Friday, September 2, 2011

Peace day 062 Istanbul

Got up late, had late breakfast at a bakery and experienced quite some anarchy doing so. As I set there with lemonade and some unknown yet delicious turkish breakfast stuff a huge demonstration went by - later I found out that it was due to "Peace day". Soon things were getting a bit unpeaceful, when some mummed guys started throwing stones at bus shelters and shop windows. Stupid people: want to destroy the government and start by destroying public transport facilities and small shop owners windows. This is not revolution, this Is just some immature dumbasses having fun destroying random stuff.
Possibly they had also been throwing stuff at policemen as they were quite pissed and reacted with tear gas - that part of the story I fortunately only noticed much later: When I thought the action would be over, I wanted to go to the center of Kadiköy. Everything looked fine, no anarchists around, no smoke in the air. But at one point I noticed that I should not go further - there was still a lot of tear gas in the air, so I better retreated to some more breathing-friendly area. This was actually the first experience of tear gas in my life - looks like I am not that much of a revolutionist. I am fine with that :) As most ferries to the European side were also blocked most of the day, I just hang around a bit in a park at the seashore, playing guitalele to the delight of some curious guys around. In the evening I moved from my couchsurfing host Burcu to my next couchsurfing host Fatosh - she introduced me to her part of Asian Istanbul including pide (more or less pizza-like stuff, very good) and salgam (fermented purple carrot juice, extremely sour and, hmmm, rather interesting than good).




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