Turkey - A Contradictory Country.

I chose 'contradictory' but I could have picked Erratic, changeable, unpredictable, variable, varying, changing, inconstant, unstable, irregular, fluctuating, unsteady, unsettled, uneven; self-contradictory, contradictory, paradoxical; capricious, fickle, flighty, whimsical, unreliable, mercurial, volatile, blowing hot and cold, ever-changing, chameleonlike.

I was sitting in the courtyard on Friday evening, playing backgammon with a friend when said friend's phone beeped with an incoming text.  "Are you still in Turkey? Are you OK?"  Why would he not be ok we wondered.  Thus the 'inconsistency': While Istanbul was raging and my blogger friend Terry had fighter jets and sonic booms over her apartment in Ankara, I was sipping wine, winning at tavla and contemplating  picking another bunch of grapes.

Friends who have visited me in Turkey know why I choose to live here despite all the above adjectives, those who haven't will never understand. There is no logic, little beneficial law and quite often a lot of hullabaloo, but one gets used to this state of affairs and misses the chaos when in more ordered countries.  The minute I moved to Turkey to work, I knew I'd stay - I just clicked with Turks; we laughed at the same things and I felt genuinely safe in their company. Which is why the reports of young innocent Turkish conscripts being murdered by their fellow countrymen is so hard to bear.  I want to pull out Turkey's power cable, press reset and restore the factory settings that we are all used to. Something has gone terribly wrong with the machine.