If you remember my old posts, you might recall
this visual survey of the wonderfully trashy
Pulp rock bar in one of Istanbul's "underground" districts. Well, guess what - Pulp has undergone an extensive makeover to become... another trashy rock bar. But this time, it seems to have embraced its trashyness with such a passion that it is impossible to tell whether they did it on purpose... or by accident.
Here, you can see the legendary staircase that leads up to the bar. The shit paintings of Lennon and his spastic friends are gone, instead you have a ripped-up street sign that reads
Terkos Dead End, hinting that the bar might be a last destination for a lot of people. Also, you see a lot of mushrooms around... could they be...
...a thinly-veiled reference to psychoactive drugs? This hypothesis is further augmented when you come face-to-face with the gothic-indiefied characters of Alice in Wonderland. You know, like, through the mirrors, labyrinths, magic potions and all? Oh, poor Alice, it must indeed be agonizing to walk around with no underwear, no neck and badly-applied KISS make-up on your face.
Wow, and here's the magic dealer/rabbit, running away after brutally raping Alice. Judging from the extremely brief way rabbits seem to have sex, this might not be that big of a deal.
Inside, we saw many guys sleeping around on improvised beds made out of sofas, chairs and pillows. This, of course, is not the normal situation of the place. It may have more to do with the fact that it was almost seven AM when these pictures were taken.
The people that remained awake, however, made for some great company, and I ended my last night in Istanbul on the stinking-yet-lovingly-warm sofas of... Pulp bar!
In Cesme I kept finding many orthopterans, usually attracted to our porch lights. This huge grasshopper had newly molted, its wings were all soggy and wrinkled. Look at those wonderfully-striped eyes!
Several days later, I found this large, one-legged katydid (family Tettigoniidae) she was very friendly, accepted every kind of food we gave her, and actually stayed in her little corner of the room for more than a day. She might have stayed more had I not released her back to the garden.
