Yesterday was one of those nights that reminds me how much fun this is going to be, and how much I have yet to experience. I was at a dinner party thrown by my yoga teacher, at her cozy little apartment. The crowd was the artsy/literary set: a couple of magazine editors; a documentary producer; a film actor; a foreign correspondent for NPR who just returned from Kabul and Beirut. And me - the token grubby capitalist.

But the following is illustrative of how I manage to bumble through life: it so happens that my yoga teacher's roommate is a writer with a fine arts degree from London. Clearly, we should have been talking about her interesting life rather than my mundane business. But somehow I got trapped into discussing Turkish real estate, a topic that I'd rather avoid at parties. Then, she casually mentioned a family friend who has started a Turkish property fund. It turns out that I have read their prospectus - they are newcomers who have recognized the same opportunity I have - and I have been wondering for the last few months how to inviegle an introduction. As my sister notes, I somehow manage to blunder through life falling ass-backwards into good situations.

In fact, "falling ass-backwards into deals" is one of the bullet points in my business plan.

Later that evening I met up with my old college roommate Gina, who was in town from Ankara, where she works for UNICEF. She brought a friend who coincidentally grew up in Ottawa and now works at UNDP Ankara. I mentioned that I would keep my United Nations jokes to a minimum, but she replied that she had been out with a bunch of Iraqis the night before. Understandably, their withering contempt and acerbic jokes towards her employers far surpassed anything I could come up with.

We had vodka martinis in a quiet bar overlooking the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, and I could see the Aya Sophia and Blue Mosque in the far distance.

I felt I was in a very odd, wonderful dream.