by by Sarah Rainsford, correspondent, Istanbul, March 28 2006

After five years in Russia I had developed a near-permanent scowl. Don’t get me wrong – I love the place – but people’s characters change in Russia.

You get tougher to get by, to get anywhere.

After almost six months in Turkey I think I’m softening. People smile in the streets here and go out of their way to help.

Taxi drivers wait a few moments when they drop me off at night to make sure I get in the house safely; passengers on the metro actually make way (most of the time), and when I was reporting from my sat phone in the street the other day a man from a nearby cafe brought me a chair and a glass of hot Turkish tea.

Wild cat chorus

It has taken some getting used to, as do the power cuts.

I’d grown used to a post-Soviet heating system in Moscow that comes on full blast some time in autumn and lets you swelter until spring.

Here in Istanbul the power goes down most days and for the first few weeks we went long stretches with no running water.

Most office blocks have back up generators; many homes are not so lucky.

That’s what happens when almost 14 million people try to cram into an ancient city meant for a fraction of that amount.

It also makes for noisy living as I found when I tried to record some radio links on my balcony one night for Assignment.

In Moscow, the hum of traffic made that hard but not impossible.

Here – between the seagulls, the car horns and the wild cats’ chorus (wild cats abound in my neighbourhood), the mosques (almost as many as cats), the minstrels and the barrow boys – I could barely manage ten seconds without interruption. Deafening at first, the buzz is now one of my favourite things about this place.

A view of the Blue Mosque

Scaling down from the fancy new bureau in Moscow to the more modest life of a sponsored stringer has been an adjustment, too.

When I first arrived the ‘studio’ was a coobie in the corner with a hiss in the headphones and the ‘bureau’ was an empty office with me, my assistant and my laptop.

Thankfully that has all changed. A mini-studio has been installed, complete with mixing desk, and eventually we’ll have the use of a live position from our terrace with one of the most magnificent views in Istanbul.

It takes in everything, from the first bridge over the Bosphorous in one direction to the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya in the other.

As for the story, it’s fascinating and it never stops.

I arrived here just a few weeks before the nail-biting night when Turkey waited to hear if it would finally begin accession talks with the EU.

Since then I’ve spent long days chasing men chasing poultry for slaughter as Turkey dealt with the first cases of bird flu outside east Asia.

And I’ve spent more time in court than I ever imagined, attending numerous trials of some of Turkey’s best-known writers and journalists who face the peculiar charge of ‘insulting Turkishness’.

Novelist Orhan Pamuk was just the most high profile of them. At least two trials have ended in fisticuffs in court.

And those are just the big news stories.There are so many feature stories from this enormous country in the mid of a massive transition it’s a good job the new office is up and running.

I’m going to need it.

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