lira. The population seems to be quite good at accepting the new currency, however, and today was the first day that I have been given one of the old notes so far which made me feel rich until I realized what was going on.
10) Turksih acceptance to the EU. Demet seemed slightly positive on this happening, but not for a long time given the economic advances of Turkey (which are certainly greater than in much of Eastern Europe.) Nonetheless, she thought correctly that moving to EU standards would be a good thing. (As an example of progressiveness, people in Turkey actually accept Euros fairly readily, and certainly more so than in some of the Eastern European countries I was in that were already pegged.) Many of the touts and shopkeepers thought it was less likely that Turkey would ever be admitted to the EU based solely on the country being predominatly Islamic, wheras the rest of Europe is Christian.
posted by Traveling Brian at 9:12 AM
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