Friday, November 12th, 2004

Tonight Mehemt and I headed out on the town for some tasty drinks and good live music. We went to a neat bar in Kizilay which seemed to be owned by a bunch of washed up communists. Pretty funny. They had pictures of Che up and also some photos of Turkish revolutionaries. I thought that the Turkish thing was questionable and asked Mehmet how long they had lasted in Turkey. He said, “Oh, about two weeks.” This state does not put up with criticism!

The band was a five piece, playing keys, drums, and a few different guitars. I think one was a saz, a three-stringed one, while another was an ud with eleven strings. But I could be wrong. They played a mixture of Turkish and Kurdish traditional songs, with a few arabesque (traditional Arabian?) songs as well. It was really good stuff, so much better than a lot of what I hear on the radio. Maybe I’m just not used to the music here, but hearing it live in my opinion is sooooo much better than recordings.

We drank Efes brand beer. It’s a Turkish made lager and pretty non-descript. I also had a glass of rakı at the beginning of the night. This is a licorice tasting drink that Turks have a lot of respect for. Mehmet said something like “You can drink it! You’re a lion now!” He would even touch the stuff, so I took his comment seriously.

After they closed we went on a small bar crawl that only lasted two stops. We went in to some random place with a lot of mirrors that was playing dance music, and had hardly started into our beers when we were accosted by prostitutes! We had to hurry up and get out as we didn’t really need their services! The only thing nice about these prostitutes is that they were much prettier than the ones in Cuba. Not that it made it any more enticing, but at least they were cute.

I’ve been really surprised by the amount of prostitution here. It’s a good example of the corruption you can find in Turkey. All these hotels and nightclubs have arrangements worked out with the police, and some are so blatant as to put pictures of their girls on the windows of their establishments. And everyone gets along. I don’t know how this compares to other developing countries, but I wonder if Turkey is fairly unique as a far as Muslim populated countries are concerned. I mean, I doubt you’d see this kind of stuff in Iran.

But anyway, it was a good night. I really hope I can see more live music like I did tonight, as it’s such a wonderful way to understand the Turkish people and where they are coming from.