I practiced fishing on the street, with the owner of the shop where I bought my very first fishing rod ever. Last Friday that was. The guy taught me how to handle the reel, when to release the line, when to stop it again, and how to cast the sinker as far as possible into […]
ISTANBUL – An ‘Angel of goodness,’ she is called in the Turkish press, the crèche owner of Turkish descent, Erzu Erbas, who was murdered in Amsterdam on Monday night. Several Turkish newspapers report on the Turkish émigrée and mainly focus on the fact that she helped poor people in Turkey with the income she earned […]
You can see helicopters over Istanbul daily for all sorts of reasons, but yesterday, there was a “Cem Garipoğlu alarm”. Cem Garipoğlu is a young guy suspected of killing his 18 year old girlfriend Münevver Karabulut earlier this year, in March, and ever since he has been on the run. Somebody phoned the Istanbul police […]
A concert of Zülfü Livaneli is guaranteed to give you goose bumps. Zülfü Livaneli? Outside Turkey he is not very well known, but in Turkey he has been popular for decades. He is a singer/composer, novelist, and you could call him an activist for humanity too. All these sides of his personality came together in […]
Most tourists in Istanbul take a hotel either in Sultanahmet or in Beyoglu, and those who want to visit a hamam don’t know which luxury one close to their hotel to go to. If you want my advice, take a boat to Üsküdar and go to Çinili Hamam. Not luxurious, but clean, frequented by locals […]
Even though Minister of the Interior Atalay said nothing concrete in his declaration on the Kurdish question last Wednesday, many newspapers think it’s a brave step by the government to aim for democratic solutions and to discuss the matter with as many different groups in society as possible. This includes talks with two important opposition […]
ISTANBUL – Ten years after his arrest, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan still has a strong influence on how Turkey handles the Kurdish question. Even though Turkish media on Thursday praise the AKP government for declaring the Kurdish question will be solved by democratic means, the more concrete and far-reaching measures expected were not announced. The […]
No change in the law was needed for quite a big change that was made in Turkey’s education system: the YÖK (Higher Education Board) decided that graduates from normal high schools and vocational high schools have the same chance of entering a university based on their scores in the ÖSS (on which I wrote a […]
The Turkish ambassador to the Netherlands has almost ended his posting, which started in 2007. Dutch foreign affairs minister Verhagen paid him a farewell visit and twittered about it: ‘Had farewell talk with Turkish ambassador about the need for further reforms in his country’. I’ve thought it so many times before, and again it came […]
She takes a coffee mug out of my cupboard, reaches for a bottle of cleaning stuff, then points to all the cups and glasses and says something about a smell. I have absolutely no clue of what she is saying. Does she want to spray all my cups and glasses with this cleaning stuff to […]