I recently flew back home to spend the Christmas holidays with my friends and family.
One of the greatest advantages of an afternoon flight is that the spectacular light reflecting off the sunset can be used to create a makeshift "studio lightning" condition that will make anything look good. Here's my boring old eye, transformed into a fiery Lord-of-the-Rings style phantasm through the simple addition of the sun and cabin lights.
When I went to London, I thought I'd kiss my old habit of randomly finding small animals goodbye. Yet I was glad to be proven wrong, even in one of the most industrialized urban environments on earth. Take a look at this one: I found this (proportionally) gigantic spider on my doorstep in the New Cross Gate area. That's a 2-Pound coin it's standing next to.
Although I'm not a hundred-percent sure, I think this spider is a Segestria florentina, one of the largest spiders of Europe. It was almost certainly a she, since only the females attain this size in this species.
Just look at those emerald-green fangs. I'm lucky that she didn't bite me, since according to Wikipedia, a Segestria bite is supposed to feel like "...like a deep injection, and the pain can last for several hours." Yowch! After carefully scooping her up in a porcelain bowl for this photoshoot, I let this sexy chick loose in my dorm's garden.
Through random co-incidence, my adventures in London brought me face-to-face with another gigantic spider only days later. However, this time it was a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, at the Tate Modern Gallery.
Living as a student with a pre-defined budget, I have discovered that one of the greatest challenges in life is finding food... for cheap. In central London, where everything is bad and overpriced, we found cheap Chinese buffets such as this to be the best compromise between value and taste.
Yes... just for five pounds (which could get me a meal in a really classy restaurant back home,) you can eat sweet and sour chicken, roasted pork, prawn crisps, noodles... as much as you want!
Turkish emos keep fascinating some of my readers, so here are some more examples from Istanbul. This picture is actually really (well, about four years) old, it was taken in a local bar called Bronx, which was extremely popular among Istanbul's indie youth in its heyday. This guy has both a panda-eye makeup and a white fringe, and he has no shirt on. How cooler can you get?
I've seen a lot of these T-shaped Pterophorid moths back home in Turkey, but England also has these ragged-edged dark Batman varieties. Apparently, even fancier kinds exist elsewhere in the world. From the window of a Starbucks near the Soho.
To begin with, sorry that I have not been able to blog as much recently. Just these days, my MA is keeping me... rather occupied. Co-incidentally, here is where most busy Goldsmith's students waste their time. I give you Cafe Crema, a squat-turned-indie-coffeehouse par excellence.
It is difficult to believe, but this place does not serve meat! No way, no. All you get is overpriced fair trade vegetable mush with South American names. Do you want to bite into a juicy steak? Some meatballs? Tough luck, you might as well try to eat your iPod instead. This blatant abuse of human rights almost as bad as an alcohol ban. Notice that there is also a "Help Cafe Crema Stay Open" campaign going on.
The Cafe also has a garden littered with discarded, faded toys straight out of an indie nightmare. Despite its pretentious atmosphere, Cafe Crema is still a nice place to chill out after a hard day's work. Now, if they could also serve meat...
A Turkish family in front of the historic dock buildings in Bandirma, one of the small cities along the Sea of Marmara coast.
The Surp Krikor Lusavoric Armenian Church stands right next to a mosque in Kuzguncuk, one of the nicest neighborhoods on the Asian coast of the Bosphorus. Both the mosque and the church are within a short walk from a synagogue, a Greek Orthodox church and another Greek cathedral, making Kuzguncuk one of the most culturally diverse regions of the City.
A web-building spider I saw in Cesme this summer...
..once again, I am at a complete loss over its identity.
Only an idiot would be daft enough to fork out hard-earned money for a clunky Lomo Colorsplash camera when the alternative is blindingly obvious. Just hold out differently colored drinks or beverage bottles in front of the flash with any ordinary camera: Voila! You have trendy looking distorted, colorful, psychedelic photos in no time! Now, you can upload your ersatz-lomo photographs on Myspace and tell all the ladies that you have a Lomo up in your bedroom.
...while green-tinted beer bottles create this hallucinogenic green glow. This method has an additional bonus in coolness, as you can also reveal your extravagant drinking habits along with the pictures.
Beer in a plain glass, on the other hand, creates a very subtle yellow haze.
Drinks are not the only things you can hold out in front of the flash. Here is the effect given by using a pair of sunglasses instead. Ping! Everywhere is all brown, slick and grungy!
I am currently reading a trilogy of books by S. M. Stirling where the modern-day island of Nantucket somehow goes back to the Bronze age, with all the anachronistic consequences like modern-day weapons in the past. So, imagine my excitement when I saw this tank-like vehicle on the famous Assyrian wall in the British Museum this week.
Wow! Here's the "tank" in action. It looks like these things were used as battering rams or siege towers during war. Of course, they could also be grossly exaggerated in size or function.
Here's an even closer view of an Assyrian Tank in the heat of battle. Boom! Boom! There goes your walls, you dastardly enemy city-state! If you look closely, you can see the enemy trying to throw flaming oil on top of our heroes but no, their uber-tank also has a system of water pumps that douse out the pestering fires. Resplendent in scenes of war and destruction, the rest of these reliefs read like an antique version of 300.
This small, quiet coffeehouse at the bus station in Ilıca, near Çeşme, on the Turkish Aegean...
...hosts one of the strangest-yet-sweetest murals I've seen. The words spell out a popular Turkish idiom: "A cup of coffee has memories for forty years." It is my opinion that no trendy urban-street artists can duplicate the incredible naivety of images like these.
The recent craze of "healthy", "fair trade" and "guilt-free" foods has hit London harder than any other city in the world. This means only one thing: Paying more for crap food with cool packaging. I normally try to conserve my meager students' allowance and health by avoiding such dross like the plague and eating in. However, this being London, there are times and places where one simply has to dish out a flabbergasting three pounds for just such a lunchtime snack, for there are cafeterias and eateries that sell nothing else. Will you look at that package, absolutely NOTHING artificial! The rustic, "grandma's farm" lettering also immediately informs me that eating this bag of chips can only be good for my health!
The back of the package contains a tirade of nostalgic, emotional marketing bullshit. I want to cry my eyes out, no one believed in them at the beginning! They all thought they were crazy! Those bastards!
Of course, one can only lie so much while staring at you straight in the eye. A deeper glance into the small type reveals this embarrassing note: The friendly, tree hugging two-faced hippies are so sorry, their faux-homemade packaging is "currently" not recyclable. Oops, I wonder what happened to "never settling for the second best?"
This poor girl seems to have had too many drinks in a recent housewarming party we went to.
Yup, more vomit. By sheer bad luck, it also lies splattered all over the home-owner's class sketchbook. I wonder if that is a bad thing, or could the awful stains be marketed off as a unique style with experimental materials?
A dried-up guitarfish (family Rhinobatidae,) I saw nailed to the door of a fish restaurant in the Karaburun region of the Turkish Aegean. Guitarfishes look both like sharks and their close relatives, the rays. They supposedly taste great, but local restaurants have yet to figure out how to fix a tasty bowl of guitarfish soup.
This summer's photos are only now turning up on my blog. Here is a series from our most recent trip to Büyükada, or Prinkipo this August. Although I'd been living within twenty miles of it for most of my life, I'd never visited this beautiful island for almost ten years. Only with the arrival of Sofia and Kleio from Greece did I manage to lift that ass and visit Prinkipo once more.
Sailing on faith? I sneaked around to the machine room during the one hour + trip and took this picture. You can see the powerful engines that drive the boat below.
Buyukada is one of the several islands that lie off the City's coast, collectively termed as the Prince Islands. The boat thus made several stops at smaller islands before dropping us off at our destination. Here is Proti, known in Turkish as Kinaliada. (Henna Island) It had a spectacular beach in place of its main street and was arguably the best-looking of all Prince Islands, away from the crowds. I should visit it sometime.
All those stops made the journey a long and sleepy affair.
Finally, we arrived on Prinkipo. The port building has a highly unusual and impressive style, and is an almost obligatory photo moment for all those who land there.
This mini-clock tower at the center of the town is a very popular meeting point.
More views from Prinkipo town. Some Turkish readers get offended when I use the original names for places like Smyrna, Constantinople or Prinkipo, but rest assured - I am not a Greek nationalist nor an enemy of the republic. I am a Turkish citizen and I love my country.
More...
...and more views from sleepy Buyukada. I had a really cheap bargain calamari lunch on this street.
No cars are allowed here, so people get around mostly with horsecarts like these. However, they serve more as tourist rides than actual public transport.
This green building was staffed by horse-cart controllers who ceaselessly bark out the numbers of the carts as customers line out to hire them. Despite this technological advance, it's still a chaotic hurdle to get a ride, and the lines still stretch out around the square.
Not content with waiting in the buggy line, we ended up walking instead. We saw a large number of astonishing old buildings, preserved unchanged since the late Ottoman times.
Wow... I wonder how much this house costs.
Compared to the mainland, most of the houses are in good shape but very few people live here all the time. The few crumbling derelicts either have very poor owners, or the owners in question have been away in Greece for the last few decades.
A very nicely preserved house...
...and another one.
I stopped by this magnificent mansion to ask for directions to the local Synagogue, which I wanted desperately to see. It turned out that the inhabitants were one of the last few remaining Greeks, and our direction-asking adventure turned into a long, melancholic talk about the past and how things changed. That's me in the dorky shorts, trying to practice my vestigial Greek language skills.
We discovered this cute microcinema tucked away inside one of the small, two-story buildings. I'm not sure if foreign readers can get this feeling, but the whole place emanates with an extremely naive feeling of retro; like Istanbul used to be some decades years ago.
Actually, the whole island has that feeling of melancholia, like looking at a fifty-year old picture. In a social parallel to the situation of geographic isolation seen in islands like Australia and Madagascar, beautiful things that have been wiped out in the mainland continue to thrive on Prinkipo. Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Jews still coexist in comparable numbers without animosity, families leave their doors unlocked at night, and different languages continue to mingle on the streets. Here is the local Greek high school, closed but only for the summer holidays.
The island is still home to many churches of different kinds, here is the Panagia Church next to the horsecart station.
This, on the other hand, is the lavishly decorated door of the San Pacifico Latin Catholic Church. We couldn't go inside.
Prinkipos is one of the few places where Greek places of worship outnumber those of others, including mosques. Here is the Hagios Dimitrios, situated a little way off the town center.
We saw this strange marker stone in the courtyard of Hagios Dimitrios. The place was deserted, but we were told that the community still gathers here in important religious holidays.
Beyond the churches, however, the place I really wanted to visit was the Hesset Le Abraham Synagogue.
We almost missed the boat trying to get there, but no one was allowed due to security measures. These two were the only pictures I could get of this graceful building.
