Turkey, Surviving the Expats

PREFACE

Have you ever dreamt of stepping off the monotonous treadmill, binning the wicked world of the waged and bagging yourself a pretty little place in the sun? Have you ever wondered what it’s really like to live as a jolly expat in a balmy foreign field? To get a real feel, you need to ask someone who’s been there, done that and bought all the fake t-shirts. In 2009, Jack Scott and his civil partner, Liam, sold off the family silver and jumped the good ship Blighty for Muslim Turkey. They parachuted into paradise with eyes firmly shut and hoped for the best. When the blindfolds were removed, what they saw wasn’t pretty. They found themselves peering over the rim of a Byzantine bear pit. Bitching and pretension ruled the emigrey roost. The white-washed ghettoes were populated by neo-colonial bar-room bores who hated the country they’d come from, hated the country they’d come to and were obsessed with property prices, pork products and street dogs. Expat life was village life, a place where your business was everyone’s business. For Liam, it was the barren badlands of the lost and lonely. For Jack it was the last stand of the charmless Raj - 'Tenko' without the guards, the guns and the barbed wire. It took the hapless couple a while to find their feet and separate the wheat from the chavs but, determined to stay the course, they eventually found diamonds in the rough and roses in the scrub. Regular replenishing trips back home to the warm bosom of friends and family became a vital tool in their expat survival kit. Jack wrote it all down in a blog for the world to ignore. He called it Perking the Pansies. Against the odds and quite by surprise, Perking the Pansies grew into the most successful blog of its kind in Turkey, attracting an international audience, the attention of the Turkish national press and hatching an award-winning autobiography. Jack raised a satirical mirror. Sometimes the reflection was funny, sometimes it was sad, and sometimes it was just plain ugly. His witterings struck a global chord: expats are expats wherever they pitch up.

After four glorious and inglorious years, the ties that bind eventually drew Jack and Liam back home to where the heart was and the health care was free. They upped sticks and paddled back to Blighty on the evening tide. They now live in the English cathedral city of Norwich set within the flatlands and big skies of Norfolk. With their Anatolian adventures firmly behind them, Jack has published the best of the blog from the Turkey years as a two volume e-book – Turkey, the Raw Guide and Turkey, Surviving the Expats. Welcome to Part Two of the mini-series. The uncensored director's cut includes previously unpublished material together with Jack’s personal recommendations of Turkey’s must-sees for visitors and residents alike. Jack likes to be functional as well as decorative.

Don’t forget to pick up Episode One – Turkey, the Raw Guide. Like Jack and Liam, they come as a pair.