No, there is no hidden lolcat.

Instructions:

1. Stare at the center of this window as long as you can (at least 30 seconds)
2. Click the ‘Continue Reading’ link below

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Unlike Seoul, where exotic street food was varied, abundant, and cheep, Istanbul has been a bit more conservative on the food side of things. Yes, there’s great Turkish food all around us, but for whatever reason (usually price or convenience) we’ve been eating a lot less of it than I’d like. When we’re not cooking pasta or beans at home to save money, our diet consists largely of kebaps, soft serve ice cream, and ‘fiesta’ pizzas from Pizza Pizza. Yesterday I was introduced to a strangely familiar Turkish street food: Kumpir.

Turkish Kumpir, heaped with toppings

Yes, it’s a baked potato Turkish style! In addition to the standard butter and cheese, they top them with a variety of things including: black and green olives, pickles, sausage bits, Russian salad, corn, chili paste, mayonnaise, and/or ketchup. Despite the fact that there’s not a bacon bit to be had, they’re still pretty delicious and filling. We got these in Ortaköy, near the Bosphorus Bridge, which seems to be home to at least 20 different yet entirely identical Kumpir stands, so you should have no trouble tracking one down.

Yesterday, I had to kill 30 minutes while waiting for a bus, so I stopped into the only nearby restaurant for lunch… McDonald’s. Now, we’re no strangers to McDonalds… we’ve probably eaten 100 of their ice cream cones a piece, but it’s very rare when we actually order food there. Every time I do, I try to get something unique to the country we’re in, so that I pack in a little bit of culture along with the calories.

Is that... meat?

The McTurco seems to be the McDonalds answer to the Turkish Kebab… some form of flat-bread, shredded lettuce, a tomato slice, and… beer coasters? What are those things?? They look like a very large, very flat Chicken McNugget… and even those probably contain only 1% real chicken. After taking a bite I looked at what I had just eaten… there were little air bubbles throughout what looked like bleached wood pulp! Ugh… I think I’ll be sticking with real kebabs from now on!

It’s really amazing to me that you can live in the middle of a city hit by major flooding, caused by “the worst rain in 80 years”, and have no idea until friends from the states email you asking if you’re ok. We’re up on a pretty huge hill, so if our neighborhood was to flood, it would likely be the Apocalypse anyway. Still, I take the metro bus (like the green bus covered in water from all the pictures) every day to work and pass right through the area that was hit by flooding and I still barely noticed it. This morning there was a large area of low lying land that looked more like a lake than usual, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the roads. It wasn’t until my trip home when I saw that most of the water had cleared away leaving lots of rubbish and a few passengers pointed and chattered, though what they said I don’t know. Looking at the pictures online, you’d think the whole of Istanbul had been leveled under flood waters, which just goes to show that a photo doesn’t always tell the whole story.

Yesterday, we received a new comment on the video Trang, Vietnam Idol left by a ‘fan’ named Billy.

Billy says: “What’s the point? Why don’t you just get a real job and then travel. The premise does not match the actual outcome of the show. You guys come off looking like a bunch of morons, aimlessly wandering. Who the hell would want to live like that? Stupid.”

This may be the only negative comment I’ve ever seen left on this site, so instead of simply ignoring it or burying it as spam, I think it deserves a post of its own and a response.

If you’ve spent any time on this site, you’d know that we all had real jobs… careers even. Before I joined Jet Set Zero, I spent three years as a Software Engineer. Needless to say, I took one hell of a pay-cut to join Jet Set Zero and work more hours for less money with almost zero job security. Who would want to live like that? I do, and an amazing number of other people, judging by the number of applicants we get on a regular basis!

The problem with real jobs, as you call them, rarely afford the opportunity for extended travel. A paltry two to three weeks of vacation is barely enough to visit family during the holidays. Combine that with the pressure to meet constant deadlines and move up the corporate ladder and some people find themselves not even taking what little vacation time they have. What traveling with Jet Set Zero has given me isn’t money, it’s time… which IMHO, is much more valuable, but most people don’t realize that until it’s too late.  Yes, we do still have to work, but the jobs we work now are just jobs, not careers. They also put us smack in the middle of the country and culture which we’ve chosen to learn about and have helped us meet wonderful friends and have led to great adventures. What little money we earn still manages to cover rent, food, and fun, and when we’re ready to move on, our jobs are never the things holding us back.

Don’t just take my word for it, here’s Jen to explain why she joined Jet Set Zero: (more…)

The Conrad Hotel on Victory Day

Apparently, today was a national holiday in Turkey; Victory Day to be precise. It’s a celebration of the Turkish victory over the Greeks at the Battle of Dumlupınar, the last battle fought in the Turkish War of Independence.

Although we did notice the increase in the number of flags around the city in the days prior, we might have overlooked it entirely if the sound of helicopters hadn’t caught Brian’s attention. We went out on the terrace just in time to catch 9 helicopters and the start of a parade of naval vessels down the phosphorus strait. The parade was lead by a naval destroyer, followed by four submarines, four smaller cruisers, four bigger cruisers, and then a host of miscellaneous military boats.

Enjoy the photos from the day!

A Turkish submarine on The Bosphorus

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A few months back, my laptop decided that I no longer had the correct brand of power adapter and therefore it was no longer going to charge my battery. It will happily turn on when plugged in, but unless it’s sure my power adapter is a Dell (and it is), its going to guard access to my battery closer than a farmer guards his twin daughters. The only logical reason for this is that Dell brand power must be the electronic equivalent of sipping Cristal while generic brand power exists only to be chugged liberally by frat-laptops. Whatever the case may be, I decided to give replacing it a chance, so I had my family ship me the spare I’d left at home back in April. Yesterday, a man who only spoke Turkish came to our door and had Rob sign for a white slip of paper, also entirely in Turkish, that seemed to say that my package was somewhere within the city limits.

Here’s where the fun begins! Today, my boss had to meet with a customer for about an hour, so I figured I’d run out and pick it while he was gone. I dashed down to the bus stop and hopped on a Metro bus towards what I hopped was the right address. I was a little off, and needing to be quick, I hailed a cab who drove in what can only be described as large figure eights towards my destination, finally dropping me off at the cargo processing center. Once inside I showed the slip to a number of security guards who directed me to a long dingy looking hallway with 9 different numbered windows and a general atmosphere like a combination DMV/Hospital. I could detail each of the 6 separate lines I stood in and the 5 different documents I shuffled between windows, but it would take as long as the experience itself. In short, it was explained to me that any package with a declared value of over 100 Euros had to be picked up at this location so that a 10% customs tax could be assessed. Unfortunately my package had been declared as 105 Euros ($150 USD), so not only was it not delivered to my doorstep, I would have to pay 23 TL if I ever wanted to see my box again. Explaining that the contents of the box were barely worth 23 TL didn’t seem to matter much to them, and when I asked to speak to a customs agent I was just told: “You don’t need to talk to him”.  In the end I conceded defeat and paid the 23 TL customs fee and attempted to collect my package, only to be sent back to the first window to pay a 2 TL ’service fee’ for the assessment of the customs fee!

Finally, two hours after leaving work, I walked out of the cargo office one package heavier and a total of 46 TL ($30 USD) lighter. Luckily my boss had a good sense of humor about it and didn’t mind me vanishing from the office for a good chunk of the day. The lesson learned here is that bureaucracy is alive and well at the PTT (Turkish Post Telegraph and Telephone) and you should always declare the value of your package under 100 Euros if you want to avoid a similar fate.

Join us again for Volume II, if and when the package that Brian had shipped out here over a month ago ever arrives!

One of the most rewarding things about being a part of this project is hearing from our fans. We love it when you send us email, add us on Facebook, or comment on our blog posts.

Up until now, commenting on a post meant either filling in your name and email address each time or registering for an account on our site and keeping track of another password. To make things simpler (and because we’d love you to stroke our egos by commenting more), you can now log in with any Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace, AOL, or Yahoo account! Read on for instructions:
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Istanbul, Work and Home

We live in Beşiktaş, Istanbul, a quiet but central neighborhood near the Bosphorus strait; my job however is located in what feels like the other side of Turkey. It’s an area called Avcılar (pronounced Avjilar), and while it’s technically around the midpoint of the European side of Istanbul, it’s none the less a long trip. Every day it takes four buses, 6 Turkish Lira, and about two hours for me to make the round trip commute, which is why I’m really not very happy about showing up today and being told that the boss forgot to tell me he’s on holiday! Now I get to hop back on the bus and spend another hour playing Lemon-aid Tycoon on my cellphone. *sigh*  At this rate, you’d better watch out Jen, my lemon-aid empire is set to de-throne you as our resident lemon-aid tycoon!

Yesterday I started my new job here in Istanbul, working as private ESL tutor to the owner of a textile and clothing manufacturing company. It’s by far the strangest and least structured job I’ve ever had, but has the potential to be very very interesting…

The Interview

I was introduced to my ’student’ on Friday afternoon and spoke with him for about 2 minutes before he decided I was hired. No CV, no credentials, no discussion of the specifics of the job… just hired. Normally that would throw up a red flag, but since I’d been told that he rejected the previous candidate after 2 minutes, on the grounds that ‘he was a crook’, I was already expecting it to be a strange interview process. It seems that this guy has already tried every method possible to learn English: classes, computer programs, flash cards, living in London, etc., and hiring a full time private tutor is his last resort. Rob described it best as being an ESL version of Mr. Smithers from the Simpsons. My job is to follow him around all day and work on his English at every available moment. If he takes a drive to a client, I take a drive to a client, if he has to fly to Germany on business, I fly to Germany on business. He even went so far as to mention that ‘if I drink Ayran, you drink Ayran’, which may be my least favorite part of the job description. (For those of you who don’t know, Ayran is a really popular drink here in Turkey made from watered down yogurt and salt… yum!) Still, it’s a job, and I won’t complain if I get a free trip to Germany out of it!
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