In the same situation was Domingos, a young man from Guinea-Bissau. He offered me swigs from his one-liter Super Bock beer, which he tilted carefully above his mouth to avoid mouth contact. It was a polite action I'd seen before in my travels -- perhaps in Morocco or Romania? I offered him apricots, bought this morning in the mercado where fish merchants sold still-writhing eels.

Domingos & I commiserated about the long wait ahead of us, he in a patois of Portuguese, French, and Spanish, and me monolingual at best, scattering simple, pan-Latin words when I could.

But we got along nonetheless, as strangers usually do. I had to pee, and Domingos suggested the nearby supermercato where he'd bought his beer. As I relieved myself, Domingos got cash from the ATM and took a number for the queue at the little cafe within the supermarket. He got himself another beer (he'd finished the liter we'd started in the station), and ordered me a coffee, and, just for good measure, a small glass of pungent port.

We sat amongst the chatty women and the quiet men at the tiny cafe, and talked of Africa, of mothers and brothers and girlfriends, of work and of play, of music and the timing of trains.

After another beer, it was time to go, and we walked back to the station in the golden sunlight of the day's end. We boarded the waiting, empty train. Domingos showed me the bottle of Madeira wine given to him by his good friend he'd been visiting, and poured a finger into the glass he'd stolen from the cafe. As the sun went down among the marshy pools of the Algarve, we sipped the warm liquor and headed west to Tavira.

[Tavira, Portugal]

Waiting for the train remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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I start what is now my morning ritual: a small fire in the woodstove to burn off the remaining cold in this stone building, a pot of espresso on the simple gas range, rote cleaning of last night’s dinner dishes. The refrigerator isn’t plugged in; I hope its insulation plus the cold nights is doing a good enough job with the milk and cheese.

This place is minimal: no heat besides the small wood stove, and an on-demand water heater that I only turn on when I really want hot water. Heavy blankets act as insulation draped across the rough doors of steel and glass, and more blankets insulate me while I sleep. The simplicity stops my habits, makes me consider actions, ponder consequences.

This is the life of the farm, of earthy practicality. Everyone, even the other guests, has dirt under their fingernails. I feel strangely too clean, sterile with my computer and camera.

News from Portland and Silverton twitters in via the internet connection. Morning here is near midnight there; my urban friends are traipsing around the city, documenting their comings and goings. Other friends on the west coast are off to bed, yawning as they type their last email.

I glance at my camera, ready on its tripod. I made my first photographic exploration yesterday, hefting my gear up the hill above the convent building. On the top of the hill is the aerie, the place the birds live. Up here are odd structures designed not for people but for avians: a short square tower, a dome-like building that could be a granary, an angled wall with a tiny roof. All these are homes for birds, carefully constructed to be welcoming to the birds that fly around the banks of the river.

At the very top of the hill is a wide, flat place, carefully cobblestoned in a large circle, smooth stones drawing the spokes of a wheel. In ancient times, perhaps before the convent, this was where corn was threshed. But there are vaguer meanings here: rumors that the spokes have meanings in ancient astronomy, or point in certain directions to places of forgotten importance. Someone was just telling me of ley lines, of electromagnetic forces that invisibly connect powerful places. This part of Portugal has been inhabited for a very long time: there are dolmens and other stone-age monuments scattered around these Alentejo hills.

And now, in these modern times where we know so much, these convent grounds seem to be built on mystery. Geraldine, Christiaan, and Louie have lived here since 1980; over the years, the family has slowly restored the abandoned, crumbling halls and courtyards, rebuilt the water mill, planted trees, and created and tended to what seems like dozens of tiny, distinct gardens. Geraldine and Christiaan are both artists, and art infuses everything. There is nothing factual and simple and straightforward here; everything has a deepness, as if the meaning is buried like an iceberg. As I explore the grounds, I am always running across small surprises: a piece of smooth glass balanced on a rock, a stack of slate like pages of a book, an arm from an old statue used as the edge of a footbridge.

Waking up in mystery remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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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]

The dance of the swallows remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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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]

Exploring unknown neighborhoods remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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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]

Sleeping city remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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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]

As the heat descends to dusk remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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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]

Friday night in Istanbul remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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And the pedestrians most certainly do not stay on the sidewalk. If the object is to reach the next block, then the path is any route that will reach, regardless of law or obstacle. The sidewalk seems to exist only as a front stoop to the shops that line it. A cafe table, two friends talking, a step up to a shop, or an outright and dangerous hole — all are simply observed by the pedestrian, and avoided by walking into the street.

The only truth that holds is that no driver really wants to hit a pedestrian, and no pedestrian really wants to be run over. Observation, intuition, and action win out over regulations, ethics, and aesthetics. Confidence, on both sides, wins the game. The worst thing you can do as a pedestrian is move suddenly out of fear.

The rules are simple: assume nothing, don’t panic, and don’t be stupid.

[dateline Istanbul, Turkey]

Rules of the road remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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My flatmate George, smoking on the balcony as usual, asks me if I’d like to go with him to visit Dolmabahçe Sarayı, the palace of the Ottoman Empire. George is a rather sad man, and although we’ve talked a lot of broken English in the apartment, we’ve not gone out and done anything together. I say yes, then hop in the shower. When I come out of the bathroom, George is disappearing through the front door, and gives me a vague wink.

Assuming he has just gone out to get cigarettes, I wait. I think about having another cup of coffee. I talk to Zubeyir about the neuroscience conference he’s planning, and about how I’m starting to be bothered by George’s incessant smoking. Zubeyir suggests I move to the front room. I relay my belongings to the larger room that faces the street and a a view looking west over the city — a move that takes only ten minutes, given my nomadic state of living.

Finally I realize that George and I must have miscommunicated, and that he has gone to Dolmabahçe without me. I am back to my original unplanned day, although I soon remember two polar opposites of Istanbul experiences that call to me: rambling around Mısır Çarşısı, the old Egyptian spice market across the Galata Bridge in Eminönü, and visiting the Istanbul Modern, the contemporary art museum installed in an old warehouse that lies along the Bosphorus in the Tophane district.

I head down the hill on Sıraselviler Caddesi, the avenue just off the street where I live. I enjoy this descent to the sea: the Cihangir district always seems a buoyant and exuberant place, prosperous and active without being trendy and crowded. Enjoying their lunches on the sidewalk cafes, shopping for groceries, walking to catch a tram or a ferry, saying hello to each other — people are living their lives in a real neighborhood.

Somehow I catch the eye of a big bearded man in a loud red shirt who is sitting along the fence of the hospital. He is a bit bedraggled, and has the aura of someone on the margins, a little too unstable to live amongst the normals. ‘Where you from?’ he asks. It’s the question I am asked by the touts in the tourist district of Sultanahmet, the question one learns to avoid or else be taken in by the parasites who prey on the blood of tourists.

But this is Cihangir, not Sultanahmet, and it is a radiant cloudless Tuesday, and I am looking for adventure. So I recite my usual response: ‘America… Oregon… Portland,’ and he says, ‘Oh yes, Yellowstone Park, caribou!’ Not wanting to debate geography, I tell him ‘Yes, close.'

It turns out that in the early 1970s, Mustafa had motorcycled around the US. He enumerated the places he and his Moto Guzzi had visited; it covered a large part of the country, certainly more than most Americans have seen of their own place. We speak the travelers’ litany of the names of places we both know. He tells me of the preacher he met in at a campground in New Jersey, of the Italian restaurant where he cooked, of cycling the winding roads of Nevada and Florida.

As I listen, I dread his reminiscences turning into regrets and wishes, urges to return to his carefree expatriate journey, to the old days. But his stories are just stories, his memories just memories, and this, his station on the hill, is where he is, a crazy monk, surrounded by a few belongings, laughing about the past.

[dateline Istanbul, Turkey]

Small rituals and the crazy monk of Cihangir remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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My view from the room is limited: the varied backsides of a dozen similar apartment buildings, each one streaked with the stains of the city and the years. Peeling paint, mildewed stucco, rotting window frames, cracked and sliding roof tiles, overgrown locust trees — it is the beauty of imperfection, the wabi sabi of modern life in an ancient city.

Through the day, sounds escape the neighboring flats and rise from the streets, entering my open window. In the dawn, the city is nearly noiseless; only the dove who’s made her nest above the drainpipe on my balcony, and a few rumbles from far-off delivery trucks. As the sun rises, various hums and murmurs flow through the air. A ship on the Bosphorus calls with its long, deep horn.

The streets wake up, suffused periodically with car alarms and horns. Boys whistle sharply to a friend, the men across the street at the car park gossip, someone laughs, cellphone ringtones emit tiny songs. Fast-voiced DJs speak a their patter of radio-talk, while television cartoons issue their own aural chaos. My flatmate George flicks his lighter on the first of many cigarettes.

Late in the afternoon, the city seems to switch to its musical mode: neighbors practice their violins and clarinets, learn scales on a recorder; the bars and dance clubs test their sound systems, and their musical acts prepare for the evening’s show. A girls’ chorus slowly chants their songs.

Before dinner, across the courtyard, a man and a woman have sex, her small moans and his grunts combine and intensify to a rhythmic peak, then diminish.

All through this the calls of the muezzins at the five daily prayer times, their distorted drones wafting from the loudspeakers on the minarets.

And last night, the rain: a thunderous roar so loud it woke me from my still-jetlagged sleep.

[dateline Istanbul, Turkey]

Sounds of the city remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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The woman who wore the Special Service Agent badge at the airport is coincidentally a rider, too: she must have gotten off work just after she suggested to my newfound friend Mac & I that we escape the torture of waiting in the airport for another six hours, and instead head to the Englischer Garten. The Lufthansa airport bus takes us to a part of town near to the garden, and we take a cab the remainder of the way.

We are dropped off outside the Seehaus, the beer garden that looks out over the lake they call the Kleinhesseloher See. Immediately we are surrounded by a friendly chaos of walkers, joggers, bicycles, strollers, musicians, and seemingly every other Munichian. It’s a gorgeous Sunday, warm but not too hot, and it’s clear that this is the place to be.

The motto for the city is ‘Munich loves you,’ and while we don’t feel a direct outpouring of that love, we do feel very welcome and comfortable sharing the city for the day with its residents. Young, old, hipster, parents, elders: everyone’s here, enjoying the weather and celebrating the day.

After taking a quick stroll around the lake, Mac & I navigate our way through the semi-self-serve restaurant at the Seehaus, ordering large plates of roasted potatoes and sausage, and two very large steins of beer. It’s strange trying to find my way in a language I don’t know very well, and one I was totally unprepared to use. I mumble danke schön to the cute cashier, and we find a table with a little shade.

The food is incredibly good, although simple. Although beer, sausage, and potatoes is a bit of a German stereotype, it feels quite genuine: it’s exactly what everyone else here is eating and enjoying.

Sated, we walk south, towards the Japanisches Teehaus (Japanese tea house). We pass fields full of sunbathers, more beer gardens, and musicians playing everything from blues to Rolling Stones covers to German folk music.

Near the southern end of the park, the Eisbach river becomes the powerful focal point of the landscape. People swim its currents, wade its eddies, perch in its waterfalls. Near the Teehaus, the river splits, one branch heading west into a gentle stream that winds around the Japanese-style garden.

The other branch narrows and becomes a torrent, emanating a frightful energy even on this beautiful day. At the very apex of the river’s intensity a crowd is gathered, and beyond this crowd is a surfer in a wetsuit, his surfboard floating on a stiff wave, exactly perpendicular to the shores of the river, perhaps fifteen feet wide. The surfer glides along the green-gray wave, between the two sides and the two crowds. The wave is powerful, and only allows itself ridden for short periods. When one surfer gives in, falls back, and lets himself be taken downstream, another surfer enters the water and somehow — I keep missing the exact moment — rights herself and resumes the riding of the wave. The river, the wave, the surfers are constant and never-ending: it’s the eternal surf of Munich.

[dateline Munich, Germany]

Surf’s up in Munich remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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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]

How do I get to Istanbul? remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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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.

How to read a city remains copyright of the author jslabovitz, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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