Foreign Press Club of Istanbul

Thursday evening i went along with a friend to a meeting of the Foreign Press Club of Istanbul.....it was only there 4th meeting so everyone was chatting away to one another for what was often the first time.....an advantage to me. The guy who was organising it and the majority of people were really friendly and chatty; a couple were more dismissive when they discovered i wasn’t a jobbing photographer or journo – but i decided it was more their problem than mine and moved on....they looked like they’d seen a bit too much of life already though to be fair and anything short the prospect of a major disaster wouldn’t shift them ......

The conversations were wonderfully random; the Italian journalist a stereotype of what an Italian is meant to be like debating with the Spanish – arms flying left and right at a greater and greater volume level of debate; and at that point they were still deciding what to eat; the really friendly English guy wondering whether he should give-up on his giving-up of smoking as he was going to his friends where a huge pile of coke awaited him and he was bound to start again anyway and finally the Italian complaining about the German smoking next to her - although she acknowledged this was a cultural role reversal. Most interesting was the debate amongst a group of them in their 30’s and 40’s....how could they get out of journalism. How crap it was, how they had no social lives, no family lives etc and how you were perpetually broke from it too.........mmmm....... tempting career choice eh?

The one really interesting situation was whilst a group of us debated experiences in Turkey; a secular, but still heavily policed state which is actually classed as a UN “conflict” country because of the PKK situation. My friend with me for the night had noticed a girl making notes throughout our conversations; later on we discovered she was a local journo for an English language daily here.... but none of us felt truly comfortable about the detail we had been trading amongst ourselves and the fact that she now had all of our contact details and notes attributed to us. She denied that she would use our details or make reference to us; but all 4 of us had an unhappy instinct that things didn’t ring true. Whilst she went to the toilet; i provided cover and “look-out” whilst another proceeded to remove all details of us from her notebook......scurrilous behaviour that we all agreed that none of us regretted. Sometimes you have to go with your gut feelings, and when 4 of you are having the same feeling.... she wished us good night and we all clinked glasses to a lesson well learnt to us all; the more experienced guys as well as myself as it happens.