A Cicada

A friendly European Cicada (Cicada cretensis) that blundered into my hair this summer in Athens. Just look at the intricate, circuit-etching-like pattern on its wings. Wow!

Christmastime in Istanbul

With 48 hours left until 2008, all of Istanbul is preparing for a very Christmas-like New Year, complete with Christmas trees, reindeer, Turkish Santas and zombie-like shopping sprees. Although Christmas symbols in Turkey seem at first like a bizarre mismatch, people here are used to them because of the country's secular urban tradition.

Above are three hopeful shoppers from the Nisantasi district.

The streets and squares are also decked out with lights, although nowhere as lavishly as in Europe or America. The entire holiday is commercialized to the fullest; this tacky ur-Xmas tree is sponsored by the "happiness factory" commercials of a major soft drink company.

A Trip to Alacati

Here is a long post about Alacati, one of the Turkish Aegean's nicest vacation spots. I'd been promoising myself to publish this one for about... five months. Only now could I get around to doing it.

On first sight, Alacati resembles a cross between The French Riviera and a Greek island that has rammed itself into the Anatolian mainland. This resemblance is no surprise, since, like most of the nicer places along the Turkish Aegean, Alacati was a populous Greek town before the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Unlike most of the other Greek settlements in Turkey, however, Alacati's beautiful architecture was preserved until today. Here, you can see the town square, with busts of Kemal Atatürk and Ismet Inönü proclaiming Alacatı's strongly secular, republican character.

The beautifully preserved neo-classic buildings and cobblestone alleys branch out from the main square, leading to an endless series of restaurants, hostels, shops and guest houses.

Here is an old door, probably untouched for eighty years or more...

...and here is a beautifully restored new one. Such respectful preservation of old structures is sadly very, very rare in Turkey. (But they are working on it!)

A chip on one of the houses' walls shows an antique layer of blue, overlaid with purple and at least four coats of lime white in the last few decades...

...while the paint is cracking on this nicely aged house, now used as a motel.

Yet another nice example of Alacati's architecture...

...and another, newer one, now in use as a ridiculously overpriced hotel.

Not all Alacati houses are hotels. This one, called "Ayse's Locker," is a designer boutique.

Such dress shops, jewelry and bauble stores are all over the place in Alacati! I frankly find some of them quite daft and vapid...

...but thousands of customers every summer, like these nice ladies, would probably disagree.

Despite all the beauty, Alacati does have some weird, "Blade Runner" kinds of senselessly-built houses that characterize most of Turkey.

At least there are only a handful of such eyesores. This one, at the entrance of the town, is one of the nastiest.

Houses like this always remind me of the cult PC-Adventure Neverhood. These few years, they are thankfully being knocked down and replaced by retro-neoclassical versions.

Moreover, newer old houses are are continually entering the local property market, available to refurbish and restore to your heart's content. With more local properties available than ever before to foreigners, why not give Alacati a look too, dear (affluent) readers?

Where Dreams Come True

Wet dreams? The aptly named Rüya Sineması (Dream Theater) in the middle of the perpetually busy Taksim district in Istanbul advertises "two super films together," meaning that they will show two cheap porn flicks for the price of one.

A lot of local cinemas used to hold "special screenings" of erotic films in the past, but with the rise of videos and more recently the Internet, Rüya Sineması remains the only local establishment to keep the tradition alive. Rüya is something of a legend in Istanbul, even the name of the place has become synonymous with pornography.

Featured at Grafuck

Five days ago, I received the latest edition of Grafuck, a yearly almanac of ahem... erotic illustration. To my great delight, one of my works was also featured in this year's issue! Check out the pictures below!

Things to Do While Flying

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.

A Giant Spider

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.

All You Can Eat

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!

Emo Turco

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?

A Pterophorid Moth from London

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.

Cafe Crema

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...

At Bandirma

A Turkish family in front of the historic dock buildings in Bandirma, one of the small cities along the Sea of Marmara coast.

A Church from Kuzguncuk

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.

Sky-Walker

A web-building spider I saw in Cesme this summer...

..once again, I am at a complete loss over its identity.

D.I.Y. Lomo Colorsplash

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.

Above is the intense red strobe that results from holding a cherry-vodka mixture in front of the flash...

...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 wonder what light reflected off a glass of Raki would look like? A glass of wine? Some tea? The potentials are limitless.

Assyrian Battle Tanks

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.

A Mural in a Coffee-House

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.