DIY Turkey

I've come to the realization that Turkey is the perfect place for DIY types, but not the glossy made for TV types-you need to be more a cross between the die hard loyal Martha Stewart type and Survivor, because even though there are Home Depot knock-offs here, called Bauhaus (the reference being totally lost on my husband - despite Turkey's strong ties to Germany) and Koctas where you can find basic building supplies and maybe a glue gun, but there are no craft stores or places to buy the unusual art, building or sewing supplies that you see on the DIY website or shows like While You Were Out.
You have to be more hard core than the weekend fan to try to search for what you need for your projects and may even have to make your own tools and will have to expertly substitute freely when you can't find what you need.
But DIY here is not only for interior design or small home projects. It most often extends to everyday tasks and modern conveniences that people in the Western world take for granted. Compared to NYC where Convenience is King and there are countless time-saving products lining the supermarket shelves to suit one's hectic lifestyle, here women mostly don't work, so there is no one willing to pay the extra price for prepared anything, especially when you still have your mother around who is always ready to come by with a tray of borek or dolmas. The only saving grace to all this extra work is that one gets to actually utilize all one's skills that have been acquired over years of obsessively becoming an expert in the hobbies you have chosen.
For example, after I had finally figured out how to ask in Turkish, to both the local and supermarket fishmongers, to please clean & fillet my fish, and watching in dismay as they lobbed off half of my expensive, imported, albeit farmed, salmon (no wild salmon here) that had already been weighed & paid for, and neglected to remove the pin bones, I resigned to continue to DI Myself at home, dissatisfied with their lack of skill, and somewhat perplexed, since this was their chosen profession. The same held true for de-boning chickens, and unless you want your meat pounded to a few millimeters in thickness, you need to stop them and take it away from them before the meat pounder falls. Besides butchering, I now make my own pastry shells, puff pastry, hummus, yogurt with live active cultures, cheese, curtains, duvet covers, grow my old herbs...the list goes on and on.
When you can't find something, or more importantly, when you can't find something at the taste level that you like, you must resort to making it yourself.
Yogurt is a great example. For a nation that eats every meal with yogurt and probably consumes more plain yogurt than any other country in the world, buying it by the 1500gr tub, none of the commercially available yogurts are organic, antibiotic or hormone-free and the most distressing, none contain live yogurt cultures, which are so important and beneficial to our digestive systems and one of the most compelling reasons to eat yogurt. There is Danone Activa, but it comes in tiny 4 pack thimble size containers that cost the same as 15x the amount.

But to be fair, most of my need to DIY comes from my foreign tastes. Within Turkish cuisine there are convenience foods available, such as all types of kofte, boregi, spice mixes, and strange pre-made dry cake, etc, but once you venture into foreign food territory, the choices are non-existent.