Elves & Slavs
Hello.
My cupboard elf has been stolen.
Or rather sacked.
And she was only small.
Quite literally: absolutely tiny, like 4’ nothing type tiny. And quite sweet in a brainless blonde kind of way, of which she was neither naturally, but both artificially.
And therein, I believe, lies the seed of her ultimate doom, jobby-wise.
Little ’I’ (la turque) was actually a low-rent version of a Paris Hilton-type spoilt little rich girl. Only we couldn’t tell because our perception of her Turkishness crowded out the indicators that – had she been, say English, or, to a lesser extent, German or something, would have made clear what her type was, and consequently affected our treatment of, and behaviour and feelings towards, her.
Instead of seeing her as a proud, self-involved and potentially vicious girl to be treated with kid gloves and kept at least a metre away from real affection, we fooled ourselves into thinking she was something akin to a pet Turk.
And it appears that Turks, like huskies, eventually turn on their owners.
So my cupboard has been vacated and I now have access to a real-live bed, albeit one in a cupboard. But plus ca change…
Exciting times job-wise though. Having the cupboard elf out of the way, real efficiency has kicked in.
The job hinges on interviewing everybody and their mother active in Turkey’s burgeoning financial sector and a couple of chief-execs from big companies in a position to comment in a general way on the broader economy.
Slowish start to the interviews given that my knowledge of the financial sector was previously largely restricted to Islamic finance, “private sector instruments complementary to asset-based welfare” and listening to my ex-girlfriend get my bank charges reversed.
But there is no better education than having someone speak to you as if you are an expert and so doing a lot better now. For any of you considering buying ‘rich dad, poor dad’ – don’t. Simply take a week off work, pretend you’re a financial services journalist for a semi-creditable publication no one has heard of and go about interviewing financial analysts. All I need now is the bloody cash to do something with my new-found knowledge.
But then again, given that I have never, ever, ever won ANYTHING ever in my sporadic trips to casinos, I would more likely lose everything phucking stupid investments in the Turkish service sector.
But I could just put it in the bank and do well: because the Turkish central bank is desperate to get foreign capital into the country, short-tem bank interest rates can be as high as 17%. Now inflation is about 8%, so it’s not as good as it at first seems, but it still sure as schit beats the crap out of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
I’m just not sure as to how I go about getting the requisite ‘right’ to put my money here. There’s the further concern that there was a massive banking crisis in 2001 in which everybody and their uncle lost all their cash due to a liquidity shortfall, so having the money in the bank is still no guarantee you won’t lose everything. Hence the high interest rates as a kind of risk premium.
A propos of the above, in answer to a question about why foreign capital makes up over 70% of the Istanbul Stock Exchange, one of my interviewee’s answers produced the following diamond: “after the financial crises of 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, the earthquake in 2000, and the big crisis of 2001, Turkish investors are somewhat shy of investing in the stock market.”
Which makes you think.
Went to Bulgaria via a 12ish hour bus trip.
Our journey out began with a minibus ride to a small bus station where everyone was going mental, banging drums, blowing bag pipes, singing and chucking people in the air.
We kind of assumed it was football, but whatever it was served to make the whole situation thoroughly confusing.
We eventually managed to get someone to help us to a second minibus that drove us to the big bus station where we were greeted by yet more mentalist football supporters, this time lighting flares and setting off fire crackers.
Turns out, however, they were not football supporters but the friends and family of Turks being sent off to their military service.
They seemed remarkably upbeat for people about to spend three years getting schit pay, screamed at and living in areas of the country where around 90% of the population arguably have some justification for wanting them dead on sight.
One of these areas will include the border with Bulgaria at 3 o’clock the morning, where Turkey’s marvelously efficient crossing system takes a measly three hours to complete.
But ho-hum.
Given my love of all things Slav – bar the word “slav” which is, sadly, unconscionably ugly in English – I was over the moon to be in Bulgaria and grinned like a drunken fool at everything we saw and most people we passed.
The architecture of Sofia is a wonderful mix of the old and the dreadful, with a picture postcard scene at every turn.
But the place is about the size of a postcard.
Literally.
Sofia has to be the most absurdly small city I’ve been to. It claims a million people – which is Edinburghish or Glasgowish – but appears to be the size of Burgh’s New Town.
It MUST be bigger than it seemed, but, my god, did it seem utterly, utterly tiny.
Bulgarians v pleasant, though, and nothing cost anything. They were also much better looking than Serbs and have this rather fetching habit of plastering sexually explicit adverts all over the city. Also sex shoppes everywhere.
Also much pig.
Amusing, this pig thing. Everything in Serbia – which like Bulgaria was also Ottoman land for about 400 years – was also pig.
I remember a mixed grill we ordered at a restaurant in Serbia which consisted solely of the different shapes you could grill minced pig into.
Did the culinary fashion for pigs and nothing else takeoff before, during or after the Ottomans? If before and during, was the Ottoman reaction one of disgust, disinterest or discipline?
I have Bulgarians cousins. More specifically I have two Bulgarian half-cousins I’ve never met through my uncle’s Bulgarian ex-Stasi faith healer second wife.
Took the opportunity of meeting them while in Sofia: one’s an architect-cum-entrepreneur
We had a few drinks, a reasonable amount of laughs and left it at that. They said Sofia was small, Bulgarians lazy and spoke wistfully of how well Romania had managed their transition to the EU: “They build roads with their money, man!”.
These are getting a bit long.
M
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