Moving by yourself is hard

I don’t even want to get into the reasons I’m moving unexpectedly to another apartment. (My former roommate morphed into frigid b*tch and her layabout boyfriend was basically living with us.) Instead, I wish to focus on my adorable new Galata area home!
It’s tiny compared to my old apartment, but plenty big enough for me. It’s a corner building, which means my many (doubled paned!) windows (so many that I struggled to find a lady willing to clean them all) face east, west, and north, with one bay window facing south. I even have an itty-bitty balcony. Welcome, smokers!
It’s got two decent-sized rooms–a bedroom and a living room–plus a well-appointed kitchen, a corridor that I plan to utilize to the max, as though it were a real room, and a nice bathroom. Well, the bathroom will be nice after the contractor finishes raising the sink and adding the built-ins.
Moving on your own isn’t easy, though. Especially when you don’t have a car. And when you do hire a car, it can’t easily approach your door because there’s a television show being filmed in your neighborhood. Yesterday, I came via taxi with a dresser, small table, suitcases, and et cetera. The contractor insisted it was a better idea for him to meet the taxi at the bottom of the hill instead of maneuvering our way up to my street. I tried to tell him I had too much stuff for that, but men don’t always listen. Luckily, once my possessions had all been unloaded onto to curb, and the contractor was scratching his head, “Hmm, you do have a lot of stuff”, this man with an empty wagon rolled our way.
“Müsait misiniz?” I asked hopefully. (“Are you free?”)
He was, so we loaded everything onto his wagon and he got an excellent workout pushing it up the short but steep hill. He seemed pleased with the 10 lira I gave him for his help. The taxi driver had suggested I give him five!

Van Show

I hadn’t heard of Van until a year and a half ago, when the area suffered severe damage, injuries and deaths from a major earthquake. It’s a city near the eastern border of Turkey, about an hour and a half from Iran. When I accepted a gig there, my friend said, Van? That’s the city Turkey forgot about. Why are you going there?
Well, there are plenty of people who haven’t forgotten about Van, namely those who live there, and the those who live for Van-made herbed cheese. The show was a kadınlar matinesi. The closest translation I can come up with is a “ladies’ luncheon”, which took place in a hotel ballroom.
I loooooved the hotel, a five-star ordeal called Rescate, facing the impressively huge Van Lake and breathtakingly beautiful, snow-covered mountains,

and employing the Best Staff Ever. We (the event organizers, one of the other performers, and I) arrived a day early, so I got a chance to enjoy the Friday night entertainment: live music in the top floor bar. The other entertainer who arrived with us to perform at the matinee was VJ Bülent, the first VJ on Turkish television, and also the first openly gay man on TV in this still rather homophobic country.
I popped out of the hotel early-ish on Saturday morning to visit an esthetician. There was a salon in the hotel, of course, but it wasn’t full service. I made fast friends with the girls in the local Van salon. One of them took me for a quick stroll around Van’s main drag (okay, we went to the bazaar and I bought a colander) and then, of course, we had a photo shoot.

After heading back to the hotel, I popped into its salon to have my makeup done by the resident makeup artist.

While I waited backstage, in walked the event organizer, Tayfun, with a man dressed in a black on black suit and with a dimple in his chin. Tayfun introduced me to the man as though I was already supposed to know who he was. As it turns out, it was Atilla Taş, a well-known and well-loved Turkish pop singer.
The show went off without a hitch. It was a packed ballroom of well-dressed ladies on their feet dancing, singing and applauding for four hours. My portion of the show was a 25 minute performance. I listened to Atilla from back stage. One of his songs was an amusing Turkish rendition of Gagnam Style. Not sure if he performed the accompanying dance as well.
That night, our flight was grounded due to cloudy weather. No biggie. One more sleep in a lovely hotel, and one more shower in a bathroom twice as big as my kitchen.