Artistic Genius?

There are days when I wonder if I am an artistic genius being wasted at an independent financial research company. I mean, who can belt Fallin' as well as I can or sketch the Daliesque charcoal drawings that I'm famous among my friends for? What about these photos below? I mean even the titles shout "artistic genius!!"

Blue Essence (Sep 2007, Paris)

Fascination (Sep 2007, Frankfurt)

Honestly, I should really be an artist. :P

the Dam on the Amstel

...and in such fashion Amsterdam was named. Having the opportunity to go there for work, I planned to spend the weekend there as well to explore as much of "the Venice of the north" as possible. I got there on a Friday night from Frankfurt, which I visited also for work. (P.S. Frankfurt has nothing special that would make it a tourist destination. It literally has five historic buildings left as almost the whole city was destroyed by bombs and artillery fire during WWII. Although my hotel was snazzy... you have to ask me about that when you see me. A little snippet: it was called the Innside Premium Suites located right downtown and with elevators that take you straight to your suite. Nice!)

Without further ado, here are the pics if you'd like to skip to the good stuff.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ysolmaz/AmsterdamNetherlandsSep2007

Day 1:
- Having traditional Dutch sweet pea soup with smoked ham at De Roode Leeuw. Excellent, albeit a bit simple and hearty meal.
- Visiting the Van Gogh Museum and learning he had a fascination with Japanese prints! (Did any of you know this?)
- Pretending to be Alexis (my friend who lives in Amsterdam) at the Rijksmuseum to get in for free (she has a museum pass); although the guy rejected me saying the card didn't belong to me because I wasn't a girl... Ummm.. yea. Had to pay 10 Euros to see a reduced collection that didn't even include the Kitchen Maid by Vermeer. I was pissed off! Don't go to the Rijksmuseum until 2009, when they reopen. In its full glory, it's supposed to rival the Louvre...right...
- Biking around Vondelpark with Alexis; I kept on using my trusty rental bike for four straight days to get around everywhere! You also get to shout, push and ring your bell at lame people walking around in your cycle path. It's fun! ;)
- Trying the traditional bitterballen, balls of unidentified meat fried and served with mustard. Yum! I have a nice picture of it in my gallery (testing the macro setting of my camera for the first time!)
- Having drinks with Alexis' friends and then going to a birthday dinner.
- Visiting the Red Light District and then having some more drinks.

Day 2:
- Waking up at 11:30am...
- Being a bit disappointed by the Anne Frank House after having waited almost an hour to get in. The actual rooms where they lived in hiding for so long are moving and emotional (you see the pencil marks they've made on the wall to see how much they've grown), but there is not one exhibition exploring racial/religious prejudice. It could be much more interesting if they could hold temporary exhibitions in the rest of the space there.
- Having bacon and apple pancakes with stroop (Ozlem, you're right. Stroop basically imitates the Turkish syrup known as pekmez. You stealing cowards! :P) It was a delicious mix though, I must admit.
- Taking a canal boat tour, which was really fun. See the pictures!
- Having a few drinks with Alexis and her friends
- Eating some good ol' Italian food, because I needed a break from the exploration and a return to the familiar

Day 3 and Day 4 were mostly spent at the office, which is in the suburbs of Amsterdam where ABN AMRO and Fortis are located. My last wonderful surprise in this city of canals was the incredibly cheap price of the trains to the airport from the city center. 3,40 Euros!!! Now that's cheap... You hear that price Heathrow Express?????

Next stop: MILANOOOOO!!!!! :D

Gotta love Family Guy!

I just spotted this on YouTube. Apparently, Brian and Stewie from Family Guy, the TV animated series, opened the Emmys this year. They mock pretty much every TV show out there including, but not limited to, the Sopranos, Scrubs, and Desperate Housewives. You have to watch this because they show the reaction of the shows' stars throughout the video: priceless!!!

Yeni Anayasa Taslagi - the new Turkish civil constitution draft released

Arkadaslar, NTVMSNBC'nin websitesi Ergun Özbudun ve ekibinin AKP için hazırladığı yeni anayasa taslaginin tum metnini yayinlamis bulunuyor. Bence gidip bir okumakta yarar var...

http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/news/419856.asp

Guys, the Turkish news agency NTVMSNBC has posted the full body of the new civil constitution draft on its website. It might be worth checking it out to see what's in store for us. Same link as above, however, the link is in Turkish.

A Theatrical Week

This week has been a theatrical week indeed - first, I saw A Disappearing Number by Complicite and then In Celebration at the Duke of York Theatre. All I can say is that London is the land of the best and the mediocre theatre in the world, respectively.

A Disappearing Number by Complicite
I was awed by the sheer creativity and imagination of this production, from the use of multimedia projections to the intricate script. Scenes are so seamlessly connected that the viewer has the feeling of watching a film. More than one time I found myself staring at the stage the same way I stare at a film screen - to see every detail of the image.

The play is essentially a biography of one of the world's greatest mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who contributed to the field of mathematics immensely during the First World War. Ramanujan is the mathematician that introduced the famous equation n/0=∞, where n stands for any number; meaning any number divided by 0 equals infinity. However, the play actually tells the story of four people, combining fact and fiction gracefully to emphasize its ideas of beauty, simplicity, nature and mathematics. After all, nature is full of complex mathematical patterns; we all look at them, but how many of us really see them. It also deals with "imagination and the nature of infinity; about what is continuous and what permanent; how we are attached to the past and how we affect the future; how we create and how we love."

The acting, the staging, the music, the dance, the script - this is an extremely well done play. I would recommend it without any hesitation. In fact, if you're reading this and you're in London, you have to buy tickets now!

In Celebration
And then there was this play... It got somewhat good reviews and Orland Bloom is in it for cryin' out loud! I had to see this!

Boy, was I disappointed. First of all, the script is uninspiring and almost annoying. All characters seem like they have something to resolve with each other, but they never do! All of this tension just bubbles onto the surface creating a lot of expectation and just dies down as the lights go down on the stage. Nothing surfaces, no reconciliations are made, so no climax. The script is either one of the best real-life scripts due to its lack of dramatic resolution or one of the worst examples of theatre where there is no urgency to make the audience care about these characters or watch their lives for 2,5 hours.

Another disappointing fact is that Orlando Bloom has about 50 words during the whole play. He is cast as the silent brother, who holds so much potential to be the turning point of the play due to his mysterious silence, but gets reduced to a non-central character since nothing happens. Yes, that was the theme of this play: NOTHING HAPPENS!

Don't pay 30 quid to see it!

Turks of Obieland Reunite in Paris

I know it's hard to believe, but yes, we actually did a reunion after almost a year, planned hastily and randomly, as is the Turkish custom. :P We should really be featured as a testimonial for facebook or something because this whole thing originated through a harmless wall post by Asli and then we found ourselves in Paris in a week and a half's time. Unfortunately, that meant that not the whole gang could be there. Frankly, we missed many of the Turkish gang from Oberlin when Asli, Zeynep and I were in Paris eating our duck confit in honey sauce and drinking beaujolais wine. ;) No, we really did! It would have been an all-out party then! Before I get into the details, here's where you can find the pics:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ysolmaz/ObieReunionParisSep2007

Day 1:
- Opening my hotel door to greet Asli in French "Bon soir mon cherie!!"
- Drinking Asli's bordeaux while catching up at the hotel
- Meeting Zeynep and Evrim right in front of the jazz club where Evrim was about to sing that night, the Sunside Sunset Club
- Having our only bad dinner in Paris with Asli, but the conversation was titillating. :)
- Sneaking into the jazz club without paying the 22 Euro cover fee thanks to Zeynep. We were about an hour and a half late which might have helped as well...
- Spending some time at the bar with a colleague of mine from work who had decided to come to the concert
- Hanging out at the jazz bar until about 2 am, talking with Evrim and the rest in between the times she was singing
- Not finding a freakin' cab in Paris at night to get back to the hotel!!! Seriously, what the hell was that about? We wasted an hour trying to find a cab, but the only cars on the streets were full cabs. We ended up taking a night bus to the hotel instead... fabulous? NO! The only thing that made it worthwhile was Asli's comment: "Now I understand what Carrie Bradshaw had to go through in NYC!" Hhahaha

Day 2:
- Meeting Zeynep for some cafe au lait and pain au chocolat at the Latin Quarter. Basking in the lovely morning sun while chatting it up.
- Walking north towards Ile de la Cite where we visited Notre Dame
- Onto the Louvre, the Champs Elysees and the Louis Vuitton store
- Walking at Le Marais part of Paris, shopping at boutiques, people watching, which became my favorite way of spending time in Paris since everyone's so damn good-looking
- Having an absolutely fantastic dinner near the modern Opera building at Bastille.
- Heading back to the jazz club to hang out with the jazz cats one more time!

Day 3:
- Having breakfast (cafe, orange juice and pain au chocolat accompanied by a nutella crepe!) just south of Notre Dame
- Walking through Paris, le Marais towards Etienne Marcel to check out the Paul & Joe store. Huy, I'm not that impressed... I liked the store Et Vous more!
- Stumbling upon the cutest streets and the most local of cafes, restaurants
- Making our way to Montmarte for a second-hand market, meeting cute sellers at the market, who were so cute we actually bought stuff! ;)
- Visiting Sacre Coeur and listening to the guitar players at the foot steps
- Being awed by the panorama of Paris...
- Having a long dinner at Restaurant Montorgueil - highly recommended! Get the pork and some creme brulee to finish things off. I'm not even mentioning the red wine since it's a given.

Then it was back to London on the Eurostar. I can't wait to do another reunion where more of us can join! It was fun, nostalgic and energizing at the same time. I felt like Asli, Zeynep and I never stopped hanging out; when we came together in Paris, it was as if we had been together since the day we all left Oberlin. So reassuring!

Asli, Zeyrek- Allah razi olsun! Muthis zaman gecirdim; umarim sizler de ayni benim gibi eglenmisinizdir.

An Encounter with Orhan Pamuk

At one of the autumn literature talks that recently commenced at the Southbank Centre, I got the chance to listen to Orhan Pamuk live for the first time. He read a few excepts from his new book 'Other Colours' and then answered some questions from the audience and the editor-in-chief of the Guardian. After this lovely encounter, my respect for Pamuk grew considerably.

Even though he is a controversial and, I believe, an overly-politicized figure, not just in Turkey, but in the milieu of the western world, his ideas are modern, crisp, and surprisingly non-political. He just happens to say what he believes in and thus becomes a media-embroidered political figure ("because it sells"). At the end of the day, he's a fiction writer, who has been inspired by Proust, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Among his books, Snow is the only one that could be considered a modern political study of Turkey, which he has declared as his first and last political novel. All his other books are pure fiction dealing with the medieval Istanbul and Europe, which continue to inspire him.

His sense of Turkishness emits from being very proud with our history but not in an extremely nationalistic manner, that would hinder any contemporary understanding of our identity. He is OK with accepting the past and moving on, so as to get rid of the 'shame' that fuels the 'absolute pride,' as he put it. He compared Turkey's westernization with that of Japan and offered his ideas on how successful these drastic changes can be where they are brought from the top to the people in the span of a few years. I don't want people to misunderstand this: He never questioned Atatürk and his ideals, but commented on how the manner in which Turkey acquired these western values is contributing to the current political trends in Turkey.

Above all the qualities he demonstrated during the talk though, his sense of humor was the best. To a question coming from a student who's writing her doctorate on his books, he replied: "Why don't you send your blank doctorate pages and I'll fill them in for you."

Below are some of the questions that popped up in my head as I was packing for Paris that night:

- Do you think that Turkey is becoming the leader of modern Islam, and do you think that the western world wants Turkey to assume this leadership to fix their work in the Middle East?

- Did you appreciate Turkish culture and values more when you left Turkey to live abroad?

I applaud Pamuk once again.

Memories are made of this

Huy, I apologize for stealing your phrase, but that's what came to my mind when I started digging deeper and deeper into my Gmail archive tonight. I uncovered pictures, jokes, phrases, you name it! I laughed, I reminisced, I missed... In short, I was nostalgic all of a sudden. I've prepared a special album just for this occasion since it made me recall my life in frames without the need of a near-death experience. Hail Gmail!!

Oh, and I also realized that I don't use this smiley enough anymore (:D) so expect it to appear in anywhere ranging from e-mails to postcards soon.

:D

http://picasaweb.google.com/ysolmaz/MemoriesAreMadeOfThis

the Flying Trapeze

Due to popular demand, I'm posting the video of me doing the flying trapeze for the first time. It happens to be in front of the Tate Modern on a fine summer afternoon late Aug 2006. My original idea was to get this filmed and to send it off to my best friend in Chicago as a post Sex-and-the-City souvenir.

Even though I'm afraid of heights, the only part that was scary was climbing the stairs bit. Once you get hold of the trapeze and start swinging, it's just pure fun! I was having such a blast that I didn't want to get off and tried to speed up. The French instructor wasn't very fond of that idea so my ambitions to become a professional flying trapeze Turk ended in vain, but not without a final somersault! :) Watch the video already!

The make-over of a first lady

So, as I read on BBC recently, our new first lady will be given a make-over. Now that Abdullah Gul is appointed to the Turkish presidency, all eyes are on his wife more than ever before as she wears the headscarf, which has caused huge rifts in Turkish society between the devout Muslims and the strict seculars. (Side note: I HATE it when the foreign press refers to the Turkish secularists as the elite stratosphere of Turkish society. First of all, there's nothing elite about my family. Some of my family members can't even afford to buy a car, which is a must-have in Turkey. Also, I think everyone's mistaking secularism for atheism. Many muslims are still secular. If someone is a devout muslim, that doesn't mean they can't be secular...It also pisses me off royally when the foreign press use images of women in bikinis to represent secularism and a poor, hungry kid to represent the Muslim population in Turkey. Reminder to all: 98% of Turks are Muslims, including the ones wearing the freakin' bikinis...)

To get back to the point, apparently a Turkish designer (who lives in Vienna..ahem..I wonder why...?) is now designing new looks for Hayrunisa Gul, so she can be as stylish as Audrey Hepburn in the '20s. The designer, Atil Kutoglu, says that he wants to bring back the glamour of the 20s and 30s to modernize Gul's look. Now, I do like the idea of modernizing the headscarf and making it more like a fashion accessory to ease it for the Western stares, but doesn't this prove that even the Guls themselves don't feel comfortable with the traditional headscarf... what does that tell you?

Maybe Erdogan and Gul have really changed and become modern muslim seculars, and now they're slowly trying to shake off the image that they created so boldly when they were together with Necmettin Erbakan. They're trying to shake off their islamist image from those days, but therein lies the problem: no one believes them, because no one trusts them. They shouldn't really be surprised at this though. These are men who said that democracy was a tool to get what they really want, but that it wasn't essential. Now how am I supposed to trust them? Maybe they think that if they modernize the headscarf, I'll be fooled by the Louise Vuitton or Vera Wang headscarf my new first lady wears. And I'll say to them "It's not the cloth that matters, but what ideology lies beneath it." Now, can they change that?

Some headscarf alternatives from Vera Wang follow.