Jun 2008

The swallows appear again, just at dusk outside my window, launching a spectacle of aerobatics as they swoop around the roofs of the apartment buildings. They trilling madly, swirling in little ballets of two or three, then break up into solos, diving and chortling all the way. Within minutes, the show is over, and they’ve moved on to other venues.

I’m on the downward arc of my stay here in Istanbul. This is my last weekend experiencing this exciting city, the last Saturday I will spend wandering the busy streets. Although Istanbul never really sleeps, from tomorrow until early Tuesday morning when I depart, the city will be moving slightly slower.

The quick onset of the summer has been difficult for me. The temperature rises to the early eighties by mid-morning, and if I haven’t made it out by then, I cloister myself in the somewhat cooler apartment, working on projects, listening to the city, until the evening air tempers the heat. So my days are slow, filled more with thinking and creating than with wandering and observing. It’s okay, really: there’s a different quality to be experienced, to be more resident than tourist.

Perhaps this is what it’s like to be an expat, to be away from one’s native country and to set up work and home in another, very different, place. I always thought being an expat was more about the ex, the act of leaving. And patriot is a concept I’ve always found alien, so the route to unbecoming one is not clear to me at all.

Now I’m seeing that the ‘expat experience,’ if it can be described at all, is not a particular event that happens, not a line crossed, not a decision made. It’s not even about acting in a particular way. It is more like a sense of being, crossed with a sense of place, tinged with a sense of the exotic. Perhaps it is the opposite of traveling: it is forgetting that one is traveling in a place, and waking up one day finding that one is living there.

The repetition becomes a kind of meditation practice: I walk the same streets, pass the same buildings, see the same skyline over the same rooftops, cross the same river. The place begins to show its nature. What was new becomes recognized, familiar, no longer so foreign and exotic.

So this is where I live, in a six-story flat in Hoczade Street, near Taksim Square, in Beyoğlu, in central Istanbul. Descend the 90-odd steps to the street, and smile at our friendly apartment neighbors. We’ll leave the building through its never-locked front door. Glance across the road to the men under the overhang at the little parking lot, where there is always someone ready to park a car for a few lira; more importantly, there is always someone to chat with, to share the day’s news or the expectations of tonight’s football game. Just next door you’ll notice the friendly and cheap barber shop, where the fellow who cut my hair one day invited me to sit down for tea the next day; we had a very long conversation in Turkish, which I cannot understand at all.

Up the street, just there on the right, is the produce shop that run by the cheery man who, although he’s Turkish, prefers to speak to his customers in French; I respond in my pidgin mix of everywhere I’ve been, including France. I taught him how to say ‘thank you’ in Japanese while buying his scrumptious peaches, which he carefully cradled in little gray paper bags.

Down the other way, see the young man who sells fashionable T-shirts. He seems to never close his shop. We’ll cross the street (watch that taxi!) to the corner grocery store where the owner’s kid brother is learning to make change and to answer the phone. Just beyond, in the small courtyard fashioned out of the side of the street, you’ll see two cats (Istanbul is full of stray but cared-for felines) sitting on the same pair of motorcycles, like they do every day, calmly in the heat, on the the black seats warming in the sun. Avoid looking into the sad eyes of that woman who tries to sell packages of tissues for a lira. Have a delicious tantuni — no, make it two — at the cafe on the corner that specializes in these delicious wraps; do not be surprised when the efficient yet ebullient waiter snatches your digital camera out of your hand to take your own photograph of yourself.

[dateline Istanbul, Turkey]

Lost in Istanbul. Not exactly — I just don’t know where I am. I’ve gotten off the bus somewhat randomly, thinking I’m where I was trying to go, but finding I am not.

I can place myself vaguely: a neighborhood up the hill from Eyüp, southwest of the Golden Horn. The street culture seems more Arabic here, much more so than around Taksim: more head scarves, coats, more conservative clothing. Less fashionable, more everyday, more casual. The street is crowded and active, but nowhere near like around Taksim Square.

I’m eating a hamburger, of all things, at a Turkish fast-food joint along a shopping street. I overlook the street from the second floor of the restaurant, and flash back to Morocco — the viewing of life passing through the cafe’s buffer/filter of height and glass. No one seems hurried here: all strolling at about the same confortable, observing pace.

The girl downstairs at the pastry country says hello, asks where I’m from, and is surprised I am American. She says she’s from Iraq, and says America is very nice. I goof and reply the same about her country, and she says, emphatically, ‘No.’ A look comes over her face to say, ‘No, no — Iraq is not nice at all, and it’s America’s fault.’ I shrug, try to convey that she is correct, and that I am not to blame — she smiles, says, ‘Okay.’

[dateline Istanbul, Turkey]

As if the city has decided to take a rest from its metropolitan identity, this Sunday night is calm and mellow. The sun’s heat has finally been blown away by the evening wind.

I’ve spent the day inside, also taking a break from the demands of the city. Like when I first arrived and had tweaked my back so much that I spent much of the first few days simply listening and trying not to move, my urban experience today has been filtered through the narrow angle of my sixth floor window.

The clink of tiny spoons in tea glasses echo from the school courtyard lit by flourescent lights. Last night a raucous party filled the space with the overcompensating shrieks of self-conscious teens; tonight is just a scattering of people, talking musically and moving to and fro on the playground swing.

A slow beat of music comes from the cafe that just two nights ago hosted crazed soccer fans screaming amid techno beats. The parking lot next door is nearly empty. A few couples stroll slowly towards Siraselvier Caddesi, perhaps heading home after an early evening meal.

The huge video display atop the office building not far from here still pulses its random patterns of lights, but now feels more stable, more calm, less frenetic. Instead of constant car horns, fireworks, and celebratory gunshots, I hear the tight, funneled sound of television shows, strummed guitars, windows closing. Someone plays an Abba song, crackling and distorted. A ship’s horn booms from the Bosphorus.

[dateline Istanbul, Turkey]

Out here in the Turkish countryside southeast of Istanbul, across the Sea of Marmara, I am melting in the sweltering heat. The sun is an angry beast, directing its burning glare directly at me. My words stop coming, a huge heavy weight descends on my head, across my arms, holds down my eyelids. Sweat wells up constantly on my arms and the back of my neck and down my forehead. In pain, anger, frustration, torment, panic.

To escape, Kate & I have slunk into a simple cafe near the western gate of İznik. It’s one of those stark establishments that seem to lack any decoration, where all the old men hang out all day, talking and smoking and playing backgammon. A few simple tables and chairs are scattered along the front door. Inside, it’s dark and quiet, only a few tea-drinkers sit quietly, watching the street.

Yet as we sit there, my heat fever gradually subsiding, next to the lemonade machine clanking and grinding in the heat, a cloud of hominess envelops us. The cafe manager, a tall man in his mid-30s, circles around, fetching cups of tea and juice. He brings us tea and water, chats with his regular customers, and when there’s nothing else to do, smokes a cigarette at one of the outdoor tables and reads the sports page.

An older man walks slowly toward the cafe. He seems quite overdressed for the day: heavy long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, over which he wears a heavy winter vest, and a knitted cap over his white hair. Yet he is not sweating, and seems as comfortable as if the temperature were half of what it is. He waves at his friends, says hello to a few of them, and carefully, slowly, walks through the door, up the small steps into the dark cafe.

The heat settles a bit, and I regain my consciousness. We leave the cafe, stroll around the town, trying to stick to the shadows along the walls, exploring the shops and alleys and hamams along the streets of this compact town.

After eating a huge but simple spread of bread, chicken soup, rice, and grilled meat, Kate & I walk to the shore of İznik Gölü, the large lake that adjoins the town. As the sun sets below the mountains that ring the calm water, more people gather, sit at the cafe tables and park benches and shoreside stones, and watch the day pass on. Flutters of Turkish float on the air. The boys in the cafe bring out endless cups of tea, soda, and the salty ayran yoghurt drink. There is a lightness in the dusk air, a feeling of being in between the day and the night.

[dateline İznik, Turkey]

Fireworks boom from somewhere to south, their flares sadly obscured by the apartment building across Hoczade Street. Seagulls cry, angry and upset, and head north over my head, their white underbellies glowing against the violet sky. The imams’ evening prayers call out as a car skids out from the parking lot below me. Occasional cheers and whistles erupt from a few blocks away—perhaps Turkey has won the football game.

I feel almost guilty for not going out on this Friday night, but I’m nursing the grumpy ending of a semi-hangover from two too many Efes beers yesterday, and the effects of today’s humid and languid heat. Anyway, I can see the blue TV-light from flats in the adjoining apartment building, so I can’t be the only person in the city not out on the maddening streets.

Istanbul is addictive that way. Like most truly large cities, there is always something going on. That constant activity manifests itself as the lyrics of a siren song to the city dweller, always chanting, ‘Just one more…’ And while I’m sure that the outlying neighborhoods become calm as the night falls, Beyoğlu is one of the most popular districts; the later it gets, the more people seem to flood the streets.

If little Hoczade Street is so alive with nightlife, then Taksim Square, just a few blocks away, must be a buzzing explosion of people coming up from the metro and the buses and the old tram, buying *simit* pastries from the sellers at their carts, meeting their friends in front of the Burger King, eating *döner kebab* and hamburgers from the fast-food restaurants around the square, and hanging around İstiklâl Anıtı, the monument to Turkey’s independence.

And İstiklâl Caddesi must be a rushing river of hipster humanity, the pedestrian boulevard swimming with the crowds promenading from Taksim Square, through the crazy intersection at Galatasaray, and all the way down the hill to the Tünel, where the world’s second-oldest subway takes its brief journey down to the dark shores of the Golden Horn.

[dateline Istanbul, Turkey]