Sarah from Was Constantinople recently attended a unique bloggers’ coffee shop convention in Istanbul featuring some of the most talented writers in the Turkey and travel blogosphere. The blogging stars were in perfect alignment for one day only. You can check out the illustrious list on Sarah’s commemorative post. Not to be outdone by our big city co-bloggers, we had our very own smaller but perfectly formed beano down here in old Bodrum Town. I spent a gossipy sunny few hours chewing the cud over a beer or two with the wonderful folk behind Pul Biber and Back to Bodrum.
What is the collective noun for bloggers, I wonder? A gaggle of bloggers? A blagger of bloggers? A jobbing of bloggers? My personal favourite is a gobble of bloggers purely because it sounds a little naughty. I guess this could only apply to Turkey-baste blogs (pun intended). Answers on a postcard or leave a comment.
I recently received glad tidings from Blighty, a welcome email providing light relief from my solitary confinement. Old friend, Ian and his partner, Matt, intend to join our extended leaving bash at the end of May. Ian was once my regular escort as we tripped the light fantastic across the sweaty dance floors of Europe during our misspent youth. It was he who accompanied me on my first trip to Istanbul in 2003. Our eyes popped at the dark and illicit underbelly of Turkish life. Oh, happy days.
Last year, Ian and I were summer-supping in the Duke of Wellington (the Wellie), our favourite Soho watering hole and pick up joint. He asked me what expat life was really like. This was the conversation.
It’s like Tenko.
Come again?
A great social leveller. People who, in any other situation, would neither meet nor mix are chucked together like prisoners of war.
I see. A bit like this place, then?
Precisely.
*Tenko was a BBC TV series of the early Eighties which dramatised the experiences of British, Australian and Dutch women imprisoned by the Japanese after the Fall of Singapore in 1942. Think ‘Bad Girls‘ in the tropics.
A tantalising glimpse at the April edition of Time Out, Istanbul. Right at the bottom there’s a tiny headline for Pat Yale’s article, the Best of Expat Literature. I’m in it. I don’t know what Pat has written as I haven’t yet got my grubby hands on a copy. I’m spending so much time hanging around my garden gate for the postie, passers-by think I’m soliciting. Well, if the book doesn’t sell…
March winds are fashionably late this year. A few nights ago, Hurricane Hatice blew furiously over Bodrum. We were trapped in our bed by a creepy speedy wind that whistled through the narrow streets. Unfettered flying objects and the constant banging of a nearby metal gate kept us alert. Dogs were silenced and cocks kept their own counsel. Unhappy memories came flooding back of the infamous hurricane that hit southern England and northern France on the morning of my 27th birthday on the 16th October 1987. More about this here.
Talking of wacky birthday weather, Yankee Sarah from Was Constantinople recently celebrated her birthday with a friend from across the pond. She wrote:
“While we were catching up on Baltimore Ravens gossip over fried anchovies and mussels, 300 houses were losing their roofs, 5 people were dying, some building was falling over in Nisantisi, and a yacht was on fire. By the time we paid the bill, the seas were calm again. We opted for more chilling than sight seeing.”
It seems that the man on the Clapham omnibus often gets his Calvins in a coil when trying to work out the difference between sex, sexuality and transexuality. Put simply (simplistically, even), sex is what you do, sexuality is who you fancy and transexuality is when you are born the wrong gender. A sex change does not alter an individual’s sexuality. Therefore, a woman born as a man who fancies men will still fancy men after the op. Likewise, a woman born as a man who fancies women will still fancy women. Got it?
The reason I’m labouring this point is because my good friend and new kid on the blogging block over at Back to Bodrum sent me an article about two gay men, Aras Güngör and Barış Sulu. They intend to marry in Turkey. Impossible, I hear you collectively cry. Under ordinary circumstances you would be correct but these are not ordinary circumstances. You see, Aras is a transexual born female and now living as a man. Therefore, he carries a ‘pink’ identity. Barış carries a ‘blue’ identity so, under Turkish law, they are permitted to marry with all the rights and duties that entails. They intend to use their matrimony to campaign for marriage equality. I wish them the best of luck and I hope they can stay safe from those who will seek to bring them down.
Despite a long tradition of transexuality in Turkey, transexuals have a rough time. With the exception of a few at the top of the entertainment heap, most are marginalised and reviled. Some end up leading brutal lives and resort to prostitution to bring home the daily bread. I saw this first hand during my inaugural trip to Istanbul in 2003 when street ladies in Laura Ashley frocks would leap out from behind parked cars in the dingy side roads along Tarlabaşi Bulvari. It scared the life out of me.
Just for the record, transvestites are people who cross dress, often, but not always, for sexual gratification. Most transvestites, like most people, are straight. Drag queens are not transvestites. They are female impersonators and entertainers (though not always convincing or entertaining). It’s all part of the rich tapestry of humanity, I’m pleased to say.
Our flight back to Blighty a few days before Christmas was smooth and relatively uneventful. We flew to Stansted via Sabiha Gökçen Airport, Istanbul, with Pegasus. Sabiha Gökçen is an ultra-modern airport, all shiny and new, in stark contrast to Stansted which is looking distinctly shabby these days. The airport is named after a Turkish aviator who is reputed to have been the world’s first female fighter pilot and one of Atatürk’s eight adopted children.
Istanbul’s airports provide an exotic visual banquet as travellers from across the Balkan, Anatolian, Caucasus and central Asia regions mingle around the highly polished halls in their ethno-religious finery. The most striking group this year was an angelic-looking troupe of people dressed from head to toe in bright white towelling and biblical strappy sandals. I don’t know which country they hailed from or what religion they observed (if any), but I was fascinated by them as they shuffled along through the rowdy crowds. Vive la difference!
Once in a while a chance encounter with a stranger can change things forever. My happy happenstance was crashing into Liam one wintry afternoon after work in a pub called ‘Half Way to Heaven’.
Matt Krause, a mighty Yankee vetpat from California has recently released a book. A Tight Wide-open Space tells the touching tale of his own chance meeting that led to love and a journey across an ocean to follow his heart. The story is much more than a boy-meets-girl penny romance, as sweet as that is. It’s also about his struggle to adapt to the strange ways of a strange faraway land. We can all identify with that one.
If you’d like to know more, take a look at Matt’s website. The book is available in paperback or kindle at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
To celebrate the release of the book, I asked Matt to write a guest post about his love, hate, love relationship with that great and ancient metropolis that straddles two continents.
I am not a city boy. In my more militant moments I will rail against urban life, calling cities “cesspools of human filth” and swearing up and down the truest beauty in all the world can only be found when no man is present. In fact, put a glass of scotch in me (I am a lightweight, it only takes one), and I am likely to say things that make the Unabomber look like a humanity-loving urban hipster.
So why did I write a book that starts out as “boy meets girl,” but ends up being “boy loves city”?
Believe me, it wasn’t easy (learning to love a city I mean, although writing a book is no cake walk either).
There are people who go to Istanbul and fall in love with it in 20 seconds. They barely even pull away from the airport before they start raving about how amazing the place is. Immediately they begin posting photos to Facebook and drooling all over everything and generally acting like giddy teenagers who just found the most perfect guy or girl in like, EVER!
I am not one of those people. When I first got to Istanbul I saw little but smog and chaos and stress. Even six years after I arrived I was comparing living there to living like a lab rat in a cage stuffed with so many other lab rats they go insane from the overcrowding, and end up attacking each other and gnawing off their own feet.
But Istanbul has a way of getting under one’s skin, even mine. Few things bring me peace like strolling through the square just north of the Ortakoy mosque on a cool summer night, where young lovers cuddle on the benches and little kids laugh as they chase each other around the plaza. Few things strike me with awe like standing atop the stone walls of the Rumeli Hisari while watching a massive Ukrainian tanker sail south down the Bosphorus on its way to the Mediterranean.
Don’t let my mixed feelings about Istanbul scare you away from it. For every person like me who doesn’t know whether to call that place a shining city on the bay or a shameful scar on the face of the earth, there are ten who say without reservation that it is the greatest city they’ve ever seen in their entire lives. Istanbul is the kind of place that every person, country boy or city slicker, should see at least once before they die.
And certainly don’t let my mixed feelings about Istanbul scare you away from Turkey in general. If I were to list the five most beautiful places in the world, three of them would be in Turkey. The first would be a particular balcony in Gumusluk, a small town on the Bodrum peninsula Jack mentions occasionally on this blog, from which all you can see is sea and all you can hear is wind and waves. The second would be the side of a hill in Kapadokya, 600 kilometers inland, where in the mornings you can step out your front door and marvel at a sky so big and so blue it reminds you it is the sky that brings life to this earth, not the ground you are standing on. And the third, well, that third image is just for me.
Maybe I wrote a book about adjusting to life in Istanbul because I was trying to sort through contradictory feelings that will never reconcile. Maybe I did it because after the thousandth person asked me what it was like in Turkey, and for the thousandth time I didn’t know where to start, I thought maybe writing it down would help me clear my head and move on.
A fat lot of good that seems to have done me though. I miss Istanbul and will be moving back in a few months.
Today’s guest post is from Yankee Erin who lives the Bohemian dream (she would say hand to mouth) existence in Berlin with teacher hubby, Ian. Very Cabaret. I first ‘met’ Erin when she interviewed me for Blogexpat. Erin writes her own blog about their Teutonic expat adventures in Back to Berlin…And Beyond, a wonderfully intimate glimpse into their lives. Today, Erin gives us a delicious titbit of their grand train journey to Istanbul and their first experience of the city that crosses two continents. Not quite Murder on the Orient Express but…
Erin
We had done it! We had lived in Europe for one whole year, just as we said we were going to. Going vegetarian for days at a time (even in cheap Berlin) to make ends meet on a teacher and sometimes writer budget, we had done it. And now it was time…time for The Trip. We were doing the collegiate run-around-europe-with-backpacks-half-the-size-of-our-body for over a month. In that time, we planned to visit 10 countries. We were crazy.
A week in (having just visited Austria, Hungary, & Romania), we boarded the train for Istanbul. Scheduled to be 18 hours, we knew it was going to be a long haul. A Kiwi couple paired with us in a sleeper and we spent long hours talking about our adventures and watching fields of crispy sunflowers roll by. Along with us on the train were some hippies from Germany (there is no escaping the Germans, I swear they seek us out wherever we travel), and a woman from Cyprus with 3 passports. One of hers literally had handwritten documentation. I was fascinated.
Night met the train in Bulgaria where we were told we would wait ‘a little while’ for a train from Serbia to meet-up. Making conversation with some of our fellow train riders, a Turkish man and his wife told us ‘Istanbul, big danger!’ They then charaded out the gestures of drugs and pick- pocketing. Oh, thank you for the advice.
The train
The hours ticked by and we realized our long train ride just got a lot longer. Finally, the two trains re-united and we were off again, struggling to sleep on the top bunks in the sweltering August heat. Screeech! Stopped again at around 4:30am, men with bug guns boarded the train, shouting at us in Turkish. The woman from Cyprus turned out to be a big aid as she spoke with the guards, and translated for us in German. ‘Kontrolle. Your passes…’ Oh- Passport Control. What a lovely welcome.
They took our passports and left the train. Don’t all the guidebooks tell you to never let that happen? We blearily followed, and forked over the money required for the visa. The Kiwi’s – those lucky bastards- got off without a fee. I see. As Americans, your country starts a bunch of wars- or wait excuse me – ‘conflicts’ and you don’t get very easy access to places.
The Blue Mosque
A whole day had passed since we boarded the train. We eagerly disembarked, ready to see a new continent, the place once called Constantinople – Istanbul! Immediately, we fell in love with the smells & sights of the city. Aggressive salesmen chanted at us ‘Spend money here, please?’ and we just smiled, happy to be swept away in the ocean of color. We found our way to our hostel in Sultanahmet and happily gazed out into the water. A little of this happiness dampened as a sour couple also on the roof top told us
‘There’s no water, you know?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The whole city. No water’
She seemed to take pleasure at the looks of panic on our face. We had just spent a full day on a train in August. We weren’t exactly feeling so fresh or so clean. Running to the lobby we asked at the desk and the clerk apologetically told us it was true. They were running on their water tanks, but expected them to run out soon as the water had already been off for several days. He smiled sadly, ‘Welcome to Istanbul.’
Pigeon Lady
Whatever. We smelled. But we were in Istanbul! Pretzel vendors calling beneath our window, thousands of wild cats, a whole world of spices to discover…nothing mattered except that we were here for 3 magical days.
On the third day, we got sick. Call it Ataturk’s revenge (or possibly Vlad’s revenge as we had suspicion it might have come from Romania), but boy did we use those bathrooms. Struggling to maintain any ounce of dignity, we sweatily hung on as we continued to tour. It accompanied us to Kusadasi, Greek islands, all the way up Italy and through Southern France. By the time we got to Bruges we were almost recovered. A thoroughly effective weight loss program.
Time for Tea
Maybe it’s us. Or maybe it was some tough love from Istanbul. Maybe it’s best we didn’t have an easy time in Istanbul, because we really loved it, all of it. We survived the trip, celebrated our second Oktoberfest, said good-byes to all of our friends in Berlin, and flew home to Seattle. We even got married and have since returned to Berlin (I said it already – we’re crazy). But the trip to Istanbul stands out in my mind. I hate to pick favorites, but I wonder how much tickets are to Istanbul. Or maybe we should take the train.
For all the fast talk of political Islam and a return to piety, there truly are two sides to this magnificent resurgent nation. Istanbul’s Kadir Has University clearly has a modern, progressive curriculum that allows students to express themselves in music and dance in a fun and inclusive way. I’ve picked three great examples of this. The first two are uplifting romps that had us rolling in the aisles. The third brought us to our feet. You’ll see why at the end.
You might also like to look at Turkey’s Got Talent. I challenge you not to at least smile.
Yes, this really is a duet with Jennifer Saunders, presumably remixed from Shrek 2.
Our second day in Istanbul was spent meandering through the piazzas and pavilions of the splendid Topkapı Palace, epicentre of the imperial Ottoman court for 400 years. The unheralded highlight was chancing upon relics of the Prophet (yes, The Prophet). We gazed incredulously upon bits of His beard, tooth, sword, bow, a heap of soil used for ritual ablution and a clay impression of His foot – all allegedly genuine. Slightly less credible are the rod of Moses (of the plagues of Egypt fame), King David’s skull, Abraham’s cookware, and Joseph’s turban (though sadly not his coat of many colours). We were most disappointed not to see the Ark of the Covenant and a charred twig from the Burning Bush. Naturally we remained suitably deferential to avoid stoning by the Faithful. I suppose it’s no less fantastic than the implausible holy artefacts revered by the old ladies of Christendom.
In the extensive grounds we encountered the phenomenon known as ‘Islamic Chic’. Gaggles of giggling girls wandering about their Ottoman heritage adorned in exquisitely tailored dark hued, figure-hugging maxi coats garnished with sumptuous silk scarves of vivid primary colours. The head coverings, moulded at the forehead into a shallow peek as if hiding a baseball cap beneath, framed their painted faces. Modest and modern, I suspect the look is more a sign of wealth and status than of piety. We finished the day with a flourish by ambling around the excellent archeological museum.
Ol’ Constantinople is simply sublime and just gets better each time I visit. We travelled home that evening wanting more and vowing to return.
Perking the Pansies 