Things Turkish that you probably shouldn’t try without a lot of practice, faith or bravado

1. At your next dinner party, pass around helpings of raw minced beef while explaining that you have actually ‘cooked’ the stuff by kneading and beating and adding a lot of spices to it over the past eight hours. If anyone asks, call it çiğ kőfte and invite them to eat up.
2. Singe off your ear and nose hair, and that odd wild eyebrow, with a butane lighter cranked up to its brilliantly full four-inch flame.
3. Allow the conscientious editor in you to tell that very forlorn but tense-looking uniformed dude carrying the AK-40-something howitzer at the gate of any of the many sandbagged and razor-wired military barracks across eastern and southern Turkey that someone's made a spelling mistake in their KEEP OUT poster.
4. Cross a four-lane Istanbul main drag at 4 p.m. with two toddlers in one hand, six shopping bags in the other, and a headscarf wrapped with such care that you’ve lost pretty well all of your peripheral vision.
5. Build your house on a cliff-side with prime views over the river valley below, a major fault line beneath the basement, a front yard desired for centuries by one invading army after another, and a government that’s about to sink the whole works under the lake that’s rising behind the new hydro dam upstream.
6. Say ‘yes’ to anyone who uses any combination of the words ‘have you seen this mosque before’, ‘tea’, invite’, ‘shop’, ‘no obligation’ or ‘carpets’ in the same sentence.
7. Pay (and stand waiting for change from) your dolmus driver as he picks up time speeding along cliff-side switchback roads (the sea waiting hungrily 300 metres below), never hesitating to take that new cell call, fingers of one hand rummaging through his wallet for what must be some desperately-needed document, reaching across the dash with his other hand for his cigarettes and lighter, but most of all enjoying listening to the whiskery guy one row back describing how tasty his olives will be this year.
8. Get yourself up a minaret at 4:30 a.m., switch on the mic, and belt out “Get Up, Stand Up” across the rooftops.
9. Wait til it’s dark, then carry two bags of toilet paper, each about two metres square, one on your front, one on your back, up an unlit, steep cobblestone laneway thick with honking, insecure Turkish male drivers, the rain pelting down on each slick stone.