The Apinautica - Chapter 10: Turkey - Part 1
I spent at least an hour editing an article someone had submitted for the magazine the other day, saved it as a word file, and thereafter I haven't been able to open it (all programs claim its not a word file, but it's not anything else??). This reminded me that it was that kind of shenanigans which had driven me to edit documents in the browser on google docs already years ago. Well, right now I'm trying to make some simple edits to the most recent section of I'm about to post of my Apinautica story and it will let me spend five to ten minutes making edits before telling me it failed to save, and then when I reload there's a nightmarish mix of some but not all of my edits creating half words and mangled sentences. Argh. Am I going to have to retreat to using pen and paper?? ... or learn to use the Apple computer I've been provided with as the official work computer? Hmmm pen and paper sounds more appealing ajajaja.
Anyway, I guess I'll make my edits HERE and hopefully be able to go back and re-integrate them to the master file on google docs some time when it's not being insanely loopy.
(My computer has been doing this insane thing where the mouse loses the ability to click on buttons or tabs, but it fixes itself when I ctrl-alt-delete and open task manager (not actually resetting my computer, just opening task manager). I mentioned it to my IT friend but he must have been busy with something cause he was just like "huh that's odd." Similarly this google docs problem is... presumably a problem somewhere between my computer and google docs, like, I assume the latter isn't broken, but if my computer's memory had gotten bovine spongiform encephalitis again you'd think it wouldn't effect inputting things into google docs. I dunno, it's probably cursed.
June 23rd, 2013, Turkey - Sometimes, on a random Tuesday in June, you decide you really need to go see a beautiful young woman in Turkey, so you buy a ticket for four days hence.
When I had arrived in Turkey for the first time in 2009, it had seemed so exotic, “third world” even. The plumbing hadn’t worked well in one of our hotels! The strange and alien call to prayer warbled out throughout the town several times a day! This time I have the perspective to laugh at my earlier self - Turkey is just another place with its own rich culture, and when we had finally mentioned the plumbing problem to the hotel proprietor asked in surprise why we hadn’t reported it earlier.
In 2009 my friends and I had taken a taxi from Ataturk Airport, getting mired in traffic and slowly navigating the narrow roads of old town before arriving at our hotel in the center of the historic city in Sultanahmet.
This time I discover what an unnecessarily tedious adventure that had been, when Deniz meets me at the airport and leads me down the escalator from the terminal directly to a station on the highly effective and easy-to-navigate city light rail system. We ride it to the waterfront and board a ferry to cross the Bosporus, the channel that separates Europe from Asia, and walk a few blocks to her apartment. The roads are narrow, steep and cobbled. We pass a random ancient fountain that has probably seen empires rise and fall around its gently burbling water. Perhaps my namesake, Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, had paused beside this very fountain. He was martyred right here in this district (then the town of Chalcedon) in 251 AD - first tempted by two beautiful women and then beheaded, so the hagiographies go.
We arrive at Deniz’ narrow apartment. Rather to my surprise, it is filled with “Route 66” sign, saguaro cactus knicknacks, and posters of famous landmarks in the States. Well this is more Americana than I expected to find here, but I can’t believe how fortunate I am, this incredibly cute, fiercely strong young woman I had initially had a vague “internet crush” on has welcomed me into her heart and life, me, scrawny itinerate agricultural laborer that I am. I hope I don’t fuck this up!
She’s taking some classes at the nearby maritime academy so in the mornings she departs in her crisp white uniform with gold epaullets, and I usually explore the city with her brother, who lives nearby. Sometimes sitting in her apartment I hear someone playing a concertina or accordion, the Old-World-y music beautifully funneling up through the acoustics of the stone walls and cobbled streets and fading away again as the player continued their inexplicable musical journey. Some evenings the acrid sinister aroma of tear gas floats faintly on the breeze from the ongoing protests at Taksim Square across the water. We avoid that area but even in our neighborhood giant police water-cannon trucks drive by occasionally, and young men in black tactical police uniforms can be seen having coffee in a cafe, as if “dystopian storm trooper” is just a normal job.
After a few days in Istanbul we set off by the efficient local buses to travel around a bit. We visit her father in the town of Izmit on the coast. He’s a retired naval officer and (jokingly?) maintains that given all my travels, he thinks I’m a spy. Deniz describes living through the 1999 Izmit earthquake which killed nearly 20,000 people - her parents had been out of town, they rushed back as soon as the earthquake happened, but her dad stopped just behind the last ridge before the city would come into sight and walked to the top so he could discover if the building containing his two children was still standing while not driving in the car with their mom. Deniz had awoken to the shaking, jumped over an opening crack in the floor, grabbed her little brother and ran out of the building. She says you could smell the dead buried under the rubble for weeks afterwords.
We continue down the coast of the Sea of Marmara to Bursa to spend a few days with her mom before returning to Istanbul.
For the past two weeks it has been smooth sailing, her brown gazelle eyes sparkling; but, turbulent like the sea, we have an argument and lightning flashes in eyes that aren’t used to not getting their way. If I love her, she argues, I would marry her next Tuesday. I look around at the Americana on her walls and feel this is all a bit fast. Things escalate, she suddenly feels I am distracting her from her studies and should immediately cast off from her place. And so out I go with my seabag over my shoulder, suddenly cast adrift in Turkey.
I head across the Bosporus again, on a mostly-empty evening ferry, towards a sky pink with sunset behind the city’s many minarets. The lonely call to prayer warbles out as I wend my way up the streets towards a hostel in Sultanahmet.
For weeks there’d been daily protests at Taksim Square. Deniz as a reasonable person wanted nothing to do with it, but, like a moth to a candle, I longed to see this political turbulence first hand, and now I can at least do that.
I descend from Sultanahmet hill. By the waterfront, in front of New Mosque (founded 1665), there’s a big demonstration against the toppling of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, the culmination of the tension that had been there when Deniz and I had met. I edge past the Egyptian-flag-waving throng and cross the low bridge across the inlet known as the Golden Horn heading up the steep Galata hill on the far side, towards Taksim.
On the broad pedestrian-only boulevard leading to Taksim, crowds go about their shopping as usual, contrasting strongly with the young men in black police uniforms standing around. In their ominous dark uniforms and combat boots they joke with each other, like twenty-year-old boys do the world over, and they chat with passers-by like normal people, and they sit at cafes and play backgammon with old men, passing the time until they’ll go into action. About fifty young people are doing a sit-in in honor of people killed in the protests, holding nearly two dozen pictures of people from all walks of life. Several squads of riot police stand off to the side, awkward and motiveless until the command will come which will cause them to suddenly move like coordinated marionettes, linking shields and following orders. Finally I come to the broad open space of Taksim Square. On one side a huge red Turkish flag flutters fitfully in the wind in front of a government building. A huge picture of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk gazes sternly over the square from the wall of the building, with steely blue eyes, a stately handlebar mustache, and a cylindrical astrakhan hat on his head. He’s not Big Brother, he’s the father of the nation, the hero of Gallipoli, and he gazes on the police and the protestors equally.
The concrete of the square is pockmarked with little craters from the violence of the recent encounters. Armoured water cannon trucks rest in the shadows to the side, looking like weaponized zambonis. Beside the square is the grassy and tree-filled Gezi Park, the proposed demolition of which sparked the protests, and ironically it is here that during the day more than a hundred riot police lounge in the grass, looking for all the world like a resting Roman army from the future - plastic shields and black helmets lying around them, armoured shin guards on their legs, some are napping in the grass, some sit as if on a picnic.
I walk around the park, it is very lovely. Children gambol about and couples stroll. Next to some playground equipment covered with frolicking children, a concrete wall has recently been knocked over in places by the violence. I sit on a bench for awhile and enjoy the park. I’m hoping at any moment for a conciliatory message from her on my phone but none comes as the afternoon drifts towards evening. The policemen are getting up and stretching. Having seen Taksim Square, I don’t really feel the need to be there in the evening when it becomes a combat zone -- I walk back to the hostel.
This section had some interesting decisions on how to cover it. Basically, the section that begins right after that is a little mini arc I like a lot, I wrote it first as the final story for a creative writing class, and used roughly the same arc for a series on Medium that was a travelogue of Turkey, drawing parallels between my travels and mythical Bellerophon's travels. In those other contexts the back story was limited to more or less one line ("I got in a fight with my girlfriend") but it needed more here, and while I didn't really want to dwell on the good times, they needed to be here to balance the rest, hence its a bit fastforwardy.
I had thought about writing more about my initial visit in 2009 but I find I don't really have a lot to say about it because we pretty much just came as tourists and did tourist stuff, any plot arc that could be found, other than oh we were so naive, is no longer relevant I mean there's a plot arc of "and that's why I don't travel with friends any more" but that would be distracting and tedious to fit in. Its a bit ironic because I think even at the time I thought "I'd like to write a travelog some day" but even while I'm doing it I'm not writing about that trip.
The other decision, was this section actually encompasses two trips -- I had gone to Turkey in June and then returned in August, but I decided to simplify it into one trip. But now all my dates for the latter half are off, oh well.
In other news I'm currently reading a book I'm really liking, called Adjacent to Argonauts by Julian Blatchley, which I had gotten onto actually after I encountered him being remarkably witty in comments to a post in a facebook group and he quipped about wishing people liked his book as much as his post. The broadest simplest way I unintentionally categorize things I read is "bah I could do better than this" and "fuck I could never write this well." This book falls into the latter category! It's funny it doesn't say anywhere on the blurb or anything but from the first line I picked up on that it took substantial inspiration from Three Men in A Boat, but while I actually felt that classic book came off as trying-too-hard and not as funny everyone makes it out to be, this book succeeds in actually being constantly funny.
So being in the midst of reading that as I re-read the above section of my own writing I'm like ugh, it's so flat, unfunny and lacking in creative descriptions compared to Blatchley's book! The creative descriptions are something I can aspire to but I really can't think of how I could make almost everything sound as humorous as he does. Anyway, suffice to say I really wholeheartedly recommend his book, especially to the surprising number of you who were fans of Three Men in a Boat
