Summer is over, and I can finally devote more time to my blog. Stay tuned for an orgy of new posts, including a trip across the Turkish Aegean, the deserted Greek villages of Karaburun, a local rock festival and many more!
This is what a jellyfish looks like after it has been stranded on a beach for a day. Their bodies, made mostly of water, degrade into a sort of mushy goo that makes identification mostly impossible. As a result, they are only good for hurling around, preferably onto other people.
Igor wants to get out.
When we were younger, (ie: five or six years ago,) my brother and I used to hide behind this wall and shoot our BB guns to passing cars' windows. Snit! Snit! We would then mark our "scores" on the wall with a Sharpie. I returned to this makeshift "snipers' alley" a few weeks ago, to find the "kill counts" still on the wall. We'd chalked up more than 210 hits before stopping out of boredom.
The Imam Adnan street near Taksim is home to one of the most garishly-decorated indie rock bars in history. A purple stairway lined with notebook-doodle style characters greets you as soon as you enter through the door. Welcome... can you resist the urge to advance?
So... purple! Must... resist! The drawings get progressively more irksome as you climb up the seemingly endless flights of stairs. The unnerving atmosphere is further enhanced by the fact that the drawings talk to you. "The world is one day, that one day is today!" announces the green-headed gimp with the ironic business suit. Wow! Like, so deep!
Do you think this grotesque work is the product of one amateur artist, or a dozen? I could not decide. Nor could I understand if all those faces were meant to be famous rock stars, or a pantheon of aneuryism-suffering peace kids. Notice how someone has administrated the finishing touch by artfully applying a sticker of John Lennon, that tax-dodging, hypocritical twat.
At last! The view that greets you as you climb to the top floor of the apartment. Despite my artistic rants, this place is actually very comfortable and friendly, and the live music keeps on playing every day of the week, until dawn. Given that it can get impossible find a decent bar in the middle of the week, Pulp Live Music Bar is always a Pearl-Jam-busting oasis.
Boink! Even street-art critters in Turkey are tainted with a bit of nationalism.
You can still see this sticker at the notorious "street art corner" in Cihangir. Local viewers will doubtlessly be able to identify its exact location.
Speaking of street art, here is Mr. Blumbo! There are still many Blumbos left in Istanbul and Athens... Could you find them all, dear readers?
Two local millipedes I collected for Professor Zoltan Korsos from Hungary. Make no mistake, I don't enjoy killing animals and it was extremely painful to watch them struggle as the helpless creatures drowned in alcohol. I am only collecting them since there is a slight chance that some millipedes in my garden might represent undescribed species.
Beautiful Thessaloniki! Here is a small collection of random shots from my visit to this city last year. I stayed for one night at this cheap hotel, only to move out immediately after discovering that it was mostly used for prostitution.
A couple in traditional Pontiac costumes pose in a rally to remember the "Pontic Genocie", a collection of massacres and Christian-Moslem clashes at the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Was this an actual genocide like the Armenian one? Or was it a bloody, guerilla civil war between two different ethnicities inhabiting the same place? Perhaps historians can know better.
A gallant statue of Alexander the Great dominates the waterfront of Thessaloniki, a city which actually didn't exist when he was alive.
I took a walk out in my garden last night to look for millipedes. I couldn't find any, but instead I ran into a whole bunch of other critters...
I saw small slugs...
...as well as this polka-dotted monster that was as long as my index finger. Mr. Ümit Kebapçı has identified the first slug as a Deroceras, while the spotty giant is possibly a Limax maxiumus. Thank you so much!
I also saw this huge Helix Aspersa snail.
This tiny Cyrtopodion kotschyi gecko is very peculiar because unlike the majority of gecko species, it lacks ahedsive pads on its toes. (Compare it with pictures of other geckos I posted earlier.) Instead, it manages to hold on to walls with zig-zag kinks on its fingers. I wonder if they belong to a more "primitive" lineage than other geckos, or if they have secondarily lost their finger-pads.
You viewers are probably saturated with photos of all the green toads (Bufo viridis) I keep finding everywhere, but who could resist such cute things? I placed a small lacewing in front of this frog, and he ate it without thinking twice. It happened so fast that I couldn't take a picture.
Of course, frogs should better watch out for hedgehogs (Erinaceus concolor) like these. These spiny animals have been getting more and more common around where I live, possibly because they keep having sex all the time.
Drinking in the streets is an universal phenomenon, especially when the weather is suffocatingly hot. These examples are from Athens.
Election fever! After last week's huge post about political parties, here are some pictures from the fateful election that rocked the nation on the 22nd of July. Voting takes place in schools, here is the view from the one on our street.
We got into one of the classes to see hastily-constructed "voting chambers" made out of desks and chairs. Behind the "chamber" you can see one of the "Life of Kemal Ataturk" posters that are a staple fixture in every Turkish school.
The huge vote sheet was made even larger with the participation of hundreds of independent candidates. Each one of those unmarked circles you see represents one of those hopeful participants. Besides them, there are eleven proper parties. You have only one choice.
After making your choice, you fold up the huge voting sheet and put it in the dirt-yellow envelope. The envelope then goes into one of these boxes. Counting all the votes used to take days, but this time it was all over in a matter of hours, thanks to a newly computerized vote-counting system.
This group of friendly volunteers helped with the voting process...
...and later on, marked our fingers with permanent ink to make sure we didn't cast another vote.
Although the practice of finger-marking is sometimes condemned as being de-humanizing and paranoid, I see it more like a sign of prestige. I didn't slack off at a beach and voted, and I have the markings to prove it!
In the end, however, none of this mattered. I voted for the center-leftist CHP, but the conservatives at AKP won a staggering victory by getting 48 percent of the votes, mostly due to their success at stabilizing the economy and reforms in health care, free housing and so on. Life goes on...
A cute little chapel in Ampelokipos, Athens. It now stands next to a gigantic supermarket.
This strange green spider and a mysterious "larva" fell out of a bag of nuts I was eating with my sister.
Here is green-spider-friend, with a haze of spike-like hairs. I cannot identify exactly what he is, aside from placing him in the crab spider family, Thomisidae. Mr. Ümit Kurt says that it is a Heriaeus hirtus. Thanks again!
And here is "the larva." Perhaps it will grow up to be some sort of beetle, but I am clueless about his origins too. I think he might be feeding on the nuts somehow. Can anyone help?
I changed the light tubes on Igor's terrarium today so his pad is all nice and shiny, bathed in beneficial UV light. He only goes there to sleep of course, I usually keep him loose in my room during the hot summer.
An old building in Cihangir is burning down in a horrifying blaze, as seen from the other side of the Golden Horn. Another beautiful structure, gone forever.
When I was in Athens, I saw these huge protests against the ineptitude of the local government, who watched some of the city's last forests burn for six days without taking action. I can say these were the most peaceful and tear-gas-free demonstrations I've seen in the Greek capital for a long time.
Poor guy, he was delirious on drugs and possibly homeless... Behind him you can see one of the ubiquitous mini-buses native to Istanbul.
Would you rather stay at Hotel Sudan, in Athens?...
...or at the glorious Hotel Libya, in Istanbul? These two fine establishments once again prove that hotels named after messed-up countries... always charge by the hour.
I saw this strange millipede the previous night on my porch. It didn't look or act at all like the blunt, thick, darker ones I see everyday, so I took it inside for a quick photo-shoot.
Here, he is walking on the biblical landscape of my bed. Notice how its body tapers like a cone towards his head, and how he holds the first 5-6 pairs of his legs off the ground when walking.
Suddenly, he stopped as if something was wrong. Then, in a moment that will haunt me as long as I live, that thing turned his head completely backwards and started licking himself. I didn't know millipedes could do that!
Here is a close up of its eerily insect-like head as it cleans itself. (This reminds me of the Arthropod head problem.)
Blumbomen! Blumbomen! Blumbomen! After more than a month of non-stop work, the copies of my first album are ready for distribution! Click here to hear some of the songs!
Happy customers. Who are they? Meet Nektarios and Constantinos of the Vinyl Microstore in Athens!
We made these Blumbomen plushies to market my album. If you go to the store, Green Blumbomen can show you an exciting secret thing he hides in his pants!
Remember, Vinyl Microstore is at number 34 Didotou street, near Exarcheia, Athens! Grab your copy of the fabulous "Kamon Blumbomen" before they run out! The CD's have two songs and a special-edition poster you won't see on myspace!
