Wednesday, June 07, 2006

7 June 2006

It's hard to believe that we were in Istanbul. Istanbul, the city that straddles two continents. Istanbul, the city in every sophomore year history textbook. Istanbul (was Constantinople), the city that They Might Be Giants sang about. Thousands of years of history and millions of people, interlaced with kids selling postcards, shady men offering private tours, and buses full of German tourists. In some ways, it's a very modern city: huge highways full of cars, teenagers taking pictures of each other with their camera phones, trendy restaurants and bars. When you look more closely, you can see differences: few of those cars are driven by women (we saw one female driver while we were there), a lot of the teenage girls wear headscarves, and some are completely veiled.

One travel website suggested getting a Turkish newspaper to carry around to blend in. That might have been a good tip if we had been in, say, Paris or Berlin, but not in Istanbul. My two friends and I look like the cover of a diversity awareness pamphlet: we represent three professions, three regions of the States, three ethnicities, and both genders. I don't think a mere newspaper would have helped us to blend in, given the amount of staring we inspired while walking down the street. (Plus, there's the minor obstacle that none of us know any Turkish, so any small illusion of native-ness would have fallen apart immediately).

We would blend in if we were walking down the street in Manhattan, and we are of some interest in Switzerland, but we were a tourist attraction unto ourselves in Istanbul. Schoolchildren and adults alike stopped and stared at us wherever we walked, and they found us more picture-worthy than the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. I've never had my photo taken by so many strangers, not even right after Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon came out, and people thought I was Zhang Ziyi. Turkish people from the countryside rarely see people who are black, white, or yellow, and to see all three together was even more mind-blowing, even for cosmopolitan Istanbul natives.

On the first day, a Turkish carpet shop owner came up to us and said, "You're very multi-racial, you just need me." We ended up chatting with him and his business partner (Turkish hospitality is absolutely incredible – we spent most of the weekend with them, drinking, eating, smoking shishas, seeing lesser-known parts of the city). They threw an impromptu cook-out for us, invited their friends (the Turkish mafia, the Turkish Pavarotti, the Turkish Geraldo, their drivers and associates and apprentices) by calling them and telling them that three Americans were visiting, and hired three gypsies to come sing for us.

Not that Istanbul has never seen foreigners before. You can see evidence of the historical diversity of Istanbul, which has been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Ottoman Turks, and was Christian before it was Muslim, and has traded heavily with Africa and Asia. The Hagia Sophia was a church before it was a mosque before it was a museum, and there are plaques written in Arabic side-by-side with mosaics of Mary and Jesus (which the Muslims left intact, with extra people tiled in next to them: local politicians and other decidedly non-Christian people). There are Turkish people with dark hair, dark skin, and pale green eyes. There are Turkish people with blond hair and Asian features. Maybe the strange thing for them was seeing individual races represented in different people, instead of all mixed together.

Our experience was incredible, bordering on the surreal, to the point that any description of what we did sounds like the lead-in for a bad joke: Three Americans walk into a bazaar, and… Or, a yellow person, a black person, and a white person walk into a carpet store… And how about, what do you get when you mix a lawyer, a banker, an engineer, an opera singer, a TV star, the Turkish mafia, two carpet salesmen, a chauffeur, and three gypsies? An awesome weekend.

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