Our flat buying proceeds apace, but suffered a bit of a setback today. We are more or less settled on our fixer-upper, assuming it goes through – if not, whatevs – but the GF went today with a contractor to see what needed to be done, and was basically ambushed by a lot of men […]
The Greatest American
I woke up this morning to the news that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. What a incredible person she was, a qutb of her country in this age. She leaves behind an abiding sense of fear and dread. It is going to be a terrible few months up to the election, and to the inauguration, […]
Nearly two months later
It’s nearly two months after the Beirut explosion. This blog has not reflected how much it’s been on my mind. The horror of what happened, in a long line of terrible events, is very persistent. Partly because I did fall in love, or at least in fascination, with Lebanon when we stayed there, and to […]
Determination
I closed my Metafilter account today, and deleted all the bookmarks. It had been increasingly clear to me that I was not getting much pleasure out it, only a lot of irritation. This was before I listened to a Talking Politics episode in which Jill Lepore appeared and talked about social media. What she was […]
Babes in the wood
After a few days of feeling quite confident and increasingly knowlegable about this whole house buying business, yesterday was a setback which left me feeling, again, as though we might be a pair of babes in the wood, ripe for the taking. First, there was the increasing suspicion of that nice flat with a view, […]
Uphill
It was a quiet Sunday: we walked down to Taksim Square (stopping for a kibbeh for me along the way), and then onward to take the cable car to Nisantasi. This turned out to be unexpectedly enjoyable, as the cable car was just two capsules each way, and went over the park, over ruined walls […]
Someone else’s home
A couple of days ago, when I was feeling particularly glum about the flat that got away, I went on the main property website for Turkey and fired off WhatsApp messages to everyone with a flat that looked nice and within our budget. The first of these viewings was this evening: a flat in Galata, […]
New possibilities
This evening we met up with someone the GF had been communicating with, and who works in the property world. He turned out to be a German Turk, rather nice fellow – nicer than the last, and with a more trustworthy air – and talked quite frankly about the scene in Istanbul. It seemed genuine, […]
Church, mosque, museum, mosque
I had a working weekend but planned it so I could take some time off. This afternoon we went to the Chora museum, formerly the Chora church, then the Chora mosque, and soon to be the Chora mosque again. Nothing can quite replicate the astonishing luminescence and life of Byzantine mosaics, certainly not photos. The […]
Emerging markets
This afternoon we went across the Golden Horn to Fener, a sub-district just beyond the dramatic bits of Sarayburnu – an old Greek/ Jewish/ Bulgarian/ Armenian neighbourhood which recently received a UNESCO imprimature for heritage for its churches, synagogues, mosques, and scores of graceful Ottoman era row houses, tall and narrow, with moulded ceilings, wooden […]