Destination: Turkey

I’m in Istanbul — floodlit minarets out my window in a hot and muggy room after a great first day of filming. I’m getting this blog entry up pronto because of the horrible bombing here 24 hours ago, which killed at least 17 people and injured more than 150.

Apparently, many Americans heading for Turkey saw the news and wonder if it’s still safe. The thought honestly didn’t even occur to me until I got back into the room tonight and read my email from our office saying some of the people signed up on our tours were concerned. My first thought was not to dignify the unfounded fear with a response. But that’s not fair. When you are half a world away and just watching the news, it is understandable that you might overreact. Let me just recount my day.

In this city of well over 10 million people, this is a tragedy. But (as I commented to Simon, my TV director, as we returned after 10 hours of shooting all over town today) I’m impressed by how I felt no tension on the streets because of this event. Of course, it’s on the Istanbul news big time tonight, but the city is as fun-loving and lofty as ever.

Our last shot of the day — looking from the Galata Bridge over a churning harbor at the Topkapi Palace sitting in a green bed of trees, with huge red Turkish flags flying and a skyline spiky with minarets — I commented to Simon that this city is uniquely graceful to the eye. Even though it’s rough…it still has the fragrance of a harem girl dancing for a sultan.

Istanbul is a far cry from Denmark, where I was just yesterday. Even at the Turkish Airlines gate at the Copenhagen airport, I knew we weren’t in Denmark anymore. The Turks talked louder and their kids were unruly. The flight was a bit of culture shock — horrible sound system, grainy 1980s-vintage video, families jabbering noisily as their children bounced all over. (Just between you and me, that’s why I enjoy traveling in Turkey more than Denmark.)

Riding the taxi in from Atatürk Airport, we drove along the Bosphorus — packed with ocean-going freighters, most Russia-bound. Passing along the harborfront, I remembered it a few years ago — littered with beggars, homeless people, shantytowns of immigrants camping out and in search of jobs. Today it’s a sleek European-style park. And, as it was Sunday evening, it was filled with families out wrapping up their weekend with a picnic.

This morning, as we set out to film, I met my friend and local guide Lale (who’s helping us with this shoot). She told me of the horrible bombing. We stopped by a government office to see if we had extra concerns with permissions and getting on public transit with a big camera and our gear. There was no change in our access for filming things in town.

I was hoping to be in the hotel all day, catching up on writing, while Simon and our cameraman got all the B-roll (beautiful exteriors). But a thunderhead sent the crew in, and we changed plans to shoot indoor things.

As usual, the script is too long. It could be two shows…but I think I’d rather do Istanbul dense in half an hour. Simon and I cut the home visit to Lale’s nice suburban condo in a gated community (where I hoped to show how modern Turks live, and introduce their little 14-month-old boy to our audience).

We also cut the fancy deli, and cut the attempt to film merchants in the Grand Bazaar pitching their goofy, sentimental, and clever sales lines. (“Don’t I know you? Love is blind but never mind. Can I sell you something you don’t need? Please, where are you from? Special price today…just for you, my friend.”) Most wouldn’t talk to the camera, as they seem to have been recently burned by TV cameras doing negative stories. One guy said, “You just want to make us look bad.” I said, “No, I want to make you look good. Are you bad?” He said, “We are bad, yes. But we don’t want to lookbad.”

In the far end of the bazaar, my favorite goldsmith did his thing — melting the off-cuts and sweepings into a little brick of solid gold — for our camera. In three minutes, it went from loose shavings to molten metal poured into a mold, cooled in a bucket of water, polished with newspaper, and into my hands. Being the first to hold that brand-new, four-pound brick of gold there in that funky, ramshackle, hot hole-in-the-wall was fun…and great TV.

We worked all day. The security was as tight as London’s (where I was a couple of weeks ago). Guards with metal-detecting wands did a cursory wave over us as we entered the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Market.

I was tuned into the people around us. At first, it was the cruise-ship people — filling the Hippodrome square and the main street in the Grand Bazaar. Then, simply stepping into the thriving market streets beyond the touristy zone, there were absolutely no tourists and a festival of telegenic local faces.

There are a lot of tourists in town. At lunch, I met an enthusiastic group who took our Turkey tour last year and have returned to explore the country again. I think I met more American tourists in Istanbul today than I did all last week traveling through the Danish countryside (outside of Copenhagen, which has lots of Yanks).

I’ve always wanted to film Istanbul’s fish boats cooking up their fish right on their bobbing deck, and serving it up in hunks of bread wrapped in newspaper. (This Istanbul fast food is a sentimental memory from my teenage visit here.) With the boats rocking wildly, we bought our sandwiches. As I sat down to eat mine, a bird strafed me. It was as if yellow mustard (the expensive kind, with the grains in it) just squirted out of the sky. A streak landed on my sleeve, and another on the thigh of my pants. I heard a third squirt land in the vicinity of my sandwich. When I surveyed my fried mackerel, it was the same rustic yellow — camouflaging whatever may have landed there. Lale said, “That’s why we don’t like pigeons.” Simon tried to comfort me, saying, “It’s probably mostly mackerel, anyway.” I still couldn’t finish my snack.

The slick new city tram — notoriously crowded through the day — was not jammed after rush hour. So we hopped on and filmed it as we returned to our hotel. We met a beautiful woman in an amazing black scarf covered with bangles (imagine I Dream of Jeannie at an Irish wake). I asked her man where they were from…thinking Oman or Sudan or Kilimanjaro or something really exotic. They said Istanbul. I said, “Çok güzel”(very beautiful), and thought, “I guess if you need to cover your head…you can do it with panache.”

Oh, back to my reason for the blog entry: Should you travel to Istanbul? Who am I to say? Some people will, and some people won’t. Those who won’t…can see a great show about it on public TV this coming October.

I intended to be finished with Turkey — but the vivid images blow like snow drifts against my mind. I can’t leave until I dig out.

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Each night during my six-night stay in Istanbul, I was drawn to the Ramadan street fair — the rollicking food fest after the fast. Six floodlit minarets rocket into black sky above hordes of people. Sticky treats shine under swinging lamps. Young girls make head scarves fashionable. Turkish coffee cooks in copper kettles buried deep in red coals. Hourglass-shaped tea glasses fit fists — Anatolian hand-warmers. All the little children know two phrases in English: “How old are you?” and “What is your name?”

Standing on a ledge overlooking the jammed mosque courtyard, I don’t understand this scene. I talk with a brother and sister. Their dad is an imam. I say, “Where I come from, pastor’s kids are trouble — we call them PKs.” The sister said that would not be her…but it would be her brother.

My guide said the ruins that break through the Istanbul cityscape come with a message: the vanity of all aspiration to empire. It made me think. She also explained how moustaches in Turkey make a political statement. I think it was, “up is communist, down is fascist.” I took a note to make political-statement moustaches along with turban fashion a conversation on a future radio interview.

Walking across the Blue Mosque front yard, a man in a colorful traditional outfit saw my book and opened it to the title page. There he was, pictured with his traveling tea service. I took his photo posing with the photo of himself (he didn’t know I was the author) and gave him a lira (worth a bit less than a dollar). Walking away, I heard the coin hit the sidewalk and the man say in a disgusted voice, “Toilet money!” He must make plenty of money off that photo. It was the rudest encounter of my Istanbul visit. (Or, perhaps, I’m just really clueless about what to tip tea boys for their photo.)

Travel teaches me how we are so different, yet essentially the same. For instance, out of all this Turkish wonder, my friend, co-author, and guide Lale drove me to her home — down an eight-lane California-quality freeway to a gated community of condo-dwellers that could have been suburban Dallas.

Lale’s mother (in from Ankara to help with the new baby) greeted us with the five-month-old baby, “Zu-zu,” in her arms. Lale took the baby, turned to me, looked over her glasses, and said, “I’m a very logical woman.

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I know how to separate facts from emotion. But when it comes to my baby, the world stops spinning. My doctor and I talked. He said for a mother, hormones rule the body and there’s no way to control them.”

Sitting down in the yellow taksiat Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport and seeing the welcoming grin of the unshaven driver greet me with a “merhaba,” I just blurted out, “Çok Güzel.” I forgot I remembered the phrase. It just came to me — like a baby shouts for joy. I was back and it was “very good” indeed.

I went through a decade-long period of annual visits, but it’s been years since I wished a Turk “merhaba” — that local “aloha” or “namaste” that ices rough people with gentility. My first hours in Turkey were filled with déjà vu moments like no travel homecoming I’ve ever had.

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As the taksi turned off the highway and into the tangled lanes of the tourist “green zone” (just below the Blue Mosque with all the tourist-friendly businesses still lined up with that desirous “Yes, Mister”), I looked at the dirty kids in the streets and remembered a rougher time, when they would earn small change hanging out the passenger door of ramshackle vans. They’d yell “Sirkeci, Sirkeci, Sirkeci” or whichever neighborhood was ahead in a scramble to pick up passengers in the shared mini-bus taksi’s called dolmus(that wild cross between a taxi, a bus, and a kidnapping vehicle literally and so appropriately called a “squish”).

While Turkey’s new affluence has killed the dolmus, the echoes of the boys hollering from the vans bounced happily all around me. “Aksaray, Aksaray, Aksaray…Sultanahmet, Sultanahmet, Sultanahmet.” My favorite call was for the train station’s neighborhood: “Sirkeci, Sirkeci, Sirkeci.”

Stepping out of my shoes and into the vast and turquoise (a color early French travelers took home as the “color of the Turks”) of the not-quite-rightly-named Blue Mosque, something was missing. Yes…gone was the smell of so many sweaty socks, knees, palms and foreheads soaked into the ancient carpet, upon which worshippers did their quite physical (as Mohammad intended) prayer work-outs. Sure enough, the Blue Mosque has a fresh new carpet — with a subtle design that keeps worshippers organized like lined paper tames letters.

Prayer lets out and a crush of locals heads for the door. The only way to get any personal space is to look up. And that breathtaking scene plays again for me — hard pumping seagulls powering through the humid air in a black sky, coming into the light as they cross in front of floodlit minarets.

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Walking down to the Golden Horn Bay and Istanbul’s churning waterfront, I miss the old Galata Bridge — so rusted with life’s struggles. But the vivid street life — boys casting their lines, old men sucking on water pipes, sesame rings filling cloudy glass carts — has retaken the new bridge.

And on the sloppy adjacent harborfront, the venerable “fish and bread boats” are still rocking in the constant churn of the busy harbor. In a humbler day, they were 20 foot long open dinghies — rough boats with battered car tires for fenders — with open fires grilling fish literally fresh off the boat. For a few coins, they’d bury a big white fillet in a hunk of white bread, wrap it in newsprint and I was on my way…dining out on fish.

A few years ago the fish and bread boats were shut down — no license or taxes. Now, after a popular uproar, they’re back. A bit more hygienic and no longer wrapping in newspaper — but still rocking in the waves and slamming out fish. (The 3 lire or $2.50 sandwich remains the best poor man’s meal going.)

In Turkey, I have more personal rituals than in other countries. I cap my days with a bowl of sütlaç. That’s rice pudding — still served in a square and shiny stainless steel bowl with a matching spoon not much bigger than a gelato sampler with a sprinkle of cinnamon.

And I challenge a local to a game of backgammon — still a feature in restaurants, tea houses and cafes. Boards no longer smell of tobacco, with softer wood inlays worn deeper than the hard wood.

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And now the dice are plastic, with obedient dots rather than the tiny handmade “bones” of the 20th century, which had dots that didn’t line up. I spun and paused…a bystander moved for me. As before, if you don’t move immediately, locals move for you. There’s one right way…and everybody knows it.

Today in Turkey the people, like those dots, line up better. There’s a seat for everyone as the dolmus are no longer so dolmus. Fez sales to tourists are way down, but scarf wear by local girls is way up. There’s a rigidity to the chaos and each of my déjà vu moments shows a society that stays the same while enduring great change.