Istanbul, here we come!!

Arriving anywhere in the middle of the night is basically like drinking the potion in Alice’s wonderland. Suddenly, everything is strange and distorted by lack of sleep, a new place, an incomprehensible language and the inevitable warp of reality inherent in any place at 4 AM. I would likely not have been surprised to be confronted with a talking rabbit or any other apparent hallucination. We therefore took refuge in the first open and well-lit place we could find as the clerk eyed us and our approaching backpack with obvious trepidation. We’re basically a married couple, two girls living out of one backpack, one guidebook, one plane ticket, sharing a mattress, meals, and a vacation. At least I got my own underwear in the deal.

“What is that?” I asked the poor fast food man, stuck with crazy travelers at a deserted joint at 4 AM, pointing to the image of something blown up on a poster larger than my backpack that looked a) sugary and b) not made of meat. “Chicken menu?” came his hesitant non-sequitor reply, which either meant that everything else was sold out / gone / eaten by wolves / too much work to make, or that that was the only English he knew. Ordering food was like a hilarious game of charades meets Christmas meets roulette: your miming skills are crucial, you only know what you ended up with after you opened the package, and it may or may not kill you. We consoled ourselves with decent fries, a terrible chicken sandwich and a yellowish goo which turned out to be rice pudding as we awaited rescue.

As masses of giggling girls in impossible shoes passes us, followed by a group of drunken 20-year-olds and another group of twentysomethings and another group and another group and another in a surreal kind of déjà vu, like underwear in the dryer clinging briefly to each other only to separate again, constantly recycling, another and another and another on tottery legs after a night out. I reflect on the universality of man: or of young people. We’re really all the same, the unwashed masses dragging their worldly possessions in a beat up backpack across the well-trodden paths of a good time in a strange place, armed with our flipflops and our Lonely Planets, a tolerance for the uncomfortable (we call it adventure) and a sense of self entitlement. We’re gonna do Istanbul, yeah!

Istanbul at 4 AM, like many other massive cities, is anything but dead, and in our case, largely consisted of drunk tourists beginning to stagger home from the bars along the Ikslandai Caddesi, a microcosm of Europe teetering home on unsteady heels. Our home away from home was tucked into a corner of Beyoğlu, with views of the Bosphorus and Sultnahmet from the rooftop terrace, accessible after several flights of bizarrely-painted walls accompanied by the faint smell of old cigarette smoke. It was kind of like stairmaster meets Jackson Pollock. We found no obvious critters anywhere (an obvious contrast to my last stay away from home, when a massive cockroach tried to eat me alive), and the toilet was decent. The shower, however, was the place (I am sure) hairballs go to die, after huddling, shivering, in the corners, trying to avoid the onslaught of water drenching the room every time someone takes a shower. I was worried one of those slimy clumps would sink its teeth into my foot, grasping at rescue from its watery grave. No such luck; after the first shower, you learn to avoid the slimy bits and all is well. We call it adventure, after all; no fun without hardship. We stumbled off to bed as the call to prayer rang out over the rooftops reminding us that, wherever we were, we weren’t in Kansas any more.

I expected Istanbul to be something between Europe and Cairo, but here it’s all Europe and no Cairo. No mosques, no headscarves. Men don’t yell obscenities (ok, that only happened once), or marriage proposals, from the other side of the street. There is public transportation. It works. There are taxis with meters, and prices in stores (though some negotiability), and you can eat anything anywhere. But then again, that takes a lot of the adventure out of it, and you don’t feel like you’ve ‘survived’ Istanbul as you ‘survive’ Cairo. Istanbul is kind of like Prague but with mosques: perhaps some run-down bits but otherwise pretty and touristy and cheap (by European standards).

Istanbul is also massive, and exciting, and vivacious: full of people, full of cafés and bars and restaurants and food joints and boutiques and markets and bazaars and everything all at once. In this respect, it’s much more interesting than your “average” European city. It has beautiful waterfront promenades and parks, with playgrounds (for adults?) and parks along the clean river, with clean air.

Armed with two loaves of bread, two containers of what claimed to be cheese, a liter and a half of Ayran (salted yoghurt drink) and the eager enthusiasm of small children at the zoo for the first time, we set off for the Princess islands, where we spent a delightful day walking, eating, sleeping, eating, walking, eating, sleeping, drinking tea, eating, and walking. Accessible by ferry, the islands are car-free (except for the one and only car, a police cruiser, making weary laps of the island), thinly inhabited, and covered with beautiful spots perfect for picknicking (except for the sign which said “no picknicking”, which we promptly ignored) looking out over cliffs and the open water towards the Mediterranean. Moments like these make me want to forget school and responsibilities and all of that, shanghai a sailboat and head for Gibralter. Escape takes the form of blue water and a distant horizon. We must content ourselves with cheese and cookies.