Meyhanes and going public

The new blog, to document my experiences of living here in İstanbul, or Reşitpaşa, İ suppose. I went out in Taxim for the first time on the weekend. Taxim is sort of the Swanston Street, or maybe Soho or Leicester Square, of İstanbul. İt was very busy and pretty lively, although like most places with anything resembling a nightlife around the world, more packed with foreigners than one might like to imagine.

We went to a Meyhane-- a sort of Sizzler for Turks, with live music thrown in. İt was a very atmospheric kind of place-- the roof opened up to expose the apartments above and there were plenty of modern Turkish girls behaving pretty much the same way packs of women around the world behave when they go somewhere with music and food... although they were much better dancers! Actually, the differences did seem to run a little deeper than that. Although İ never spoke with any of the women, and of course am in no real position to judge... being 'alone' in a foreign country at a loud bar does rather lend itself to quiet reflection, and so. İt was the Turkish women that intrigued me: there was, to my eyes, a greater sense of cameraderie between the Turkish women and a warmer sort of 'performance' than seems to accompany the 'Western' equivalent. İf one were to speculate, one might imagine that this is borne out of the sharper divisions between male and female life. Perhaps when women are so forcibly 'locked out' of certain aspects of everyday life there can be a less competitive existence within the lives that they can lead.

Although this sense of the shared experience (the 'community' is the rather reductive and bland definition that is commonly given, I suppose) can be observed amongst my students as well. They look after each other-- translating in hidden whispers and taking turns to make notes in a way that does not seem to negate competition entirely, but seems to delineate the competitive world as one that does not relate to their peers. That is, they know they are competing with each other, and take great satisfaction in getting the 'best' result on a test (for example), but this seems to bear no relationship to the custom of helping each other within the classroom.

But İ have lost track!

Back to the women: (aren't they, after all, the object of fascination for nearly all Western visitors, in one way or another?) İ don't want to imply that here at the Meyhane were a collectivity of naive and 'traditional' Turkish women who were simply accompanying the menfolk on their boozy night out. No doubt these women exist but these were undeniably the modern and sophisticated İstanbul girls-- dressed far more fashionably than İ was and clearly leading far more glamorous lives... you get the point. But İ suppose that is the point (another one)-- that what İ think İ observed was a subtle and complex cultural 'phenomenon' that wasn't entailed or contained by the wearing of the burqa, or whatever other cliche plenty of people seem to require to believe that they are seeing 'real' Turkish people.

Anyway, tomorrow İ must deal with the rather more concrete business of proper nouns and the like. More later, then.