Turkey

I awake with a sense of dis-ease, of lack of slackness, a low-level urge to just do something — not just wander around today, but to have a plan, to even have a commitment. I think about the other cities I’ve wandered through: how the initial giddy sense of timeless exploration mellows, and is replaced by small rituals. A traveler has two choices at this point: to declare a place ‘done,’ themselves bored enough to move on to the next destination; or to dive further in. Sometimes the making of little plans accomplishes more than checking off a list of destinations, but gives the explorer a structure in which to lose themselves more easily.

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]

I am in a simple room with a bed, a chair, a desk, and a wardrobe; in a four-bedroom flat on the sixth floor of a Greek apartment building constructed 150 years ago; in the alley street of Hocazade Sokak, southeast of Taksim Square; in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul; at the eastern-most edge of Europe; nearly half-way around the world from my Oregon home.

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]

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]