I’m going to dive headfirst into a sea of media this morning, because I finally finished the Super Bowl last night.
The Marmara Pera has a t-t-t-t-t-terri-buffering-ble net connection, and we can’t stream video reliably to save our lives (even when the quality has been dialed down to where it looks like your laptop is covered in peanut oil).
In other news, from the Reddit comments this morning:
I will upvote every yo dawg until the universe collapses on itself. It is the very essence of comment tomfoolery.
I have edited multiple paragraphs of explanation for this, but suffice it to say I feel the same way about the “yo dawg I herd u like X so i put an X in your X so you can X while you X” structure.
Actually had a conversation last night with Kristin about the “wazzuuup” fad associated with the Super Bowl Budweiser commercials (waxing poetic about the old days of good commercials). I’m ready for a comeback on that, but I think the rest of the world needs a few more years yet.
I took a taksi this morning because I slept long enough I couldn’t afford the Metro odyssey from Pera. I said, “Shell office in Şişli-Esentepe, on Salih Tozan.” The first driver made me swap cars and apparently said, “Shell in Şişli-Esentepe.” There was some “evet” (yes) going on, and we took off.
Yes, he took me to the Shell gas station in Esentepe.
I suppose a dapperly-dressed fellow taking a cab (implying no car ownership?) to a gas station at 7:40 in the morning makes sense? He also didn’t know where the major mall, next to my office, was located, so I think cabbies in Pera don’t know the more northern areas of the old city.
He was very nice, and the fare came to 14.30 TL or so. He tried to give me change for my 15 TL (I had to use my only “on” [10] and “beş” [5]!) as an apology. Many cabbies wouldn’t even offer that change without prompting.
By the way, people here seem to carry next to nothing with them, but a lot of money-takers have a very stubborn assumption that you will have near-exact change. There can be grumbling when “bir” (1) coins have to be brought out, which if you think of the statistics is going to happen most of the time, really.
Pages load very slowly at work, so I saw the page title long before the article. I was sure it was, um, how to be discreet, that Indian artifact people like to dig up, but another staffer? What in the world?
For cost-cutting reasons, we have been asked to relocate from The Marmara Taksim to The Marmara Pera. Pera’s a great place; I don’t know if we were officially there a few days ago, but we were very close.
It’s a very nice hotel, but I’m not too excited to move from one hotel to another. But, this seems to be what we have to do.
I’ve been on total media silence for the past two days, as I have not yet watched the Super Bowl. We saw the Steelers score their first field goal last night and promptly fell asleep.
Can you believe an iPod Nano 8GB costs $85 more here (tax included in both prices) than in America? So if anybody comes here to see us you are hereby requested to (1) bring a suitcase filled with stuff I need you to smuggle in for me, and (2) use that now-empty suitcase to bring home all the cool non-electronic stuff you’ll get here on the cheap.
I am now the proud owner of a bağlama, which is a seven-stringed guitar/lute type thing. Kristin now has two different types of Turkish flutes (one with a reed and one without). We’re going to learn them as part of our cultural immersion. There is a district of music stores just down the road from Pera and Şişhane (a spanking new Metro stop), on a street called Galip Dede (Victorious Ancestor/Grandfather, for fellow literal language translation nuts).
The bağlama is set up kind of like a 12-string guitar, but with only three string groupings (2-2-3). The strings are different weights, so you tune them to octaves of each other within the same groupings. Which means you can pretty much slide around on one string and get a really awesome Middle Eastern vibe out of the instrument, even not knowing anything about how to play technically. It doesn’t seem too hard to play. I was getting the basic idea in the music store, and our salseman is a professional player who gives lessons. There are also books and VCDs.
We are also invited to dinner sometime with him and his fiancee. This is an awesome country, by the way.
Folk instruments are one of those things that are really cheap here. Like, we had a salesman tell us the really high quality professional-grade bağlamalar with great wood and mother-of-pearl inlays are like 300 TL ($188). I got an instrument of middling-high quality for 200 TL ($125). And, I mean, this thing is like the size of a 3⁄4 size guitar, only with a smaller but much deeper gourd-like resonance chamber. We’ll post pictures of our loot sometime shortly. I figure the point where “gourd” comes in, it becomes hard to visualize.
Anyway, it should be obvious by the length of this mail that things are much slower now at work. I have a lot of forward-looking work to do, but the emergencies have calmed down considerably.
I’m a little under the weather today (biraz hastayım, a little sick I am) from sinus stuff. I think being at a latitude similar to Boston with weather more like the average of London and Houston, jetting between the fourth floor of a deep hole (work), the 26th floor of a high rise (apartment) and the 16th floor of a hotel, with pressurized subways in between, has taken its toll, as I’ve had these troubles twice now already.
But, things are good and we might be getting close to moving to the apartment, even if we are just camping out.
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to write, but I’m really feeling on top of my work now, which is a lovely change. There are still inscrutable things, and barbs, and complications, but really a lot of the reason I’m here is to de-barb the system. But, that’s a culture change and is therefore something that must be both slow and impassioned all the way through.
I’m pretty close to rolling out some of my Real Work, meaning the long-term-focus make-things-better work. And the reactive work is calming down as things settle in.
Even on a foolishly conservative basis, I would figure about 50% of the reactive work currently on my desk could become automated monthly reporting within a month or two. A lot of questions are obvious to be asked and easy to be answered, but if the answer is reconstructed every month from scratch time is certainly wasted.
On the personal front, we still have no visas, and no stuff, but we do have our apartment, empty as it is. I see no nearby end to the struggles to become a “normal expat,” which is kind of frustrating but not really on my mind very much.
I find it striking that, without the HR infrastructure afforded you when you actually have work authorization before embarking, most of the responsibility is actually placed on the employee. Like, I have had to complete and sign legal documents written in Turkish to arrange for my move. I can’t imagine things work like this in a conventional scenario. It is somewhat presented as my responsibility to arrange things like notaries and couriers.
Just think, I imagined we would need hand-holding help just finding a bank or house! Child’s play compared to producing backup documents to push your household goods through customs. I negotiated the price and terms on our apartment myself! I’m handling all the maintenance requests, as soon as I can find someone there who speaks English!
Our expat services group will basically hang up on me if I call, because I’m not even officially legally working outside my native country.
I suppose you’re just supposed to light your corporate card on fire using it so much, but the manufacturing analyst in me says that just isn’t right. So, we’re kind of living on the cheap (with the notable exception of our hotel, of course), making it up as we go. Which — honestly — at this age and level of responsibility to others is not so bad.
At least we have a washing machine now, because paying 8 TL (5 USD) per pair of boxers was not looking reasonable to me. Luckily we never had to use the hotel’s laundry service.
Next Friday is the first day I will receive my (much deserved, in my opinion) per diem, which I will continue to receive until I am an employee of an out-of-country office (which means work visa). [A per diem is a daily allowance (duh) given to defray extra expenses and compensate for inconvenience.] This per diem is roughly equivalent to 1⁄3 my US salary, so nothing to sneeze at!
The Shell Turkey network gateway is actually in Holland, so the below advertisement is actually targeted toward a Dutch IP, and the language is clearly Dutch.
My posts have been infrequent, although Kristin’s picture posts have been frequent, mostly due to the demands of work right now. Jumping into a new system is one thing, but this is a whole ‘nuther thing completely.
The majority of the data entry is actually done in Turkish (abbreviated, no less), making it pretty hard to do account analysis, and data just seems like it’s everywhere. It’s my job to organize a lot of this, and it’s no small task.
Hotel down pillows are apparently not how I roll: I think I bruised the skin on my neck massaging out a really bad crick.
Anyway, I’m struggling to establish a solid foundation of consistent reporting. It is difficult. More to come!
When I saw the above code in a spreadsheet today, I immediately split it into two-character pairs, converted hex to decimal, and converted decimal to ASCII. It didn’t yield anything useful, but I thought it was especially sick (çok hasta, for all you Turkish fans) that this was my primary course of action.
