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Published: March 10th 2010
Istanbul Today This is our third blog during our month in Istanbul. The first focused on the Byzantine sights in Istanbul, the second on the Ottoman sights. This blog focuses on Istanbul today, and our daily, personal experiences here.
But first May, the woman who doesn’t really like to travel, is going to share with us why she likes to travel.
Thoughts on why travel is good
By May, the woman who doesn’t really like to travel Instead of writing about things we’ve done in Istanbul (which is a lot) and why I like it (which I have), I’m going to write about why being away from home in a foreign place is good for me. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I’m thinking about things that most people have probably thought about before, but they are occurring to me now, so I thought I’d write them down.
Travel is like medicine. I am a middle aged lady. I like my kitchen, my clothes, my car and my routine. I really do. No part of me longs for foreign lands when I am at home. I am perfectly content reading my book on
my couch.
So just like medicine is good for you but not necessarily fun to take, travel feels good for me but not something I wish I could do constantly. It is good for me to get out of my routines. By getting out several good things happen.
One, I appreciate home more. Walking through my neighborhood grocery store sounds almost like a religious experience to me now. Strolling through my yard of grass past beautiful trees and flowers will be almost too much to bear. Going to my library full of books that I can borrow for free will bring tears to my eyes. Seriously, I’m not joking. Being away makes home seem so great.
Two, my brain feels livelier when traveling. I can’t help but learn things while I’m traveling, and this feels good to my brain. I learn my way around, I learn about the history of where I am, I learn how to say “Four pieces of baklava, please”. It’s like I’m a wide eyed kid again. I have tons of questions running through my head all the time, and I notice little details about places - like the graffiti on the wall,
and the man selling water on the corner and the sound of the mosques singing out the call to prayer. I’m wide open, which is different than I feel at home. At home I feel a bit dull and more comfortable.
Three, I escape from the tyranny of time when I am traveling. I wear a watch everyday. At home, I look at it constantly. I look at it and tap my fingers on the steering wheel while waiting for a light to change. I try to cram one more thing into my morning routine before my watch tells me it’s time to go. At school, I have five minutes to get my class from art to the library. Hurry up everybody.
On a trip, I look at my watch, but it’s just for the sake of looking; it doesn’t mean anything here. “Oh, it’s ten o’clock. You guys want to hang out a bit more or go ahead and put on our shoes and go out?” Can you imagine every day feeling like that?
Getting away from the rush, rush, rush of home feels so good - like deep down good. I almost dread going back
to my list of things that need to be done in too little time life.
Fourth and finally, travel gets you out of your home base and widens what you’re exposed to. This might be really obvious, but it is the most important reason why travel is good for me. At home, I only can know what I am exposed to. I glance at the paper, talk to my friends and family, read books. I think certain thoughts about the world, but the world I learn about at home is defined by what other people say about it.
By traveling, I actually get out in the world. I can see for myself. By seeing for myself, I realize that the stories we’re told at home are only part of the truth. There is another side of every story, and by seeing for myself I can start to understand the other side.
The most concrete example of this is our experiences in Muslim countries. At home, in the US, we hear mostly bad things about Muslim countries. Even though I know deep down about biases in our media, I can’t help but think about the Muslim world in
the ways that I learn about it at home. I have no other ready source of information at home.
But now I’ve been to Malaysia and Turkey, two very big, powerful, Muslim countries. They are really great places. Some women wear head scarves, the call to prayer echoes throughout the cities five times a day, some of the men wear white caps to show they’ve been to Mecca. But they all eat just like I do, love their children just like I do, sit on the tram and day dream just like I do. That seems so obvious, maybe, but I know that my picture of Muslims is much richer and fuller and truer than it was before I traveled. I know it because I’ve seen it, and that is why travel is good for me.
Our Istanbul
By Paul We adore Istanbul. The people are outrageously warm, funny, and friendly. The sights and the history are stunning. The food is glorious. I’m going to describe a bit below about what it’s like here, day in and day out.
Our fellow chronicler, Patsy the Purple Cow. Patsy the Purple Cow, our traveling companion, has described
Candy Shop
Cute Turkish candy shop on a market street with delicious hard candy. Unusually good.very well our apartment, our neighborhood, and the food we eat. I recommend that you check out Patsy’s blog on Istanbul, if you haven’t already seen it. Her blog tells a similar story to this one, but from the perspective of a Purple Cow. Google “Patsy the Purple Cow,” and you’ll get to all of her blogs, or click this link to go to her Istanbul blog: http://www.travelblog.org/Middle-East/Turkey/Marmara/Istanbul/blog-481158.html.
Our apartment. We’ve stayed in an apartment in Istanbul for the past month. After staying most of the previous six months in backpacker guesthouses and hostels, it has been great to spread out, unpack, and have a base.
It has been great to have our own bedrooms, a kitchen, and a washing machine. A washing machine feels particularly luxurious, after hand-washing our two sets of clothes in too-small sinks all across Asia. It’s funny what comes to seem luxurious.
We also have a comfortable living room with a view out over the deeply blue Bosphoros with its ferries, tankers, and seagulls. Our apartment is on the fifth floor, and there is no elevator. We’re in good shape - 95 steps, several times a day. But all the huffing and
Strolling, Istiklal Caddessi
Strolling down the main pedestrian street near our apartment. puffing is worth it, because the views from our window are memorable.
Our neighborhood. Istanbul is a huge city, around 12 million people. (As a comparison, New York City has around 8 million people.) But it doesn’t feel huge. Our neighborhood sometimes feels almost like an artsy seaside village.
Our apartment is in a great location; I can’t imagine a better one. We’re on a little winding cobblestone street on a hill, with lots of functional and pleasant shops lining the street.
Up the hill a bit is a funky music store area, a string of alternative little music shops selling any kind of DJ equipment you can imagine, electric guitars, and traditional Turkish instruments. Lots of arty graffiti, cute cafes, young people, and posters touting the weekend’s big DJ sets.
A bit further up the hill is Istiklal Caddessi, Istanbul’s major pedestrianized shopping street. It functions as the place in the city where everyone goes to stroll in the afternoons and evenings.
Mostly people just stroll, and on the weekends the whole street is packed. There are always unbelievably skilled street musicians, mostly Turkish folk music played by earnest, long-haired, long-bearded young folkies.
Crowds, Iskitlal Caddessi
This shows how packed with strollers the pedestrian street near our apartment can become on the weekends. Most nights there is a lively, almost festive protest of some sort (feminist protests, protests against prison treatment, protests against the US in Afghanistan and Iraq), with banners, signs, flags, music, chanting, drumming, and singing. Sometimes, from far off, the protests sound like a high school football game, with all their bands and cheering and chanting.
Istiklal Caddessi is the European part of Istanbul from the late 1800s, and it has been renovated well. It looks like Europe, like Paris. Most of the strolling people look Parisian too. Here most everyone is stylishly dressed, fashionable, sleek.
In the opposite direction from Istiklal Caddessi, down the hill from our apartment, is the Galata Bridge, the main way of getting from our neighborhood to the old city. The bridge is also a big strolling area. It has beautiful views out over the blue-blue water and the ferries and the tankers, and beautiful views up to the historical center of town with all of its skyscraper mosques.
Galata Bridge is lined with grizzled fishermen and shops selling $3 fish sandwiches. It has a pleasantly fishy smell, and everywhere are fish being pulled out of the sea and seagulls whirling about,
and the beautiful deep blue water. I love that moist fishy sea smell. When I was a kid, I used to want to work in a fish market.
Istanbul’s men. Istanbul isn’t all good. Let’s take a little break from all the “Istanbul is so great” stuff that we’ve been thinking and writing about for the past month.
One thing that has been quite bad is that Jordan, who is 18, can’t walk around Istanbul by herself without being hassled by young Turkish men. She has never felt unsafe, but she has been hassled repeatedly and persistently to come have a drink or whatever.
It’s funny: Jordan walked around Asia by herself for six months, and never once was pestered. Not once. A few times when she was on her own in Hong Kong, she was approached (gently) by African and Indian men, but she wasn’t really pestered. And she was never once approached by Chinese, Malay, Indonesian, or Thai men. She has also walked around Mexican cities by herself, which was a bit more eventful than Asia but nothing like here.
In Istanbul she doesn’t want to walk around by herself anymore, because nine walks
Our Restaurant
Eating chicken sandwiches and lentil soup at our favorite local restaurant. So goo. out of ten she’ll get hassled and pestered. It has been frustrating and unpleasant. Walking around by herself is one of Jordan’s greatest joys, and here she can’t really do it.
Most of the people in Istanbul, and most of the men, are extremely friendly and pleasant. But there’s something about some of the younger men, when they see a young European / North American / Australian woman….
It’s so bad here that Jordan once shoved a guy hard and yelled at him. Those of you who know Jordan can imagine what it took to get her to that point.
Istanbul’s mild inefficiencies. Another slightly negative characteristic of Istanbul is the overall mild inefficiencies that we experience every day. Maybe we notice these inefficiencies more than we might otherwise, because they feel like such a stark contrast to our six months in Asia, where everything is hyper-hyper-hyper-efficient.
As an example, a couple of days ago I needed to print out a plane ticket. When I had to print our plane tickets in Asia, I walked into an internet shop (they were everywhere), put my thumb drive into a computer, sent the file to the shop’s printer,
collected my pages, paid 25 cents or so, and walked out. Five minutes max.
In Istanbul it begins by being unable to find an internet shop, then finding one 20 minutes away. Their computers aren’t working well, so it takes them 10 minutes to get my thumb drive recognized, get the file off, and email it off. They have to email the file off, because they don’t have a printer, but there is a printer at another shop two blocks away. It takes a while for the file to get to the printer two blocks away, and a guy at our shop has to run down four stories of stairs then run the two blocks to the other shop, get my printout, and come back. The whole process takes at least an hour. Everyone is nice and smiley and friendly, and it’s even sort of charming and fun. But it’s not efficient.
It feels like most things that we try to get done in Istanbul are sort of like this: much less efficient than they should be (or that we’re used to from Asia). Each little experience of inefficiency is no problem, but they are quite noticeable, and
Ad for Stylish Headscarves
There is a market for stylish headscarves and Muslim Turkish outfits. Walking around, there are huge billboards with pictures like this one. they add up to some mild frustration after a while.
Istanbul’s stunningly rich history. In the end, though, Istanbul is a great place in my book - despite these negatives. I think I’ve learned more here than I have anywhere I have ever traveled.
I continue to be stunned by Istanbul’s rich and varied history. It just blows me away.
Here is a city that was the center of two huge empires, one Christian, one Muslim. It was perhaps the leading city in the world during two different historical eras, once as a Christian city, once as a Muslim city. And as you stroll around the city, you see the glories of both of these cultures everywhere you look.
If there were a prize for the world’s most richly historical city, it seems likely to me that Istanbul would probably win it.
A Postscript, by Paul: Making One of May’s Points Concrete Here’s one more point, a pedantic, fairly boring point. I’m a bit tired of serious issues, so I’m sticking it at the end. Feel free to skip it if you want to. It seems to me a point worth making, though,
because it is a concrete example of May’s point above - how we are told biased stories at home.
As a preface to the ideas below, a smidgen of history: The Republic of Turkey formed in 1923, and has had periods of one-party rule, democratically elected governments, and military coups throughout it’s history. It has always been a fiercely secular government.
Turkey’s “pro-Islamic” progressive government. 2002 was a watershed year in Turkey, and the period since 2002 has been a time of significant positive change. In 2002 the “pro-Islamic” or “Islamic-inspired” (but resolutely secular) AKP party was ushered into power with a huge majority, and then re-elected (with an even greater popular majority) in 2007. Interestingly, this religiously conservative, pro-Islamic government has instituted a series of liberal, modernizing, almost progressive reforms.
Since 2002, the pro-Islamic AKP party has abolished the death penalty, legally banned torture, expanded freedoms of the press, advanced the right to demonstrations and assemblies, reformed the judicial system to make it more transparent, enshrined gender equality as part of the constitution, removed mechanisms of secrecy from various aspects of government and military functioning, and ensured that international human rights treaties would always take precedence
over domestic laws.
Turkey has also taken on new and increased leadership roles in international peace processes, particularly related to the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict and aspects of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflicts. Culturally, the government has increased the use of and education in ethnic minority languages (languages other than Turkish). Finally, the AKP Party also brought about economic reforms, which resulted in significantly increased economic growth in Turkey (at least until the recent recession).
I hadn’t heard this story before coming to Turkey: the story of a religiously conservative, “pro-Islamic” government bringing about significant, systematic progressive change. Probably this story was somewhere in the paper I read at home (New York Times). Maybe I missed it. But maybe it wasn’t given the emphasis given to other stories related to Islam, which are usually very negative.
In Turkey there seems to be a unique story of how democracy and Islam are thriving together - and yet it’s not a story we hear much about in the US.
The stories we’re told (and not told) at home are interesting, to say the least, when viewed from other places.
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marian
non-member comment
Istanbul today
May's thoughts about travel were thought provoking. And Paul's history helped me fill in gaps. I never realized that the pro-Islamic party is currently in power. I remember when it emerged to take part in an election (must have been 2002) there were fears that it would bring Turkey a religious dictatorship sort of like Iran. But Turkey as I remember is Sunni--Islam without the hierarchy that Shiites have. Good thoughts. Gran