I was in Istanbul for a conference and my first impression of Turkey, upon leaving the airport, was, my god *everyone* smokes here. It was mildly ironic to see later that night an old Bond film in which any smoking actor had their cigarette blurred out. I didn’t realise that there was censorship in Turkey. The same movie channel kept advertising Game of Thrones, which must end up being a gigantic blur.
My other overriding first impression was of a glorious, buzzing chaos, and that sense never really left me. I arrived late in the evening and when I reached my hotel in Levent the streets around it were full of people. It was the same all the other six nights I was there. It seemed like everyone was on the street regardless of age, culture, or social grouping – old and young, modern western dress and headscarves, people singing, selling things, etc. etc. There was a very strong sense of it being a city where many things are happening rapidly: new skyscrapers, bustling streets, and a strong sense of enterprise. There was a tire store on the corner near my hotel, but the front part of it was also a book store (?!), and it was open until late at night even though the tire business was closed. This busyness and newness may sound trivial, but it was only on seeing that that a number of things about Paris that I had never really thought about consciously became readily apparent. There’s a great many things I loved about Paris, but it feels to me like it’s frozen in time. At first I really loved the wide avenues, the historic architecture and the sense of history being concretely present. After several weeks though, it mostly felt sterile and static. Everything felt established long ago. I don’t doubt that there are cool new things happening in Paris, but it seemed very hard to stumble upon them as an outsider.
When I wasn’t at the conference, most days I would just pick a new direction each day and walk and walk and see what I could discover. Some of the things I loved about Istanbul: amazing sahleb and coffee. A whole new style of cuisine. The periodic calls to prayer. The friendliness of locals. People would have been even friendlier except for my complete lack of knowledge about football.
I saved my last day, a full free day following the conference, to see some of the most iconic sights. Unfortunately that was the day I became very unwell – extreme sweatiness, temperature, great stomach discomfort, etc. All coming from what I later discovered was giardia (a water borne parasite that locates itself in the intestines). Despite that I managed to see the hagia sophia and the blue mosque, but didn’t have the stamina to make it to the palace and harem, and couldn’t stomach any turkish delight or other desserts. Going for a greatly anticipated turkish bath wasn’t even a possibility. It was an experience which I bought upon myself: drinking mysterious fermented milk drinks from street vendors beside the highway in the middle of the night is pretty much asking for trouble.
The giardia was the other kind of travel experience, the one that travel guides never write about: travel as a brutal dose of other people’s harsh realities. Maybe I’m wrong though and there is a ‘guides to samsara’ genre of travel books. At first I thought I just had food poisoning, but after a week without any relief I went and saw a doctor. As well as the diagnosis, the doctor said it was lucky I had had a hepatitis immunisation before travelling because that was spread in the same way that the giardia was. The cure was simple and inexpensive – take a few pills for several days. It did make me think about people who don’t have access to or cannot afford medical treatment. And it also made me reflect on the fact that I live in a country where giardia (and other parasites and infections) are not constant risks. While I was in Turkey a village on the border with Syria was shelled by Syrian forces and several people were killed. It felt like a place where history is actually happening – I find it hard to shake an ingrained antipodean sense that history always happens elsewhere. Along with that is the feeling that strife and danger are also usually far far away. These aren’t particularly startling insights, and it’s obvious that I’m blissfully ignorant of a lot of things, but I was still glad to have been prompted to think and be grateful by those experiences.
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