Okay, About That Last Post…

I have to say, that is some of the funniest shit I’ve ever read. I say “read” because I don’t remember writing a lot of it. I was utterly exhausted, and the circumstances remind me a great deal of a night back during high school when I was writing a theology paper, and somehow wrote “…and that God wears a denim jacket.” I think for history’s sake I will let that post stand unedited. I might have to speed things up a bit, so before I do my homework, I will get us caught up to the Depeche Mode concert:

Sunday I woke up at 12:10 when Michelle knocked on my door 50 minutes early. We headed to Istiklal and hit up the Saray Muhallebicisi again, but this time I felt sick and didn’t eat anything. Methinks twas the nine slices of pizza I inhaled the night before. I had myself a Sprite and some tea, and started to feel better. We then shopped around for a bit, and walked to the tünel, which is the third oldest subway in the world, and it runs from the top of the hill to the bottom, down by the Galata Bridge. We got out and made our way by tram to Sultanahmet, where we walked to the Archeology Museum in Topkapi Palace. Turns out they stop selling tickets at 4:00pm, and it was 4:10 when we got there. Bummer. We saw some cute kittens, though, and a bunch of sweet columns. Naturally, we hit up the Topkapi gift shop for a bit and pined for sweet rosaries, which they lacked. I wonder why.

Michelle suggested that we not consider the day a loss, and steered me toward the Basin Sistern, which you have seen if you’ve ever watched a little film called “From Russia With Love.” Essentially it was an underground chamber that was dark, cool, and used to be full of water. Now, about a foot or so covers the floor of the whole place, and they built some footbridges for tourists. I loved it in there! They had TONS of fish swimming in the water (as opposed to walking, goddamn it, Kevin). I also got to see a super old Medusa head that they took from some super old temple and placed it underneath a column. Can you say cool? Of course you can. The gift shop was sweet, as well. I found a nice comic book for kids about the founding of the Turkish Republic under Atatürk, and it’s violent. It’s also straight up propaganda. Dig it. You’ll see it.

We headed back and didn’t eat anything while we got ready. Michelle actually managed to prepare faster than I did, which is odd, considering she’s, well, not a man. After I scolded her for being a race and gender traitor, we headed out to grab a taxi and head to Kuruçeşme Arena, where the Depeche Mode concert was going to be. We stood in line out on the street waiting for the fuzz to let all of us in, and I heard someone speaking Turkish use the phrase “after-party.” I got a kick out of that. I found out the day after that my friend Peter, whom we’d run into on the bus earlier that day (with his family: wife, and two cute kids), saw the line for the concert as they were passing again on the bus, and told his family to look for me and Michelle.

“Just look for the orange hair!”
“There it is!”

We got in after I got frisked twice, presumably because I’m hot. We were greeted by like five different people whose job it was to look at our tickets (and, presumably, greet us), and then we had a handful of candies tossed at us by some peopel promoting the (superior) Turkish answer to the Starburst. I’d say they’re more like the fancy Tootsie Rolls you only get at Halloween, the vanilla, cherry, and lime stuff. Except these had cream flavor, and coffee. Shit, they were good and gone really soon after that. We wandered around the arena, which was literally on the waterfront, and was essentially a slightly tiered parking lot with a huge stage. The whole deal was set about 20 feet below the street level, which meant that people could sit on the bus stop up there and watch the show for free. Clever girl.

The show started with an unknown opening act (literally “front group,” in Turkish), and I asked someone who it was, and the answer stunned me: Björk.

Just kidding, sorry to make you all prematurely ejaculate (words like “wow!” or “holy shit.” Look it up in a dictionary, you perverts). Turns out the opener was actually a Turkish Depeche Mode cover group called “Stay Cool.” What? I know. Seriously? Yeah. Okay, fine, whatever, as long as Depeche Mode comes afterward. Which they did. We managed to find ourselves right next to the biggest Depeche Mode fan in Turkey, who would not stop jumping up and down and screaming. There was also a fat kid behind me doing the same, and his man tits kept slapping my shoulder, so I jutted my elbow out so he would land on it, and that solved the problem. It’s not that I minded the tits on my shoulder, it’s just that, well, they were attached to him.

The concert lasted a couple hours, and they played almost all the hits (People are People and Black Celebration aside), and excluded Exciter entirely. Getting to sing “Personal Jesus” with 12,000 other people was amazing. It almost made me forget that I was the only red head among them. I seriously checked, folks, and there were 0 others. Also the woman next to me was probably trying to give her mate a clandestine hand job, because she spent an awful lot of the show seated between his legs. Cigarettes are dangerous in crowds, and by extension, crowds are dangerous in Turkey. Fucking smoke everywhere, more than at an indoor venue in the states.

When the show ended, we hit up the t-shirt stands and found out that the one Michelle wanted was gone, depsite their having 2 display copies. Whatever! We saw some people shining laser pointers at the big movie screens during the show, and I had to laugh, because that person was probably wearing a South Park shirt and listening to Blink182 on his Walkman. We waited about a half an hour before checking out of the arena, and I bought us some water for 1 YTL a bottle (instead of the 2 YTL some were asking), and we started on the long and winding road to catching a cab. We walked about 20 minutes when I saw something across four lanes of traffic.

What I saw shocked me. A man was holding a woman by her neck and shouting at her by their car. I stopped, and Michelle noticed too and stopped, and I stood there watching, trying to figure out what was going on as people passed them by across the highway. I could tell that the two of them knew each other, but the guy was roughing her up and screaming at her, and pressing her against the hood of the car. I stopped a group of pretty big Turkish guys and asked them if they could call the police on their cell phones, because the guy had just slapped the woman and I told them that I didn’t want to have to make trouble with him. They looked across the road, and even after I told them that he had hit her, one of them said, in English, “They are lovers. It’s no problem.” I told him “But he just hit her! There is a problem. Please call the police,” and then his friend came back and put his arm around my shoulder and said “This is Turkey,” and walked away.

I asked another group the same thing, and got the same result. I even asked a group of teenaged girls, a group likely to be sympathetic to the cause of women’s safety, but they only stared at their cellphones after the pulled them out of their designer holsters. Meanwhile, on the other side, the woman was trying to walk away but the guy was grabbing ahold of her. At least 25 people had passed them by and done nothing. At one point, the guy pulled the purse out of her hand and started throwing her perfume or makeup glass stuff onto the street and breaking it. I was trying to prepare myself mentally for a fight, because things were starting to get even more out of hand.

It was at this point that I found out I wasn’t the only person watching what was going on. From my right, a man shouted “Ey!” and whistled at the guy loudly. I started moving closer to the street. When the Turk shoved the woman onto the hood of the car and put his hands on her neck, the guy next to me said something I will never forget, something that made it clear that the woman was going to be safe for the night.

“OY! WANKER!”

Turns out the man whom I thought was an exemplary Turkish man was actually a Brit, whose heavy accent and furious expression made it clear to me that he’d been in at least a few fights. He headed across the street, and started to follow him, but Michelle grabbed my arm and asked me not to, because it could only lead to more trouble. I stayed on our side of the expressway, and waited for the Turk to take a swing at the British guy, in which case I would have been over in a second. The Brit spoke clearly, slowly, and loudly in English, telling the guy to calm down, using body language to demonstrate. The Turk got right in his face, probably asking him what he thought he was doing. Our guy didn’t back down, he just stared him right in the face. When the Turk started heading back toward the woman, who was still on the hood, the Brit followed him, circling around him to make sure he didn’t try anything else. This went on for about 2 minutes until a Renault Police mini-van pulled up and some officers got out. The British guy came back over, and some of the Turks who had stopped to watch when they heard English being spoken went to the cops and told them what happened. We were satisfied once we saw two police officers between the guy and the woman, and continued on our way, asking the British guy what they talked about. He said that the man claimed that it was okay because they were married.

Turkish men lost all kinds of points Sunday night. So did crowds of people. We talked about this for a long time with friends on Monday, and I thought that nothing like that would have gone on for the 6 or 7 minutes that it did in America, but the truth of the matter is that people tend not to want to step out of line. I guess that’s particularly true among the Turks, especially given that the only two men who tried to do anything to help the woman were an American and a Brit. That was very telling, in terms of culture and cultural adjustment. Each time the woman tried to walk away, I thought of how many instances of spousal abuse per year would disqualify them from EU membership, which, after seeing what I did, I actually had second thoughts about for a minute. It also made me appreciate British men a lot more, though. I don’t want to sound patriarcho-fascist, but maybe one good measure of how advanced a democratic society is is how willing its stronger members are to use their strength to help. Now I’m just talking out my ass, which you might be able to see through my towel.