Blogging
From Abroad

In Turkey there are cats everywhere; on college campuses, under tables at restaurants, in classrooms, anywhere a cat might be able to survive… which is pretty much everywhere. At first to me this seemed very strange and silly. It is difficult to not laugh everytime a cat comes bounding through the window during class or when a tail brushes your leg while you’re eating. However the more time I spend in Istanbul the more sense it makes to have hordes of cats running wild. For example, in Istanbul there are very few trash cans. Instead, trash piles magically appear in the middle of pedestrian throughfares and the municipality comes and picks it up. In fact, this works pretty well, and I think Istanbul is fairly clean for a city of 17 million that has been continually growing for a thousand years ago. However were it not for the cats, I shudder to think what the rat situation might look like. I mentioned to a Turkish friend that in America we don’t have cats roaming free and he replied incredulous, “Why not? But cats are so funny!”
Another interesting thing to note is that Turks don’t treat the street cats like you’d imagine… quite the opposite; it is not uncommon to see a shop owner putting food out, or a proper headscarved woman crouching to give an especially cute cat a good scratch. Oftentimes you can hear groups of Turkish girls squealing “Offff çok tatlı yaaa… şeker yaaa”, literally “Oh it’s soo tasty… like sugar yaaa” My Turkish friends love when I imitate this.
If and when people mistreat the cats people almost always react, ranging from a tsk tsk to a shout. And this kind of behavior isn’t reserved only for cats; put your feet up on a seat on a bus or talk too loudly on the tramvay and you are sure to get reprimanded by the first person that sees you. I was once reprimanded by a homeless guy for resting my foot too close to a seat on a bus.
Turks care deeply for all the residents of Istanbul, their hometowns, Turkey, and the world in general. You could literally go to any town in Turkey, knock on a door, and chances are you would have a place to stay at least for a night or two free of charge. In Istanbul there are plenty of homeless selling everything from tissues to wally walkers. I’m sure that tissues are not selling like hotcakes, but in Turkey these people survive because people buy things they don’t want or need. I’ve even seen restaurant owners give street children large bags of food for their family. Turks are some of the most caring and socially concious people I have ever encountered, which is definitely one of the countless reasons I love this country so much.

In other news, this is how I get home from school everyday:
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