The Wild Side

Having just got back from a swift trip home to Devon, I can make a comparison with the home country and securely use the old traveller's cliche to say that Istanbul is a 'city of contrasts'. Having to explain your new life and the place you live to people who haven't been here (yet!) is always a challenge. Where can you possibly start and what do people really want to know about? Not really the tourist attractions and what we did on holiday, but how is daily life? What's different to the UK and specifically to rural Devon? Well, here's what's different.

Two weeks ago we had no school on Monday and Tuesday because we were under a foot of snow , by Friday it was 20 degrees centrigrade and sunny and only the soggy Fenerbahce scarf on the lawn indicated we had made a snowman. In the morning I can be 15 minutes drive away from home in the glitziest shopping mall you can imagine, surrounded by famous brand names ( that I have no desire to buy) while designer dressed cosmopolitan Turks throng Starbucks and Gloria Jean's buying cappuccino at around £3 a cup. In the afternoon I can walk in my wellies 5 minutes up the hill from our compound past the huge Toyota showroom into what I imagine is the kind of terrain best known to old Istanbul - or Constantinople. The city is built on forest sliced through by the Bosphorus strait and more recently decimated by the dwellings needed to both horizontally and vertically house 15 million people; but there are still large areas of pine, oak and beech state-owned forestry that give a clue to how the city once was. No one from the chattering middle classes uses the forest much (they are in their expensive health clubs) but Ruby and I regularly meet with the other population of Turkey - ordinary folk and street dogs.

More of the dogs later (they need a separate entry). My fellow forest walkers at 8am tend to be traditional Turkish women wearing the original headscarf - long and triangular and tied at the back, rather than the trendy shiny numbers with fancy pleats and ties that the politicised younger women wear. They are often older women with long grey coats or full skirts and thick sweaters against the cold. They have weathered faces and gnarled hands but are surprisingly nimble at shinning up the strawberry trees to gather berries. According to the season, they also gather blackberries or dig up wild flowers or herbs - often to sell I suspect. In the bigger forests they are huddled with their families picnicking on Sunday. Sometimes they are just taking their constitutional walk and admiring the view down over the city. We exchange greetings and are on our way. I see these same women tending lines of vegetables in market garden plots near the children's school. They are hard working country people who can carry huge sacks on their backs and are used to harsh conditions - they seem a million miles removed from their city cousins who currently fight for the right to wear the headscarf with their fashionably fitted suits in the workplace and university classes.

Just as the division between conservative and secular versus religious and radical is confusing to us in western Europe, the existence of these stark contrasts - cheek by jowl- is unfamiliar. But both are faces of Turkey and reconciliation of these opposites is part of the quest to enter Europe. It is an interesting time to be here...