Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Halloween!

Halloween is not celebrated in Turkey, which is kind of sad for American exchange students studying here. Halloween's non-existance is a phenomenon in itself given how much Turks seem to like their sugar. Turkish students at any rate seem to subsist on a steady diet of almost pure sucrose: sugar spiked tea, sugar drenched desserts, sugar infused candy bars and the odd simit. Simit don't have sugar. But students eat them - to be fair I had to add that. Oh - and their mother's cooking. And cigarettes - but I don't think those are a food group...

Anyway - this particular Halloween I am actually glad I'm too old to trick-or-treat/it doesn't happen in Turkey because I would definitely get blown into next Sunday if I went outside. Well - I already was outside a fair bit today (go figure the second flood comes on the one day a week I have classes all day and on three separate campuses) but if I went outside again today I'd probably have to do it naked because I have no dry clothes left.

So that's a bit of an exaggeration, but when I say that the water coming from the sky is blowing parallel to the sidewalk I'm not stretching the truth one iota. And I'm talking about the small amount of sidewalk, where it exists, in Istanbul that's actually flat. It's so windy there are white caps on the puddles and the rain is blowing up under the umbrellas. It's an umbrella slaughter out there - I've seen more dead, blown out umbrellas today alone then all the rest of my life combined - including movies.

Everything that could possible be wet is wet and everything that wasn't nailed down before the storm started yesterday is at least in another neighborhood if not drifting off to sea. If you had a hundred bottles of paint that were all gray and dumped them out on the floor that's what it looks like outside.

It is so awesome!!

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