sanctions relief

A visit to the consulate finally got me the documentation I needed and I am pleased to report that bank access is restored. It was actually my first time ever going to the Istanbul consulate and I have to say I love its design, a kind of brutalist motte-and-bailey castle on a hill.

The consulate was moved here in 2003 from the grand old Palazzo Corpi, which was the first embassy building that the US purchased in Europe, back in 1906 when Istanbul was the Ottoman capital. The Palazzo Corpi is now a fancy hotel called Soho House. It seems to have been good timing for the move as four Al Qaeda truck bombs hit targets in Istanbul including the more exposed British consulate a few months later.
Palazzo Corpi circa 1915:


What I like about the architecture of the new building is that it keeps the main building safe without requiring the super hostile and intimidating blast walls, barbed wire, sandbagged machine gun nests etc. characteristic of consular buildings I've been to in Afghanistan and even Germany. You enter the fairly normal-looking building at the bottom, minded by Turkish guards with body armor but only handguns not crazy-looking weaponry, and after passing through security and walking down a hall, you take an elevator up the main building. Even within the main building, all the consular services are on a lower level with nice little outdoor space that is nonetheless segregated from the rest of the consulate.
I got to cut all the lines because I was the only US citizen, felt like a dick.

Compliance Purposes

I tried to log into my bank account online a few days ago and an error message popped up saying that my account was "suspended" and I should call customer service. After speaking with several useless representatives I was told that by an only slightly less useless representative who told me that I had to fax a notarized letter stating my current location. Because it is 1989.
I asked why this was necessary and she told me that it is because I am in a "high risk country." I asked what on earth that meant, why Turkey is considered high risk. It is just for compliance purposes, she told me, unable to elaborate. Oh, well that clears it right up. Of course, compliance purposes.

So I spent the next rainy day going to a notary, having the notary tell me that he couldn't stamp anything unless there was an officially stamped Turkish translation on the flip side of the page, going to the translator and falling asleep in her office chair while she took 45 minutes to translate a few sentences, going back to the notary and listening to his rant about how America is the most ruthless country trying to ruin Turkey. He walked off and I paid his ditsy flirty headscarved secretary with a 100 lira note and she didn't have change so called him back and he gave me a twenty from his pocket. The American doesn't leave without taking money, eh? He guffawed. You just charged me 80 liras for a rubber stamp and I'm robbing the Turkish nation because I ask for change? I didn't say, instead just nodded haha. America is the most ruthless country, he reminded me. Then his secretary asked me how she could improve her English and warned me that the stationary shop across the street was a real rip-off. I went there anyway and they were nice but the fax didn't go through; 2 hours later, after 9am New York time, it was finally sent.

Then, a few hours later, I got a convoluted email from Marcia at the bank office actually in charge of handling "compliance issues"; though she didn't even acknowledge receiving my fax, Marcia told me I needed a letter notarized at a US embassy if I was abroad. Apparently, the bank does not believe either my signed statement or that Republic of Turkey-accredited notaries are in fact located in the country of Turkey. I hope that the US consulate rather than embassy (where Marcia told me I must go) is an acceptable witness to my being in the country; Ankara does not seem like a particularly appealing travel destination these days.

So today I'm off to the consulate way up north in Istinye. The problem is that I entered Turkey with my Iranian passport, so the US consulate may also lack sufficient evidence that I am, in fact, in Turkey, and be unable to notarize my claim that such is the case.

I learned from Marcia that this is all because when in Iran I logged into my online banking account to check my balance. I didn't transfer any money to Iran, just checked my balance and logged out. Apparently that is a sanctions violation--and it must be a serious one if the nuclear deal didn't legalize it. Weren't Republicans making a big deal out of the Iranian government being able to pour money into Hezbollah and the Assad regime with its assets unfrozen by the deal? I guess the only thing bulwark left to protect American interests in the Middle East against the mad mullahs is that the latter aren't allowed to check the account balances for those unfrozen assets.

Before I go to the consulate, here is a review of the ways they could have detected that I am in Turkey and not Iran, if they had really dug deep into their detective work:
1) If they could trace my computer's IP address to Iran 2 weeks ago to know to block my account, they can trace my IP address to Turkey now
2) I called them, confirmed my identity by providing my card and PIN and address and last four digits of my social security number, and then told them I am in Turkey
3) I wrote them a notarized letter stating "I am currently in Istanbul, Turkey"
4) That notarized letter bore seals from Turkish translation and notary services and was stamped with the name ISTANBUL in large letters

nationalist tidbits

A French-American friend was passing through Istanbul a couple days ago with his girlfriend and invited me to join them and some Turkish friends-of-friends he'd never met. The spot the hosts had picked was a very fancy-looking restaurant inside of an odd little compound that included a night club and soon-to-be-opened craft brewery encircling a big courtyard.
The 4 new Turkish friends were secular elitist in that boring tone-deaf way, making easy references to Kurdist terrorists and the great leader Ataturk and how half the country voted for Erdogan just because they were stupid uneducated people. They, especially the two women at the table, seemed to like me less and less as the night went on specifically because of my familiarity with Turkish things. My friend and his ladyfriend would be talking about their first impressions and asking about stuff, for example the origin of the fez hat and where to get the best pickles, and I was sometimes better able to answer than the Turkish diners. "I'm scared of you," of the the women said laughing, and later asked me if I was a spy. The other chimed in that maybe I was trying to learn what "modern" Turks think, as part of a CIA mission I guess. Joking, but not fully. Just the fact of a foreigner knowing something about their country--however innocuous that knowledge: pickles and fezzes and a weirdo religious group--seemed to be vaguely threatening to them. And the latter woman got very offended when, after my French-American friend asked about male Turkish dance moves, I googled "adnan oktar dans" to bring up images of a bizarre televised cult's leader dancing with his surgically enhanced "kitten" followers. I thought the Turks at the table would get a laugh at me saying this was the ideal Turkish man to imitate but she said disapprovingly that she never would have showed Adan Oktar to a visiting guest, that was something an American would show a visitor [to embarrass the Turkish nation, I guess].
That kind of attitude is kind of incomprehensible to me, in the sense that I can't imagine having a response of discomfort when someone knew too much about American or having impulse to present the best face of my country to foreigners, sweeping, I dunno, Kim Kardashian under the rug.

On my taxi ride home last night from viewing an amazing bohemian apartment that I think I will rent, my driver told me that, years earlier, he had another American passenger who spoke English and what he remembered was that pride with which that passenger had declared "I am American." The driver wished that people would have the same pride in saying they are Turkish. Because Turkey is a very rich country; all its governments for decades has been robbing it but it still has lots of money--that means it must be rich, no? And as taxici who had been working in Istanbul for 30 years he could make a prediction with great confidence, which I might laugh at now but I should remember and recount at the conferences I attend when it comes true, that within 30 years Turkey will be the #1 country in the world. Yeah, a lot can change in 30 years, was that best response I could come up with.

Tehran to Istanbul

Breaking news while I've been navel gazing: government seizes Turkey's largest circulation newspaper and English-language affiliate, a week after shutting down independent TV news channel IMC, all on charges of supporting terrorism: http://www.todayszaman.com/national_court-appoints-trustees-to-take-over-management-of-zaman-todays-zaman_414040.html

My flight from Tehran left at 5am, which meant leaving my uncle’s apartment at 2am. I groggily composed a blog post in my head to stay awake and remember thinking that it would turn out beautiful. I don’t know if I have forgotten too much or if my judgment at the time was impaired but now that I’m getting down to actually writing the post I don’t see what I was so dreamily excited to post.

I sat silently for most of the trip, thinking I should start a conversation to help keep the driver, who was yawning and kept adjusting an air vent from which I couldn’t detect any hot or cold air blowing, awake. I kept thinking of things to say but the awkwardness barrier of starting with my rubbish Persian kept feeling too great. I am more timid now then on previous trips because of the unfortunate combination of higher expectations (since it was, fuck, a decade ago that I started studying the language) and lower abilities, as I am lazy about maintaining languages and haven’t spent much time in Iran or Afghanistan in recent years, and when I have been in Afghanistan I have spoken English more than Persian.

We had a weird semi-interaction for some time: I would watch his eyes in the rearview mirror as they started to droop and then he would catch me and sharply lock eyes with me and I would look away. Then I would nod off momentarily and then wake up to his eyes in the rearview and he would quickly look back at the road. Every time I woke up the smell of shit—at first I thought cow manure but then wait maybe human sewage—seemed stronger, and I would look out the window and see nothing but open country and wonder why the hell they had built the airport so far outside the city. Nothing but oddly manicured dirt with little grey somethings on it that ran parallel to the road. I thought it must be some kind of agricultural thing I didn’t understand and that was where the shit smell originated but finally, about ¾ of the way there, a track of metal bars started to lie atop the grey somethings and I realized they were concrete and it was the incomplete airport-to-city metro line that I had been eyeing. That seemed a sufficiently exciting topic that I struck up a conversation and yammered in my rubbish Persian about how much had changed in the past 5 years since I’d been here. As I spoke I still had some kind of self-conscious half-asleep idea that a great blog post was going to come out of the whole drive, but it seems I was mistaken.

Oh well I am to be working as a journalist for the next 6 months and it is good that I get myself in the habit of writing something anything every day. I am also testing my sea legs: I am writing this on the ferry to the Princes’ Islands to see if I can be productive on a boat. I will look for real estate on the islands, which are 45-90 minutes ride from the city center. If I do find a place on an island, I need to make the most of the long commutes. A long commute actually might be the very best thing for my research. If I got back home quickly after a bout of participant observation, it would be tempting to do practical things, check the email, have a rest, etc. before typing out fieldnotes and then never actually get to doing so. If I have 45+ minutes to do nothing but write at the end of a work day in the city, I can vomit all my notes in the best detail while fresh in mind and before doing anything else. We’ll see.

Maybe the thing that made me happiest to be back in Istanbul, and weirdly proud of Istanbul as if it were my own, was to see how happy and healthy the street cats look here compared to Tehran. In Tehran they are all covered in grime and move jitterily from hiding spot to hiding spot like rats, ducking at every (frequent) bang and roar from automobiles and construction. According to a filmmaker friend there is big award buzz about a documentary about cats in Istanbul that will be shown at the Istanbul Film Festival. TRAILER: https://youtu.be/noTLGoskNhA My filmmaker friend seemed perplexed that anyone would voluntarily sit through 90 minutes of that.

BUSking in Tehran

Here he is (on right) getting in trouble with the bus driver (in light blue shirt on left):

And a kid with an violin plugged into some kind of backtrack-producing machine that he slung from his shoulder:

The 18th Brumaire of Donald Bonaparte

I just looked it up on an online French Republican Calendar converter (of course it exists) and this upcoming election day is in fact going to be 18 Brumaire CCXXV! The parallels of The Donald to Louis Bonaparte as described by Marx, a buffoon with a ubiquitous name who gained the support of the rural underclass and the lumpenproletariat by entertaining them and playing to their prejudices, seem amazingly relevant but I have only found 1 article on the interweb that mentions the similarity: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/197905/brand-awareness
I think I'm the first to realize that Trump may be elected on the 18th Brumaire and should reread Marx and write an article about it.

5 years later

I’m in Tehran. I wrote this a few days ago but haven't been able to post it because this website is blocked and the Iranian authorities (and maybe Google, which continues to block gmail business accounts despite sanctions relief) have upgraded their anti-anti-filtering technology since last I was here. Tor browser no longer works and it seems people now have to use paid VPN services--paying for which would have been a hassle if I didn't have someone to pay for me from the US.

In the 5+ years since I’ve been here (see tehran09.blogspot.com) things have changed, and what pops out at me in rough order of how much I care:

1) high speed internet: Anything faster than 56kb/s dial-up speed internet was unavailable to the general public back in 2009, the authorities’ answer to the threat of “cultural invasion”. Now there are cafes everywhere advertising free wi-fi and I got a prepaid 4G SIM card with 1gb of data and plenty of talk and text credit for under $20.

2) inflation: The largest bill when I was last here was 50,000 rials, confusingly referred to at 5,000 tomans, which are not official currency but what everyone talks in. Now there is a banksnote printed 100,000 rials (referred to as 10,000 [tomans]) and notes called “Iran cheque” that are not officially currency but are treated as such and, just to add to confusion, are printed in big letters with their unofficial toman values of of 50 and 100 (thousand) and not their official rial values (i.e. 500,000 and 1,000,000 rials, respectively). After some early confusion I tried not to buy anything yesterday until I had a chance to spread all the bills out on a table and figure them out, for fear that I would accidentally pay 10x the price.

Along with economic inflation has gone physical inflation of the bills. The notes that are valuable enough (worth more than 30 US cents) to carry around are all too big to fit in my wallet. I guess I should just carry them loose in a dedicated jacket pocket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPB59bVSbck

3) EZ PAY cards: I will also carry around the cards they finally introduced as a unified form of metro and bus credit (about 10 cents per ride). Before you had to get one kind of (almost free) paper ticket for 1 kind of bus, pay cash on other buses, and use a different kind of cardboard ticket for the metro, which then only had 2 lines forming a cross. Now things are easier, though I still managed to screw up and not pay by swiping my card at a bus station before boarding the women’s area at the front of the bus. Having public transit divided between women-only and co-ed sections seems like not a terrible pragmatic choice to me; certainly doesn’t fix the root cause behind sexual harassment, but lets women do their commute without the constant threat of it.

The buses going north and south on Valiasr street have dedicated lanes (which I think they were just pissing people off by piloting 5 years ago) but seems to come by infrequently enough that every one is crammed to the gills. It is the same with Istanbul’s metrobus system and a source of much confusion to me: why go through the engineering feat of building a huge system of elevated roads across Istanbul only to send 1 bus down it every 12 minutes? My guess is that when I pose this to Istanbulites (I haven’t yet) their stock response will be corruption, but can’t corrupt companies profit from bus production and operation just as they can from construction? Maybe it’s just that whatever planners are calculating how frequently buses need to come are looking at maximum physical capacity rather than quality of passenger’s lives. Because on Istanbul metrobuses especially, every time I have ridden, whether rush hour or a weird off hour, I have been smushed.

Pollution and traffic seem about the same despite improvements in public transportation.

4) outlet stores: A lot of stores have popped up that look exactly like official outlet stores of companies like Nike, Adidas, Asus etc. complete with the sparse, carefully laid out floorplans of downtown NYC and Dubai shopping mall outlets, but I don’t think they are actually outlets. They all seem to have instagram pages and websites that aren’t actually connected to the corporations they claim to represent (Iran hasn’t signed the international intellectual property agreement that would make this illegal). For example http://filairan.com/ looks pretty legit but isn’t listed on the “Country Select” of the http://www.fila.com/ mother page.