A Dead Bird

I found this little dead bird in Greece. I couldn't identify the poor thing, can you?

The Bosphorus Bridge, Again

The Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul. Its cables are undergoing repair these days, after an investigation discovered minute cracks in some of them.

A Reminder Before the Elections in Greece

Elections in Greece are closing up, so here's an important reminder: Don't vote for these malakas.

For non-Greek readers, LA.O.S. is a party that boldly proclaims: "...that the divisions of left and right don't make sense after the end of the Cold War." Whatever the new dividing line is, these guys are on the wrong side. Their leader, Georgios Karatzaferis, is a holocaust denier who spoke about "...the Auschwitz and Dachau myth..." Their ranks also include maniacs such as Anestis Keramidas, who really seems to believe that the Greeks are a master race from Sirius.

An Occulted River

A small river runs peacefully into the Bosphorus from the European side of Istanbul, from around Emirgan. Istanbul has many such rivers, but this is one of the rare ones that is not a stinking, dried-up dump. The city is so large that it has swallowed up some rivers entirely. Such streams run completely underground, unknown to the people walking above.

Two Slugs

My sister loves slugs for some reason. We went out searching one warm July night...

...and found these small, brownish ones. Trying to be a bit more professional, we tried to photograph them against a ruler for size comparison.

The End of Summer

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!

Did you also notice that now you can comment on individual posts?

A Beached Jellyfish

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.

Farewell to Igor

Igor wants to get out.

UPDATE!

This is the last photo I have of Igor. He died a few months later of a heart attack, when I was away in London.

The Snipers' Alley

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.

Pulp Bar in Taksim

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.

This bar was actually located in a ground-floor establishment right around the corner. It used to host a myriad of local punk-alternative-indie bands, as it still does. However, during the fall of 2004, a crowded punk concert turned into a massive three-way fight between young punks, the establishment and various other drunken thugs. The police arrived to seal down the scene, and Pulp was forced to relocate to its present place on top of the Yesilcam Theatre. For more information, please visit their website. (It's only in Turkish, sorry!)

Street Art from Istanbul

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 Preserved Millipedes

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.

However, the dead millipedes got a sort of poetic revenge as their body secretions reacted with the alcohol solution to form an impermeable gunk, making them impossible to remove from the vials, let alone study. I hope I can figure out a clean way to preserve them, so that science will be able to understand the millipedes of Istanbul with a minimal loss of life.

Greek Nationalism in Thessaloniki

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.

Ok, so these three pictures might be a bit drab but believe me, Thessaloniki is still a beautiful place to visit.

Fauna from the Garden

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.

Athenian Nightlife

Drinking in the streets is an universal phenomenon, especially when the weather is suffocatingly hot. These examples are from Athens.

Not a Dog

No kitty no! That's not a real dog, only some crap graffiti! Don't run away, come back!

The Fateful Turkish Elections

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...

An Athenian Shrine

A cute little chapel in Ampelokipos, Athens. It now stands next to a gigantic supermarket.

Two Strange Invertebrates

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?

New Lights for Igor

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.

A Fire in Cihangir

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.

Protests in Athens

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.

High and Homeless

Poor guy, he was delirious on drugs and possibly homeless... Behind him you can see one of the ubiquitous mini-buses native to Istanbul.

Hotels Named After Countries

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.)

UPDATE!

Professor Zoltan Korsos of the Hungarian Natural History Museum has identified this strange millipede as a member of the orderCallipodida . Apparently, further identificiation is only possible through a microscopic dissection of the creature's copulatory legs. Köszönöm, Mr. Korsos!