Saturday 8 January 2011

Fezaurus #10

Eceli gelen köpek cami duvarına işermiş - The dying dog pisses on the wall of the mosque.

This takes me back to my New Year's Eve. We went to a lovely little village near Çeşme called Alaçatı. Every year, the town puts on a street party to welcome in the new year. This was my first visit and I'll give it a miss next year. It was absolutely heaving.

Unfortunately, in Turkey, when there's a congregation of people at an event that asks no entrance fee, it attracts an inordinate number of pikeys. Pikeys + crowd + alcohol = trouble.

As the masses counted down the final seconds of 2010, the pikeys had another plan:

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-FIGHT!!! PUSH!!! BUNDLE!!!!!!!!!

As a seething mass roared towards me, I suddenly found immense courage. Confident in my obese frame, I dug my heels into the ground and waited. Thank god, I managed to hang in there long enough for the crowds to squeeze past. It was somewhere between a bull run, cheese rolling and the opening of Primark on Oxford Street ...but everyone's pissed.

So what's the connection with the above expression? Well later we found some space to breathe near the mosque. We exchanged anecdotes of how lucky we were to survive and watched in horror as a drunk youth staggered over to one of the pillars of the mosque, opening his fly as he went.

Before the first drip had hit the floor, there was a shout from a local. "Heyyyyyyyy!!!! What the fuck are you doing? A mosque isn't a place to piss!!". As all my courage had been used up, we edged away from the scene and, from a safe distance, watched the furious local pointing aggressively backwards and forwards between the minaret and the drunk's penis.

So, when you've got nothing to lose, piss up a mosque. If a severe kick in seems like a walk in the park, piss up a mosque.