May 2008

Descending for the landing into Munich, I see in the distance the craggy edifices of a monumental city, reflecting white, orange, and violet in the morning. But this is an impossible city: its architecture doesn’t rise linearly, but rather explodes like a huge crystal. I realize it is not a city after all, but the Alps, lying calmly at the horizon in this Bavarian morning sun.

Below me, the countryside is a calm network of meandering roads and streams, nongeometric fields, small woods, and villages at the nodal points. Not quite flat but not quite hilly, the landscape looks like a lovely place to go for a long walk. I fantasize about taking a two-week stroll along the lanes and towns, perhaps ending up in Munich where I would gather my photographs and journals into a small book.

The transfer at the Munich airport is quick and painless, and soon we are in the air again: our entry into the exotic east. I wonder how different it will be than the fairy-tale setting we’ve been traveling through.

But happenstance rears its head. The captain announces that one of the jet engines is leaking oil, and has been shut off, and that we are returning to Munich. The situation is handled with aplomb, and I have this sense the the plane’s passengers, as a whole, hold a certain confidence that these smart German technicians will have it all worked out very soon.

Back on the ground, we’re back in the modern reality of the service industry. Lufthansa Airlines seems to not want to divulge the possibilities for whisking us efficiently off to Turkey. We wait. We receive an announcement that they will soon announce their plans. We wait further. Our entire group is whisked over to the service center, where we watch closely the unmoving line. Occasionally, a service agent comes out and talks to whoever happens to be in front of the mob. People get angry, demand their ‘passenger rights’ (a certain nervous/angry consumerist tone betrays the probability of a recent media campaign promoting these supposed ‘rights’). The group becomes a mob of traveling minnows, blindly following rumors, gossip, and inaccurately interpreting the body language of the service agents.

Most of the passengers are Turkish; I’ve spotted only a couple of Americans. I happen to be standing next to one, a man in his 30s. Mac works for the Pentagon, and is going to Turkey for a NATO conference. He’s a genuinely nice guy, and our conversation meanders around travel, cellphone service, networking technology, living in DC, government work… None of us know our immediate future under the care of Lufthansa, but it’s always nice to talk about the possibilities.

Long past the time we would have reached Istanbul on the one-engined plane, we finally learn our options. We have missed the two intermediate flights, but there is one more this evening, leaving nearly 12 hours after our original airplane did. There’s no other choice, so we agree and are very slowly and manually rebooked.

I am not one to sit around in airports, so with a big friendly American smile, I ask our very capable Special Service Agent about possibilities: Can we sit in the Lufthansa club? Get a shower? Maybe get a free wifi pass? No, sorry, Es tut mir leid; none of these are possible.

But then her eyes twinkle, and she says to us: ‘You have American passports, yes? Then you may leave the airport. You should go to the Englischer Garten. Very nice. You may sit at the Seehaus beer garden. There is a bus.’ And so we set off, slithering around the Munich airport, out through passport control with only a smile from the agent, into the warm summer air of Munich and into the waiting bus that will take us downtown.

[dateline Munich, Germany]

Sometimes a trip is best begun as a series of nasty-looking ladders that need to be climbed. The hurdles remind the traveler that he has departed on a journey, and that this journey is not his everyday life.

In my case, the first hurdle is getting up at 3am, after only an hour’s sleep. Molly arrives to drive me to the shuttle, which will then deliver me to the Portland airport. Molly runs the local bakery in our town; she is the only person who would naturally be up and reasonably awake at that hour. God bless the bakers, for they give the early mornings their souls.

Although I’m not an early waker by any means, I love the dawn when it arrives to me by accident or circumstance. This morning, the moon is a foggy silver over a violet-gray sky. The city slowly illuminates, a new act begins on the stage of the world.

The free wifi in the shuttle bus lets me begin the documentation of the trip, just a small ‘tweet’ of what I see, via the Twitter messaging network and my handy iPod.

[dateline Portland, Oregon]

In ‘Cities and Ambition,’ Paul Graham explains how great cities attract different sorts of ambitious people, thereby creating different types of cities. He posits that if you want to be ambitious in a particular city, it’s essential to know how to read that city for its specific type of ambition. And if you find your own ambition to not match the overarching ambition for that city, perhaps you’re in the wrong place.

Paul’s main point is how a resident of a city is affected by the kind of ambition that’s found there. But I think there are also hints here for travelers.

When I arrive in a new city, I find myself looking for clues on how the city works. Some of the clues are logistical: Are the streets in a logical grid or quadrant, or do they run to and fro, connecting the nodes of the city like mycelium? Is the traffic ordered and calm, or chaotic and frenzied? Where are the main boulevards, the pedestrian promenades? Where is the edge of the city? Where is its center?

Some clues are social. Do people look you in the eye? Do they smile, or do they tense up? (I was once warned to never look into another man’s eyes if I went to Liverpool.) Where is the social scene: on the sidewalks? In the plazas? In the malls? Who is sitting at the sidewalk cafes — if anyone?

Some are architectural, or historical. What is the style and age of the primary buildings? What about the secondary buildings? What about the in-fill — have houses from the 1400s been bridged by a concrete edifice from the 1960s? Or is everything from the 1960s and onwards?

I’ve long I’ve considered writing a guide, tentatively titled How to Read a City, that would go into all these attributes and signs of a new city. It would be part tour guide, part psychogeography. It would be non-specific, be applicable to any city in the world, be usable by any traveler. It would not be a book of answers, but a book of questions.

Like most of my journeys, the trip to Istanbul arrived on the travel horizon not so much by choice as much as happenstance.

First comes the far-off call of the road and the world beyond my door, the sirens all travelers know. The air starts to sparkle, the future journey seems both indefinite and full of potential. Hints and messages begin to arrive, addressed from places asking me to come visit.

I poke my head out the door, test the wind, mention to friends that I’m thinking of traveling, letting them know the places that have been calling to me. I get back encouragement, ideas, inspiration, connections, coincidences, possibilities.

Gradually, a story forms: a theme, a way of travel, the soul that each journey inhabits. This story shapes the trip, giving it meaning and a context. Is it circular, a trip around the central provinces of Japan? Is it linear, a trip from the west coast of the US to the eastern edge of Eastern Europe? Is a journey of depth, or of length? About architecture, gardens, and walking, or about the myth of the American road?

Then the rational planning mind kicks in, starts to gather information, research, plot the dots on the mental travel map. Ideas become plans; problems become solutions; scrawled notes become flight confirmation numbers; packing lists become packed bags. The trip becomes solid.

Un-travel

This is a new sort of traveling for me, yet one that I hope I’ll continue to do. Instead of spending weeks moving around a particular region, I am living in Istanbul for a month. Just living there. Just in Istanbul.

I’m setting up shop, as it were: my laptop and a few office items will be packed carefully into my bags, and a wifi connection at the flat should keep me in touch with my consulting/programming world, without the usual hassle and frustration of Internet cafes or the like. I do plan to work while I’m living in Istanbul, on either projects of my own or with my clients.

I want to see what it’s like to live and work in another part of the world, and so I’ll put myself in that situation for a few weeks and try it out. I’ve always wanted to live in another country; I finally realized that I didn’t have to move away from my home to do so. I always get a lot out of trips, even short ones; I hope this month of temporary emigration will be enlightening and inspiring.

Because of this method of traveling, I have not taken my usual path in research: I have not bought the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey; I have not cataloged long lists of places I want to visit; I have not scribed a path in a rough circle around a certain part of the world. In fact, all I have done is made this decision to travel from Portland to Istanbul, the decision to have a room in Instanbul, and the decision to come home after a month has passed.

The slow departure

As I write this, it’s less than a week before I leave. That last-week travel pressure is always present; thoughts of organization, travel, packing, language, money, drift through my head. The list of must-do things becomes longer; soon I will triage these must-do’s and realize I just won’t get to a few of them.

Coincidentally, friends here have been hosting dinner parties, movie nights, early-summer BBQs -- I am able to connect to folks before I depart. The night before I leave town, I’ll be at the unveiling party for the poster I photographed and designed for the Silverton Fine Arts Festival — one last hurrah before my very early morning flight to DC, then Munich, then finally to Istanbul.

Through the modern miracle of Craigslist, I found a room to rent, in a flat a few blocks off Taksim Square. Zubeyir calls his flat ‘The Place at the heart of the City.’ He is friendly and genuinely passionate about his city, and about his hosting of travelers. I’ll have a small room, with a bed, wardrobe, table, and chair, as well as access to the kitchen, laundry, and living room. It’s a room of my own, yet without the anonymity and transience of a hotel, and without the chaos and emotional energy of a hostel.

All else is up in the clear air of the future.

[dateline Silverton, Oregon]