Ape Rifle

I have so much to say about my trip to Turkey that I cannot hope to cram it all into this entry, or even the next several. Istanbul alone could easily dominate the next ten posts, and that was but a small part of my travels. I will therefore take the proper time to cover my Turkey travels on this blog, devoting posts to fun stories, observations and specific destinations in no particular chronological order.

A good place to start would be my experience with the Turkish intercity bus system. This service, at least in the western region of the country, puts most ‘developed’ countries to shame (I should warn here, however, that none of my observations take into account the huge eastern half of the country, which I’ve been told is a whole other story in terms of infrastructure and socio-economic development). Every long-distance bus I was on was fast, sleek, comfortable and impeccably clean. Perhaps this stems from the apparently fierce competition between a huge number of private companies; each station, rather than having a central ticket office, was a bonafide marketplace of bus companies hawking their routes.

Particularly overwhelming for me was the bus station in Izmir, the country’s third largest city. Imagine the largest sports stadium you’ve ever been to, and try to picture the cavernous concession stand areas in which you walk around trying to find your section. Then, turn every one of those concession stands into a bus company booth with a bright, visually noisy sign advertising its routes. Thankfully, I was there around 10pm and the monumental hall was largely empty- I can only imagine the scene in there at peak hours.

Anyways, there was a point to all this. This intense competition between bus companies also seems to have fostered a rather amazing level of service on the buses themselves. Each vehicle has a well-dressed attendant who goes up and down the aisle several times a trip with a trolley cart offering free (what?!) coffee, tea, soft drinks, juice, snacks and water. If you want to pay a little more, you can end up on a deluxe bus with huge leather seats, wireless internet, a personal audio connection and an up-close vantage point from which to observe Turkey’s moneyed class.

And it was riding Turkey’s great bus system that I was first introduced to Kolonya.

Kolonya sneaks up on you quietly, most often in clear, squeezable plastic bottles. The best way to describe its composition would be a nice blend alcohol, cheap cologne, citronelle candle and heavy-duty pesticide. I’m not exactly sure how its use came about in Turkish culture or what the social norms surrounding it are, but I sure got doused with a hell of a lot of it. On every bus trip, the attendant would work the aisle on several occasions and squirt Kolonya into the cupped, waiting hands of each passenger. While I restricted myself to rubbing it into my hands, some other passengers seemed to prefer massaging it onto their necks or even smoothing it into their hair. I didn’t really know why I was subjecting my palms so frequently to this substance, but I knew I sure as hell wasn’t going to get any mosquito bites there.

My exposure to Kolonya was, thankfully, not limited to bus journeys. My girlfriend, being the good Turk she is, also had a trusty bottle of it in her bag. I thus had the chance to regularly experience both its medicinal qualities and the soothing effects of its sweet smell. Scratch on your toe? Kolonya. Pimple on your face? Kolonya. Looking Tired? Kolonya. 2:35pm on a Tuesday? Kolonya.

However, one should be warned not to mix different brands of Kolonya. One particular bus trip, I was subjected to both my girlfriend’s Kolonya and a rather less pleasant one courtesy of the bus company. Faced with such a concentration of Kolonya on my fragile hands, what did I do? Why, I smelled them of course.

Big Mistake.

I’m not sure what did me in more, the intense faux lemon smell or the cheap chemicals assaulting my brain. All I know is that I haven’t felt that instantly nauseous in a long time. Good thing I was on a bumpy bus. I quickly ate some biscuits and prayed for the best, desperate not to become that ‘foreign guy puking in the back of the bus’. Through the grace of some deity or other I was thankfully spared that fate, gasping for fresh air as the bus unloaded us at our destination.

The most unexpected appearance of Kolonya came on my last day in Turkey. In a photo shop in Istanbul, as my girlfriend and I waited for digital prints promised to some kids (another story to be told), the shop owner decided the occasion necessitated perfumed hands. With a big smile and a query to my girlfriend as to whether they had Kolonya in Europe (everyone in Turkey thought I was British, or at least European), out came the infamous plastic bottle. By this point, I had learned to stop worrying and love Kolonya. I gleefully extended my cupped hands and accepted the sweet, insect repellent concoction. This time, however, I didn’t smell my hands after.

I’m not a chemist nor a sociologist, but through my limited observational powers I believe Kolonya to be the Turkish cousin of the famed Chinese 白酒 (baijiu) alcoholic delight. They seem similar both in chemical composition and through the seemingly random occasions in which they are foisted on unsuspecting foreigners. Of course, the Chinese actually make the mistake of drinking their version, which might explain a lot about the current state of that country. The Turkish, it seems, prefer the milder oomph of Raki, a more distant and more palatable relative of the East Asian firewater.

As I sit here now in a cafe on my last day in London, watching the suits and umbrellas file by outside in the rainy weather, I long for the fun of Kolonya.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2005 at 9:03 am and is filed under Musings on Life, Photography, Travel, Turkey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.