Alone in Istanbul: A Journal Entry

Mom, Dad, Lara left this morning. Alone and Luti (the owner of our hotel) gave me a ride to my hostel at the other side of Sultanahmet in his white Mercedes. "Relax. Don't worry. I want you to have a good time here." He also told me that he doesn't think Turkey will become part of the E.U., that even Istanbul is not ready. That ten years ago, when he bought what would become the Ambassador Hotel, there were folks shooting up in that currently cafe-and-souvenir-shop-studded alley. He has two others and is considering buying another now, near the Four Seasons (in the shadow of the Hagia Sofia) but it is for $5 million, and "that is a lot of money." He looked sad when he said it. I finally had my fish sandwich--grilled fillet stuffed in white fluffy bread with onions, tomato and lettuce eaten sitting on a concrete wall by the water, near the Galata Bridge. It was tasty but made me feel sick. Then I found my way to the Istanbul Modern where I saw some great photos--the encyclopedic dreamscapes of Andreas Gursky (an amazing aeriel chaotic Cairo street scene froze me) and a series of stunning black-and-whites by a Dutch Turk, Ahmet Polat. Also imaginative/disturbing/lovely videos by four international artists and a permanent collection not worth writing home (where's that?) about. Now I sit in the outermost cafe of a strip of sheesha bars at Tophane. Tea to settle my stomach. Sunlight striping the shade. An airplane passes overhead. Youth everywhere and their mixed music. Unsure why I'm anxious about returning home.

Istanbul is Absurd

...but in a (mostly) good way. Here is a list of the top absurdities I've encountered since arriving last Monday.

TRAINS
We were the first people standing on an empty tram platform our first afternoon here. Within five minutes, hundreds of people swarmed around us and there was no where to move. As people negotiated their way on and off trains, they did what they had to do. Not a single frustrated word or angry look...

TRASH
I was stunned by our first walk on Istiklal Street. The street is lined with eateries, small shops, and international retailers. At parts, cars run across it and a "nostalgic" streetcar runs down it, but otherwise it's a pedestrian thoroughfare. And you see every kind of person you could imagine. I had just finished drinking a bottle of water and eating a simit (a kind of sesame coated bread ring they sell on the street here) and so had an empty bottle and paper wrapper to throw away, but could not find a trashcan anywhere. I was even more perplexed that I didn't see any trash on the street either. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough. I got rid of my trash by leaving it on the table of an excellent pudding shop we had coffee and dessert at. And later that night as we walked around some back streets, we found all the trash. There were horrific piles of it at the edges of the empty streets and the occasional passerby would go on without a second glance. I guess somebody or something comes along in the night and deals with it. I saw a man sweeping a pile out of an alley, a cat going through some, and last night there was a young man rapidly sorting a pile almost as tall as he was into a big plastic sack.

RICE IN A MUSSEL
Walking by the water near the Galata Bridge one evening, I was excited by all the food vendors
since dinner was a few hours away and I was hungry. I went towards a man selling mussels out of a box and pointed at the big ones, paying one lira (70 cents) for two. He made a show of popping each one open, and as I ate I realized there was spiced rice stuffed inside the tasty bites of meat. How did that happen?

SHOE SHINE
Getting off the tram one day, my dad picked up the fallen brush of the shoe shine man who was walking in front of him. Upon exiting the station, my dad told us to hold up since the shoe shine man said he wanted to do him a favor for giving him his brush and proceeded to give my dad a quick shoe shine. My father asked us all if we had any small change and we managed to scare up a few coins. In the meantime, the shoe shine guy was quickly working on someone else who promptly gave him twenty lira (18 dollars). My dad produced his three lira, and the guy got upset and then regaled him with a story about how his daughter was in the hospital and asked for twenty, indicating his previous customer. We all walked away and the shoe shine man exclaimed into the air, probably cursing.

DUSTBUSTER
Our first dinner here was at a restaurant we'd wandered to after many twists and turns. It was an alright place, with padded chairs, cold beer, mediocre food, and terrible though charming service. After all our plates had been cleared, I saw the (hot) busboy coming towards our table with a dustbuster in hand. I knew what was going to happen next but couldn't believe it when he stopped at our table, turned the thing on, and dragged it across our table cloth, specifically targeting a pile of rice that had fallen off of my sister's plate. I couldn't believe it, but I looked across the table at her and she kept a straight face. When he came around the table and dustbusted a little bit more, my sister finally began to laugh and then of course I had to laugh too, and my dad, stoic that he is, kept a straight face.

CLEANING ME
Istanbul is currently packed with tourists and, consequently, at most restaurants, bazaars, and stores that cater to them/us there are men standing outside trying to tempt them/us in. A lot of times they are young and/or attractive and they say the damnedest things. They call us angels, ask if we are married, and constantly ask where we are from, try to shake our hands. It's unnerving to a certain extent and only fun when a certain element of the insincerity of these gestures is obvious. Last night, we walked back to our hotel down a street where most of the stores were closed. We passed by one shopkeeper who was moving some wares from the sidewalk into his store. I made eye contact and he enthusiastically said, "Hi!" We were waiting for the requisite follow-up but instead got: "I will clean you with this!" and he smiled, indicating the duster in his hand.

Bashar's Party

This year, American Memorial Day fell on the day of Syria's presidential election. Bashar al-Asad was elected to another 7-year presidential term, selected by a resounding 99.9% of the electorate. We arrive in Damascus the following day. Our Lebanese driver finds us a Syrian taxi on the highway. As we drive into the city and are swallowed into the traffic of tiny Eastern European cars and ramshackle micro-buses, we stat to notice pictures of Bashar everywhere. Small portraits on car windows--often two or three per car--larger ones in storefronts, and billboards hanging on the sides of buildings. We get stuck at a traffic light. It changes three times from green to red three times and our driver tells us there is a parade, for Bashar. Later we are walking near our hotel and encounter another parade. There are people dancing in the streets and playing instruments, and holding up posters of Bashar. Even away from the dreary Cold War-era architecture of modern Damascus, in the shaded, twisty, cobbled lanes of the Old City, Bashar is everywhere. He is hanging near ancient roman columns, declaring his love for his people from the sides of food carts, and smiling at us above the doorways of quaint little cafes. The man is good-looking in a shirt-and-tie-and-moustache kind of way and in these portraits he's got eyes that follow you everywhere you go. Heading back to our hotel that first night, we hear nearby explosions. They are fireworks and all of a sudden they are all around us and light up the sky. We pass a busy street corner where fireworks are being launched in a small patch of grass. The colors explode dangerously low to the ground and we can't help but turn towards them, watch the colors explode and the light reflect of the largest portrait we've seen of Bashar yet. We walk on under a concrete awning with ten uniform pillars, each pasted with a photo of Bashar. We flip to Syrian tv in our hotel the next morning and there is Bashar, walking through various crowds of various people in various places. There he is followed by his pretty wife. There he is, holding up a baby, dripping medicine into the baby's eyes. Over dinner, Dad tells us he was trained as a dentist or an eye doctor, or something. We are the only ones in the restaurant, happily feasting on the many plates of savories in front of us, and we only notice after it's been going on for nearly half an hour that we are listening to a song, which must be on repeat. It has an electric rock beat and in constant repetition, with minor variation, a chorus of male voices sings, "We love you." They love Bashar, of course. And we joke about if one of us had our face everywhere, like that. And we wonder the same then for our own president, the infamous George W. Bush. But this isn't as funny because we almost think it would somehow be a more honest reality than the one he has created for our country now.

(Or at least it would be a more straightforward dishonesty, or something...But don't get us wrong, we are happy to be American and we enjoyed getting to know Bashar.)

Awake at 4am today

In Beirut today and I woke up at 4am. Brain and body awake. Ready. And when I was sick of lying there I fumbled around our hotel room in the dark and came to sit in the still lobby with the concierge with bloodshot eyes, silent but for the Lebanese diva quietly wailing from the flatscreen tv on the far wall.

Leaving San Francisco, I had meant to wake up at 4am but accidentally managed to stay up all night. And the airport extended the chaos in my head (from all the drinking). There was a ridiculous line at the Delta gate and I, of course, was standing in front of the most annoying woman in the universe, who felt, for some reason that 5:30am was a good time to make business calls and she ended up leaving all of these annoying voice mails. Justine. And then I got yelled at by an attendant and told her not to yell at me and made feel bad and then I got selected for a security search. And probably it was the lack of sleep but I really felt sick to my stomach at being treated that way, all my belongings rooted through as I sat there and my eyes were brimming. But the guy who searched me turned out to be cool--whispered to me "you should have kept it" when I called out to him after he walked away, leaving a lighter he found in my bag on the table.

And Cincinnati was five hours of wandering from one end of the concourse to the other, debating what to eat and where to sit and when to pee. And then I watched CNN. Buttafuco. George W. Bush. Alito. Bombings in Lebanon. Lebanon. War at the refuge camp in the north. My ears perked and it was gone before they really said anything.

In Paris, the warm, bright air made it feel like we were closer to Lebanon--and chaos regarding the buses and the buildings, and Arabic and French drifting around me. People speaking French to me... After we got off the plane, we walked down a blank hall and came to a big room where we first faced a big screen with the letters and numbers that were our connections racing across it. A uniformed man stood in front of the screen, taking requests. There was no order to it, just people walking up to him and declaring their destinations. Some asked it like a question: "Helsinki?" Some said it directly: "Lyons." "Moscow!" "Beirut???" And for each of us, he would point and it was as if we sailed off the ends of his fingertips, to our flights, to those other worlds.

On my way out of the airport in Beirut, I wanted to take a picture of my family, in my mind I saw the bunch of them waiting for me, their expressions changing almost in uniform as they saw me. But instead they were here and there, spread one-by-one across the throng. And my sister ran to me first, grabbing my bag and we all piled into the car.

Beirut felt like a ghost town last night when we walked to our hotel. And this morning I was walking the streets around 6am when it began to wake up.