Messin' with Texas

I actually wasn’t sure that the Istanbul based soccer club Fenerbache had beaten London’s Chelsea last night during their champions league match last night here in Istanbul. Fenerbache is the most expensive team in Turkish history this year with a total cost for it’s players of 100 million euros. That’s quite an impressive number. Besiktas [...]

Sorry I haven’t written much but my wrist has been bothering me a lot because I spend too much time in front of my laptop, which has a keyboard that is too small for me. Both of my wrists are killing me right now. I have been dreading typing anything lately.
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For those of you that didn’t read the first part of this entry here is the link to it. The first part of this entry got more feedback than any other entry by far (not necessarily in the form of comments on the page) and I have several people ask me when PartII will be [...]

Alper – who is now working in foreign sales and marketing with me – and I, often talk about the many things we don’t like about Turkey, Turkish culture, and Turkish people. I vent a lot of my frustration to him, and I return the favor by listening to his venting. We spend our lunch [...]

As I have already said, I had a short trip to the UK and to Spain last week. The trip was exhausting, but very successful and fulfilling. Except for missing a flight, everything went brilliantly well. In the madness of my travels, I picked up on a few things that stood out in sharp contrast [...]

A friend of mine contacted me a few weeks ago to ask for my help. Her mother, Kathie, is the assistant dean of Duke’s business school (I think that is her position), and she is interested expanding Duke’s executive MBA program to Istanbul. Kathie asked her daughter if she knew anyone in Turkey and my [...]

I meet a lot of people. For work, when I am out, through other friends, I am meeting people all the time. Regardless of who they are or where they are from, they start with more or less the same question: What are you doing in Turkey?
There is always a hint of surprise, or disbelief [...]

Current Mood: AlarmedThe parking space that Izzy got his car into was so small I thought I should take a picture and share it with everyone. In general in Turkey, people park very close together. After successfully parking his car without hitting the car in behind him, Izzy took a picture of the other car [...]

Current Mood: Cool I had to look up Tasseography too, so I will save you the trouble and start off this entry with its definition (according to wikipedia.org):
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Tasseography (also known as tasseomancy or tassology) is a divination or fortune-telling method that interprets patterns in tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediments.
The terms derive from the [...]

Yesterday marked the first day of Ramadan. I won’t go into extreme detail about what it is, so if you are interested you can read Wikipedia’s Ramadan Page.   Simply put, Ramadan is an Islamic religious observance. It takes place during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar (it’s a lunar calendar, so it [...]