Well, I went to Topkapi palace, but then as I approached the monstrous line to pay the 20 Lira entrance fee (one CAN$ is about 1.4 Lira, I think) I was engulfed by a crowd of American Jehovahs' witnesses on a loud group trip, and I began to think about what it would be like inside... so I walked around the gardens.
And I went to the Hayya Sophia, but the lineup went forever, and it also cost 20 Lira, and then this guy came and tried to sell me carpets... he thought his chances were good enough that he took me to his kebab place and bought me a tea and showed me some carpets.
And I did go the Sultanahmet Mosque, which was quite beautiful, but rather hard to appreciate with the crowds (places of worship generally lose some of their intended function when they're full of people pointing and having their pictures taken and talking about how Turkey had THE FIRST TULIPS EVER and sneaking off their headscarves to make some sort of point and so on). And there are so many beautiful smaller mosques where you can actually sit down for a while and appreciate it. So I went to them. And got lost a whole lot.
And then I met Anna and headed to a museum which used to be a Greek Orthodox monestary and is full of very old mosaics... we didn't get there until after it closed (and we turned down the offer from two guys sitting in the doorway to get in for ten minutes for only 15 Lira each) but we walked past the old Orthodox Patriarchate and then for a long time through a neighbourhood that is very "conservative" Islamic (I judge this from dress and from a bunch of shops selling Qur'ans and Islamic materials) and also extremely friendly. There were a bunch of the old wooden houses that used to be standard in Istanbul and are quite beautiful in their construction (very square, in contrast to the very circular architecture of the mosques and palaces). We met a crowd of children who counted to us in English, and we counted back in Turkish (which I am still very bad at doing)... it is nice to finally now have had the travel experience of being surrounded by very happy children shouting English words. Then we met a man who had served in NATO and spoke good English -- he had served with a Canadian named Steve -- and his brother-in-law, who lives in the very old house he was born in with a view down the hill over the city. They invited us up there for tea, but we excused ourselves on account of time....
And we went down and sat by the water and ate chocolate Baklava we bought up near the museum, and then a guy came and introduced himself, and then his friend who spoke a little more English joined him, and then about ten other people, most of them siblings, and then their mother. They were Kurds, with 12 kids in the family... Anna has a few basic Turkish phrases, I have almost nothing, but we managed to have a friendly half-conversation about where we all came from and how large our families were... and "Salaam Aleikum" is a nicely universal phrase in a lot of the world...
And then we went to Marlene's graduation -- she just graduated top of her class from Istanbul Bilgi Universitei (degree in history) and we got to be her surrogate family for the event... the university, a private university with classes in English (although if everyone in the class speaks Turkish - both Julia and Marlene speak fluently - the classes are taught in Turkish), was recently bought by an American chain, so the ceremony combined the worst elements of English and American academic traditions, and ended with Pink Floyds "Another Brick in the Wall" played very loudly. They also played Michael Jackson during the ceremony. Then we got to meet a bunch of other students, and eat finger food, and drink cherry juice and vodka.
I am beginning to settle into being a tourist, although it drove me up the wall at first and still does somewhat... it is horrid not to have the resources to be polite. It is also wild to me, after watching so many people get publicly mocked at borders for being foreign, that I got my visa at the airport without speaking a word to anyone -- I just slid my passport under the window and the guy put in the visa. Still, travelling with people who speak a good six languages each, I'm realizing politeness, viewed broadly, probably requires some work. And that this work can be done if you try. Ah.
And now I hang out laundry in preparation for heading east tomorrow.
6 Temmuz 2009 Pazartesi
I guess the Black Sea is alright
Little waves in the mid-afternoon, big waves in the early evening, peaches and bread made by Yildis' mother (Yildis, about my age, runs the rustic hotel where we stayed -- for nothing rather than $480 lira per night for a couple -- and is a total sweetheart) and the Turkish equivalent of the beer-that-is-everywhere, on the beach, as the sun went down... Slept in tents and then outside when the morning sun made the tents too hot...
Anna and I wanted to swim to Crimea, but then it was just so nice floating in the clear water and lying on the sand (and getting a little sunburnt...) and playing backgammon and eating bread and cheese. Next time.
Anna and I wanted to swim to Crimea, but then it was just so nice floating in the clear water and lying on the sand (and getting a little sunburnt...) and playing backgammon and eating bread and cheese. Next time.
Things that are everywhere in Istanbul
Cats: are seriously everywhere, in many shapes and sizes (there are four very small ones that like to sit with their mother on the steps to Julia's house currently). Some of them look quite sick, but most seem to be doing well. Marlene says she's never seen a cat hit by a car (which are also everywhere in Istanbul), and from watching a few handle their way in nightime traffic I can believe that. They are extremely smart. They also make sounds I have never heard cats make before. Walking home last night we saw two of them singing to each other before going their separate ways under cars and down the street...
Dogs: I didn't realize this at first, because they are always sleeping. If you do not look down, you might not see them at all. If you do look down, however, you will see them in scores, lying on the asphalt (which is also everywhere in Itanbul, which in turn means the city doesn't cool down that much at night). Occasionally you see one walking; once, while drinking tea overlooking the Bosphorus, I saw two play-fighting. They have tags in their ears and I believe they are selectively steriliyed by the city. I speak to them in French, but so far the response has been pretty minimal. The cats seem more interested.
Roses: other flowers, too. The advantage of a city in a warm climate (same thing we saw in Austin). Adds a lot in terms of colour and smell. In Uskudar - a neighbourhood on the Anatolian side that goes from the water up a very large hill, with several levels of streets connected by stairways (and roundabout, but still steep, streets for cars) the roses seem to jump out of all sorts of places - cracks in steps, sides of houses. The air quality in Istanbul is surprisingly not bad -- it is always at least breezy, which avoids the stagnant smog-trap thing (although I hear later in the summer the sunsets can be black) -- so the rose-smell carries.
Street vendors: selling things at surprisingly (to me) reasonable prices. Water everywhere -- there doesn't seem to be anything in place to counter the thousands and thousands of plastic water bottles that must get used here every week. Pretzley things, grilled corn, etc. Then there are walking vendors with carts - Marlene tells me she could do most of her shopping just by sitting in her front window all day and stopping each vendor as they go by. "Hipermarts" are a fairly recent development, I hear, and the quality of the produce doesn't seem to be as good as the fruit stands (and here I remember my delight that the neighbourhood I live in Toronto has fruit stands -- how long will it take us to undo some of the stupidest effects of "development"?).
Cops: with baseball caps! and submachine guns! which seems to have all the obvious consequences...
Dogs: I didn't realize this at first, because they are always sleeping. If you do not look down, you might not see them at all. If you do look down, however, you will see them in scores, lying on the asphalt (which is also everywhere in Itanbul, which in turn means the city doesn't cool down that much at night). Occasionally you see one walking; once, while drinking tea overlooking the Bosphorus, I saw two play-fighting. They have tags in their ears and I believe they are selectively steriliyed by the city. I speak to them in French, but so far the response has been pretty minimal. The cats seem more interested.
Roses: other flowers, too. The advantage of a city in a warm climate (same thing we saw in Austin). Adds a lot in terms of colour and smell. In Uskudar - a neighbourhood on the Anatolian side that goes from the water up a very large hill, with several levels of streets connected by stairways (and roundabout, but still steep, streets for cars) the roses seem to jump out of all sorts of places - cracks in steps, sides of houses. The air quality in Istanbul is surprisingly not bad -- it is always at least breezy, which avoids the stagnant smog-trap thing (although I hear later in the summer the sunsets can be black) -- so the rose-smell carries.
Street vendors: selling things at surprisingly (to me) reasonable prices. Water everywhere -- there doesn't seem to be anything in place to counter the thousands and thousands of plastic water bottles that must get used here every week. Pretzley things, grilled corn, etc. Then there are walking vendors with carts - Marlene tells me she could do most of her shopping just by sitting in her front window all day and stopping each vendor as they go by. "Hipermarts" are a fairly recent development, I hear, and the quality of the produce doesn't seem to be as good as the fruit stands (and here I remember my delight that the neighbourhood I live in Toronto has fruit stands -- how long will it take us to undo some of the stupidest effects of "development"?).
Cops: with baseball caps! and submachine guns! which seems to have all the obvious consequences...
Blisstanbul
Istanbul is HUGE. The city is hilly -- in the centre, both sides go up from the Bosphorus and then keep rolling -- and from anywhere you stand, downtown at least, all you can sea is city and water. The bus from the airport drove mostly along the water (Sea of Marmora); and on the drive up to Agva on the black sea we went north on the Anatolian / Asian side and didn't leave city for more than two hours. The striking thing for somebody familiar with North American cities is how most of the city feels like a "downtown" -- multiple-use neighbourhoods, shops/restaurants/so on mixed with housing, densely packed but with lots of little streets. Further out there are "planned" areas with big housing blocks, and there are plenty of gated communities on the outskirts (which run the gamut all the way to out-there California special-interest styles), but all this is very much the minority.
Everyone says (or at least both academics and random guys I met on the street) that Istanbul is not planned; that it plans itself. The city has grown at a consistently wild rate for decades now; estimated population today is 15 million. Julia (travelling companion studying urban development and history) says the majority of housing in Istanbul is self-built (this too goes back decades). There is lots of talk about the "Gecekondu" (there should be a little cidilla on the c, which makes it sound like "ch" in English pronunciation), which I think translates to something like "grew overnight" -- whole neighbourhoods, mostly immigrants from the East (often Kurds) of houses built by people with their families and neighbours, semi-governed by neighbourhood councils who set their own rules about the heights of buildings, the density of the area, and so on. The game is to set up a house quickly enough that it seems permanent and won't be torn down. The flipside of this is the movement to tear down Gecekondu neighbourhoods for "development" -- move the inhabitants to "planned" (highrise) housing on the outskirts of the city and build "respectable" neighbourhoods downtown. The star example of this dispossession process happened a few years ago when a Roma neighbourhood - one of, if not the, oldest sedentary Roma settlements in the world - on the historical peninsula (on "Golden Horn" on the European side, where the Big Hits of Istanbul tourism - Topkapi palace, the Hayya Sophia, the Sultanahmet "Blue" Mosque - are) was razed and the inhabitants were moved -- the newspapers announced that they were "dancing with joy" over their new highrise digs in the equivalent of, hm, maybe Burlington? -- without consideration that people who largely made their living as artists, especiallz musicians, kind of relied on a downtown environment... the estimate today is that well over half of those displaced have since moved back downtown, into the surprisingly expensive Istanbul housing market (a little cheaper than Toronto).
Everything official here seems to have an "informal" counterpart. The public transport buses and ferries (!!!) coexist with smaller private ones - but you can use the same pass card for both (Istanbul, I was informed by the spectacularly lazy professor who delegated organizing the INURA conference to Julia, had these cards a decade before London. The Turks, like every other group ever, "are a proud people"). Same goes for garbage collection, etc. We walked through a largely Kurdish neighbourhood (semi-ghetto) where the houses aren't owned, but are operated by landlords who charge rent and do some "maintenance". Now the city is, claiming ownership, selling some of these buildings to private developers; so property values go up, rent goes up, gentrification ensues... Meanwhile, not only the Gecekondu are illegal, but so are many of the skyscrapers being built downtown -- including what will be the second tallest in the work, which is being built on a lot about three times the size of the one it's licenced for.
It's remarkable how similar the processes of urban development todaz are from city to city -- gentrification and dispossesion, police presence working against neighbourhood self-organiyation, rising property rates transforming "informal" economies into poverty; but it's also remarkable how FAST things happen in Istanbul. We got home two nights ago to find a trench dug down the entire length of Marlene's street -- I think it's for electricity -- and a huge scaffold put up along the building across the street from Julia's...
The wild thing is how well this all seems to work. There are many many problems, but the city is livable and lived in. Everywhere I've gone people are using the streets - as workshops, as places to hang out, as playgrounds, for market stalls - and this holds across tourist neighbourhoods to highly "conservative" neighbourhoods.
I haven't been here long, but it really helps to be hanging out with two people who have lived in Istanbul for three years, studying Ottoman history in Istanbul and the contemporary development of the city. On which point I terminate this totally rambling note. Kisses.
Everyone says (or at least both academics and random guys I met on the street) that Istanbul is not planned; that it plans itself. The city has grown at a consistently wild rate for decades now; estimated population today is 15 million. Julia (travelling companion studying urban development and history) says the majority of housing in Istanbul is self-built (this too goes back decades). There is lots of talk about the "Gecekondu" (there should be a little cidilla on the c, which makes it sound like "ch" in English pronunciation), which I think translates to something like "grew overnight" -- whole neighbourhoods, mostly immigrants from the East (often Kurds) of houses built by people with their families and neighbours, semi-governed by neighbourhood councils who set their own rules about the heights of buildings, the density of the area, and so on. The game is to set up a house quickly enough that it seems permanent and won't be torn down. The flipside of this is the movement to tear down Gecekondu neighbourhoods for "development" -- move the inhabitants to "planned" (highrise) housing on the outskirts of the city and build "respectable" neighbourhoods downtown. The star example of this dispossession process happened a few years ago when a Roma neighbourhood - one of, if not the, oldest sedentary Roma settlements in the world - on the historical peninsula (on "Golden Horn" on the European side, where the Big Hits of Istanbul tourism - Topkapi palace, the Hayya Sophia, the Sultanahmet "Blue" Mosque - are) was razed and the inhabitants were moved -- the newspapers announced that they were "dancing with joy" over their new highrise digs in the equivalent of, hm, maybe Burlington? -- without consideration that people who largely made their living as artists, especiallz musicians, kind of relied on a downtown environment... the estimate today is that well over half of those displaced have since moved back downtown, into the surprisingly expensive Istanbul housing market (a little cheaper than Toronto).
Everything official here seems to have an "informal" counterpart. The public transport buses and ferries (!!!) coexist with smaller private ones - but you can use the same pass card for both (Istanbul, I was informed by the spectacularly lazy professor who delegated organizing the INURA conference to Julia, had these cards a decade before London. The Turks, like every other group ever, "are a proud people"). Same goes for garbage collection, etc. We walked through a largely Kurdish neighbourhood (semi-ghetto) where the houses aren't owned, but are operated by landlords who charge rent and do some "maintenance". Now the city is, claiming ownership, selling some of these buildings to private developers; so property values go up, rent goes up, gentrification ensues... Meanwhile, not only the Gecekondu are illegal, but so are many of the skyscrapers being built downtown -- including what will be the second tallest in the work, which is being built on a lot about three times the size of the one it's licenced for.
It's remarkable how similar the processes of urban development todaz are from city to city -- gentrification and dispossesion, police presence working against neighbourhood self-organiyation, rising property rates transforming "informal" economies into poverty; but it's also remarkable how FAST things happen in Istanbul. We got home two nights ago to find a trench dug down the entire length of Marlene's street -- I think it's for electricity -- and a huge scaffold put up along the building across the street from Julia's...
The wild thing is how well this all seems to work. There are many many problems, but the city is livable and lived in. Everywhere I've gone people are using the streets - as workshops, as places to hang out, as playgrounds, for market stalls - and this holds across tourist neighbourhoods to highly "conservative" neighbourhoods.
I haven't been here long, but it really helps to be hanging out with two people who have lived in Istanbul for three years, studying Ottoman history in Istanbul and the contemporary development of the city. On which point I terminate this totally rambling note. Kisses.
2 Temmuz 2009 Perşembe
Brief update
Basic thing: walked around Istanbul. Walked around Istanbul more. Saw many children, rose bushes, water sellers. Spontaneously went to the Black Sea with Marlene, one of my travelling companions and the one who I am staying with in Istanbul (just completed Masters' in History, thesis on 18th-c. Ottoman architecture). We had to put luggage on a bus for Julıa, the other Istanbul-dweller among said travel companions (all of whom are German by birth) to send it to the rustıc hotel / resort where the conference on Urban geography (INURA) that she was organizing is takıng place (it had somehow been forgotten in Istanbul). After adventures with a psychopathic over-masculine taxi driver, we missed the first bus and had to wait an hour watchıng the sun sink over the Bosphorus. Then the next bus came and we got on it.
Conference: somewhat interesting. Two comments: people wıth progressive politics need to get a new aesthetic, one that doesn't involve singing 1960s and 70s songs that no one knows the lyrics to. Alternately, Anglo-American culture has to die. Seriously. They wrıte poetry on posters in Egyptian protests. And: although I have used the statement as my blog title, it's a little ridiculous.
Good food, beautıful rıver wıth people fishing in it. Friendly dog barking outside the tent for a while at about 5am. The call to prayer sounds nicest with some open space to reverberate in (although in the city you do get some neat acoustic effects bouncing off the walls).
Comments on Istanbul, and maybe even pictures, wıll follow in a couple days, when we'll have Internet at home.
Conference: somewhat interesting. Two comments: people wıth progressive politics need to get a new aesthetic, one that doesn't involve singing 1960s and 70s songs that no one knows the lyrics to. Alternately, Anglo-American culture has to die. Seriously. They wrıte poetry on posters in Egyptian protests. And: although I have used the statement as my blog title, it's a little ridiculous.
Good food, beautıful rıver wıth people fishing in it. Friendly dog barking outside the tent for a while at about 5am. The call to prayer sounds nicest with some open space to reverberate in (although in the city you do get some neat acoustic effects bouncing off the walls).
Comments on Istanbul, and maybe even pictures, wıll follow in a couple days, when we'll have Internet at home.
First Adventure
Beiıng the bus from Toronto to Ottawa, mostly filled wıth pre-teens on their way to become Counselors-In-Training at camp B'nai Brith.
Sample conversatıon:
- is Chicago in Michigan?
- no, obvıously, it's in Illinois
- I don't know the states very well
- That's ok, I don't know the provınces.
- It's provınces AND territories!
- what?
- Ha, you don't even know? We have territories too.
- yeah?
- It's like Alaska and Hawaii
- Alaska and Hawaii are states...
- Yeah, but if the US wanted them to be terrıtorıes, they'd just shoot a rocket and then they'd be.... ... I bet you don't even know who Stephen Harper is! You Amerıcans don't know anything about Canada.
and so on.
Bus from Montreal to Ottawa - sat in front of a guy who spoke Arabic on his cellphone most of the way. Saved me from turning on the language tape.
Flıght Montreal to Parıs: uneventful. Askıng for the vegetarian option means you eat about half an hour before everybody else. Cloudy, little visibility.
Going from one gate to another in Charles de Gaulle, you go past three sets of duty-frees, one of which you have to walk through. If my bags hadn't been full I would have bought so much perfume.
Flight Paris to Instanbul: clear, pretty. Coming into land I had my first inkling of the fact that Istanbul is really, really, really enormous.
Bus from Atatürk airport (everything [not lıterally] in Turkey is named after Atatürk, although there are far fewer pictures of him around than there are of US presidents in the States) to Taksim Square : long and pretty. Mostly along the bosphorus. Parks, kıds, etc. Everything looks very urban - multi-use neighbourhoods, multi-story buildings (but not many huge towers).
Sample conversatıon:
- is Chicago in Michigan?
- no, obvıously, it's in Illinois
- I don't know the states very well
- That's ok, I don't know the provınces.
- It's provınces AND territories!
- what?
- Ha, you don't even know? We have territories too.
- yeah?
- It's like Alaska and Hawaii
- Alaska and Hawaii are states...
- Yeah, but if the US wanted them to be terrıtorıes, they'd just shoot a rocket and then they'd be....
and so on.
Bus from Montreal to Ottawa - sat in front of a guy who spoke Arabic on his cellphone most of the way. Saved me from turning on the language tape.
Flıght Montreal to Parıs: uneventful. Askıng for the vegetarian option means you eat about half an hour before everybody else. Cloudy, little visibility.
Going from one gate to another in Charles de Gaulle, you go past three sets of duty-frees, one of which you have to walk through. If my bags hadn't been full I would have bought so much perfume.
Flight Paris to Instanbul: clear, pretty. Coming into land I had my first inkling of the fact that Istanbul is really, really, really enormous.
Bus from Atatürk airport (everything [not lıterally] in Turkey is named after Atatürk, although there are far fewer pictures of him around than there are of US presidents in the States) to Taksim Square : long and pretty. Mostly along the bosphorus. Parks, kıds, etc. Everything looks very urban - multi-use neighbourhoods, multi-story buildings (but not many huge towers).
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