the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

aka, “travel mug"

hi, my name is diana, and i hate to shop

Hating to shop here is like living in Alabama and hating football. Or being British and hating football. Or being a non-Muslim Afghani. Shopping is, as far as I can ascertain, the Turkish national sport.

Or maybe just selling stuff is. Either way, they’re doing a lot of things wrong (which is my arrogant way of saying I don’t follow their logic).

First, they're all entrepreneurs. Street stalls, blanket venders (my term for those people who arrange everything they have on a blanket somewhere), shops, and people trying to make you take flyers are so thick here that you don’t even notice them after the first thirty minutes. I had this sensation with art when Barb and I visited Venice many years ago*: even when you try to appreciate any of it, you soon realize that you’re attempting the impossible, like trying to appreciate the uniqueness of each tree you pass in the East Texas Piney Woods, or pausing in Alabama to admire each leaf of every kudzu vine. After a day or two, your immune system kicks in and you don’t notice anymore.

* Speaking of which, the Venetian blanket venders were apparently unlicensed. They seemed to know through some underground network that a cop was coming, at which point they’d yank up the four corners of the blanket and sprint off to sell their junk for five or ten minutes on another corner. The blanket venders here don’t do this, so I suppose they simply lack funds for a stall.

The Turks seem bent on selling something, for which they only need something to sell. They may have only two pairs of sunglasses, but they will stand on the street corner waiting for you to walk past, then they’ll scream something to make you jump through your skin. It’s like walking through a city full of those automated toys that startle you with a greeting only after you’ve passed them.

I don’t understand economics much, but from what I gather, Turks work the supply side angle. In a nutshell: Sell it, and they will come. Most of them are selling garbage, and most of their intendeds don’t have two lira to rub together, but hope springs eternal.

But wait! It gets nuttier. You don’t find just one person selling, say, fake leather junk. You find an entire street of them, side-by-side, all selling the exact same trash. They’re friends—or so it appears, since they laugh and drink tea together all day—but they’re jealous of their customers (in much the same way you’d be jealous of your wife if you lived where men outnumber women 50:1). I don’t understand why they don’t move to different streets so their wares are more convenient to people, reach a wider variety of customers, and might even appear to be unique (a solid selling point, I’m led to understand). Perhaps this odd clustering behavior makes the activity more sporting somehow.

I certainly feel sporting when I go shopping. I don’t know which street in this city of 3 million* is selling the specific piece of rubbish I’m looking for, so shopping is indeed an athletic event here. (And yeah…I’m picky about the crap I want. It has to be the specific thing that I was after when I left the house, and it has to meet certain specifications.)

* So I’m told, but I don’t know if that’s in lira or dollars.

In this case, I sought a travel coffee mug. This mug should hold as much coffee as may be feasibly consumed while still hot, or at least warm. The mug must be insulated so as to capitalize on its size. It needs a good cap that doesn’t leak or pop off when I wear my blues to work. It must feel comfortable, like a good friend. It should not be besmirched with witticisms that end in exclamation marks as though this makes them funny.* It will not, under any circumstances, be pink. It needn’t look classy (my infamous vintage 7-11 Dallas Cowboys mug being Exhibit One; if Mich takes a picture of it, I’ll post it), but it cannot look cheap and tacky.***

* Truly funny comments are only cheapened by exclamation points, while exclamation points on unfunny comments only accentuate their banality!

** In a streetwalker sense.

Here, again, we suffer from different cultures. First, Turks don’t care for what Americans call “coffee.” Our coffee is a noisesome mixture of watered down ground bitter beans, and theirs is a noisesome mixture of muddied ground bitter beans. Their coffee comes in little shot glasses, which don’t translate to travel mugs any more than tequila does. Turks do, however like a lot of tea. They call it çay, pronounced like we pronounce "chai,” but—be advised—it isn't what we mean by “chai.” American chai is an exotic, spicy beverage; Turkish chai is black tea. (They brew it differently and it’s considerably stronger than most Americans would go for, but it’s essentially the same. If you’d like to sample it, try this: Immerse a Tetley tea bag into a cup of boiling water. Steep ten minutes. Add sugar. Drink scalding hot.)

The Turks do not carry beverages with them. I rarely even catch them carrying water while street hiking. Their coffees and teas, moreover, are social events. They are to be savored and shared. Chai is something one wastes time over, something one shoots the breeze and bonds over. It is not simply a functional beverage (however tasty), as is coffee or tea to Americans. In Turkey, you are expected to drink çay and kahve until your guts rot, so long as you don’t take it with you.

They don’t drink their sodas or beers cold, either. I bought Mustafa a Coke, and he set it aside to warm first. He told me it would make him sick if he drank it cold, and I take this to be a common belief. Incidentally…Puritans had the same notion about cold well water in early America. For this reason, and because offering something as plain as water to a visitor was thought insulting, they routinely offered shots of whiskey. Their most frequent visitors were pastors whose job it was to visit the sick and afflicted in their homes as representative of the rest of the congregation (some things never change). A pastor would be toasted as a welcomed and distinguished guest, and since it’s rude to abstain from a toast to oneself, he was usually the most pickled man in town. As a result, these souses—who often as not ran a still in their churches—were the most vociferous opponents of initial Prohibition efforts.

But I digress. I was after a travel mug.

I’m further baffled by the absence of these nifty inventions here because Turks walk like they’re late to the emergency room, but then they will while away an afternoon over a cup of tea while the stars change their fates. I haven’t yet discovered whether combining the pleasure of a slower stroll with the taste of sweet tea is simply beyond their multitasking abilities, or if it has never occurred to them, or if they simply prefer this strict business-pleasure division.

The day I decided to find a travel mug here, I had just recharged my cell phone, which means I began my search on Cell Phone Service Street. I turned a corner and found myself on Restaurant Street. The next street was Power Tool and Chainsaw Street, which I was hoping might be “manly” enough to have a travel mug for the Izmir lumberjacks, but no. Bridal Street, which is festooned with the gaudiest wedding gowns you can imagine, is incredibly long, and brides don’t have any use for coffee mugs, either. Then I skipped past Cell Phone Street, which offers a breathtaking crop of new phones, then Shoes Street, Jackets Street, Leather Street, banks, electronics, brass, dishes….

The dishes gave me a surge of hopeful adrenaline, but there was no joy in Mudville.

The Turks have lots of tacky crap, and a lot of nice crap.* The food is to die (and gain girth) for. Their carpets are chock guzel** (very nice). Judging from my landlady's impromptu shopping spree of contemporary Italian furniture after I paid for my first month’s rent in cash, which she brought me along for (I think she was thrilled at the cash flow I represent), the upper classes enjoy some amazing furniture. They're very warm people, very friendly—but they are travel-mugless.

* “Crap” being herein defined as stuff that is superfluous to my existence, happiness, or comfort. Your “crap” will differ from mine.

* To the nitpickers at large who have some command of the Turkish language: be it understood that I know I’m spelling this stuff wrong, but I can’t be bothered to figure out how type the Turkish characters then explain how they’re pronounced. (Except when I feel like it, and that’s because it amuses me to do so.)

The next day that the BX was open, I selected one of the two respectable coffee mugs their selection offered. My mug cost about $6. The one I passed on costs about $18. It was larger and probably designed to withstand nuclear attack. In other words, it was reassuringly American in its spaciousness and squandered R&D* expense.

* Research and development.

Time will tell if an upgrade will be necessary.

d