Istanbul

Leaving Cairo and arriving in Istanbul: June 10th

I love Turkey. I wasn’t sure that I would after fleeing from here twenty years ago when, as a travelling 21-year-old, I took a job advertised in the paper for an English teacher for a family in Istanbul.

Roger also came here the same year but at that stage we had not met. (of course, our stars aligned a couple of years later in a queue in Nelson, but that’s another story).

Whilst on my travels, I had very much overstayed my welcome in a number of places including the home of my Aunt Joy and I needed some money to travel later in the year. So after grossly fabricating my own credentials, especially my experience with and love for children, I was flown to Istanbul where I looked forward to long languid days sailing on a yacht around the Aegean and perusing the grand bazaar for carpets.

I was also hoping for an authentic Turkish experience and now realise how ridiculous that was even then, as Turkey is a fairly progressive county that had, particularly in the larger cities, embraced a more European way of being.

My host family, who had two children aged 5 and 7, lived on the slopes of the Asian side of the Bospherus River that divides Istanbul into two halves. Their house was inside a gated community with a pool and tennis court but there never seemed to be anyone else around and it felt lonely and isolated.  The seven-year old boy was the first son of a first son and terribly overindulged and the little girl was sweet but a little neurotic.

The role of English Teacher was really a euphemism for ‘24-hours on-call baby sitter’. I sat through endless pool parties, hovering on the periphery with the children, trying to look busy, whilst the men sat around smoking cigars and the women lay around poolside, comparing their breast implants and discussing what I don’t know, as my Turkish was never really good enough.

I woke up first thing in the morning to breakfast with the kids and didn’t clock off the job until I’d got the kids off to sleep at about 11pm. I had Sunday off each week and was usually so desperate for a bit of normality that I pursued any avenue, including hanging out with the most naïve and soulless bunch of Australian women, who had similar jobs to mine.

I had a Turkish sweetheart in whom I had zero interest, who bought me a lot of garish mirror and brush sets from the gold shop in which he worked in the grand bazaar. Every time I met up with him, he used his limited English to let me know that he wished to be “more better friends”. I ignored him and wished I’d hooked up with a carpet shop assistant in the hope of acquiring something I really wanted.

The main problem really, was that I was a bit adrift in the world. Our father with whom I was very close, had died when I was 14 and our mother had quickly remarried in a state of lonely and financial panic. I had a pretty abysmal relationship with her new husband and had been living independently since the beginning of my last year of high school. I’d struggled with depression over that time but continued to go out on a limb to prove my independence, and my travels were just an extension of that. As a result, I was extremely homesick but too proud to come home early.

Having spent so much time hanging around the Grand Bazaar, sitting in bad bars or pursuing my interest in the consumption of Turkish food, I hadn’t really seen any of the historical sites of the city, other than the Blue Mosque where I went a number of times. I felt like I’d been to the others but when we arrived at Topkapi Palace and Hagia Sofia, I realised that I had never made it that far. What a pleasure it is to come back with my own kids and make some more positive memories.

This time we stayed in Sultanahmet, right in the old part of Istanbul. What a pleasure to see these things for the first time with the kids.

Staying in a little pension in Sultanahmet was like the experience I should have had when I lived here. A local neighbourhood with a park, and people and dogs hanging out their windows and talking to their neighbours.

We found a little food place that makes delicious Taze Fasulye and Turkish Shakshuka, an amazing dish of eggplant, capsicum, potato and tomato dish which I could eat every day for the next month.

Istanbul has changed enormously in twenty years and the city is clean and beautiful with living walls and hanging flower baskets everywhere. There is an amazing metro system and a tram and much of the infrastructure seems to function a lot better than in Auckland.

The remainder of our first day, we visit the Grand Bazaar which, always touristy, has become a den of overpriced lamps, carpets and textiles.

We sit in the park around the corner with the local families and I imagine that I could happily live here. We are loving the cool temperature and have worn long pants to celebrate the fact that it is no longer 48 degrees.

The next day we are off to a slow start. We take a leisurely walk from our guest-house to the Blue Mosque and pass one of the Egyptian obelisks gifted (or plundered) from Egypt.

Since arriving in Turkey we’ve been aware of frequenting some of the places where terrorist attacks have happened recently.  An extremist blew himself up next to the Obelisk in January and killed ten people. Last night in the park we had a moment where we dived behind a rubbish bin, when a soccer ball from the park rolled out on the road and got run over by a car. There was a huge bang and total silence afterwards, with the exception of the child standing next to his flat ball, crying.

We don’t spend too much time dwelling on the possible dangers of our sightseeing but we talk a bit with the kids about the politics of Daesh and why it is considered fortuitous to blow yourself up.

At the Blue Mosque we are issued with garments akin to blue hooded hospital gowns. At the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, the Abaya’s given to visitors were almost designer in their style and the black silhouettes floating around the mosque made for some beautiful scenery. Here I feel as if I’ve stepped straight out of the operating theatre and the only positive is that my bare bum is not showing through the back of my gown as it did last time I had surgery.

The tombs of the Sultans are five ornately-tiled kiosks within a garden behind Hagia Sofia. Admission is free which is why we have arrived here on a day when the cost of things in Turkey is freaking us out a bit.

There is a kiosk for each of the five sultans who were laid to rest here, each in a green-shrouded sarcophagus. Their family members joined them,  with large sarcophagi for adults and small ones for children. The whole extended family are laid alongside.

We visit the Basilica Cistern, an amazing underground water storage area, built by the Romans which is apparently the only place that Roger has not already seen.

Roger is becoming a bit of a know-it-all with his “I came here twenty years ago” and we have a number of little arguments about my desire to see places with a hefty admission fee when he’s already been there. I suppose that I want to share my experience of living here which was different than Roger’s experience of visiting for a short time and we have a “my experience was more significant than your experience” argument and in putting some distance between us, we promptly lose each other as I go one way with Jasper and Stella, and Louie and Roger go the other.

The Bosphorus is an amazing centre of this beautiful city and it is nice to sit near the Galata Bridge and watch people fishing and the ferries coming and going, even if I am in a shitty mood.

We eventually reunite on a Ferry tour that goes up and down the Bosphorus and we get far enough up the river to see the spot between the two suspension bridges, the Bosphorus Bridge and the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge, where I lived.

Our last day in Istanbul and we are learning the value of separating at this point in the trip. Jasper, Stella and I are keen to visit Topkapi Palace, one of the major residences of the Ottoman Sultans. It was built in between 1466 and 1478 by the sultan Mehmet II and as well as housing some amazing jewels, weapons and religious scripts, has beautiful gardens and several beautiful tiled kiosks with luxurious seating used for different purposes, including a circumcision kiosk. This pre-empts a discussion about circumcision. How can my children not know this? Unlike my childhood where I perhaps saw my father naked only once, our children are well acquainted with Roger’s form as his preference is to be naked. Perhaps the concept of a seated area for watching the process of circumcision is confusing.

Hagia Sofia, one of the most historically important churches (and then Mosque) in the world, is stunningly beautiful although the enormous scaffold in its centre, which divides the vast open space in half, is a bit of a disappointment.

We meet up with Roger and Louie who decided to visit Topkapi Palace in the end (Louie has a keen interest in visiting historical sites, which is a surprise to me) and we head for the spice bazaar where we spend the next hour sampling Turkish delight from every shop.

It was my intention on this part of the trip, to avoid travelling in cars together as this is the source of much family disharmony. However, looking at the bus fares around Turkey and multiplying them all by five, it starts to make sense to hire a car. We catch the metro to the car hire in Taksim Square and spend some time hopping in and out of two different cars, both of which are slightly too small but cheap, to ascertain which one will be the least uncomfortable.

It has been some time (20 years) since Roger drove a car on the wrong side of the road and there is quite a lot of shouting and stifled screams as we lurch into the traffic and head back to Sultanamet. All of a sudden, the whole experience of travel feels almost normalised, being back in a car and in charge of our own destiny (well Roger is currently in charge) but I’m navigating from the back seat where I’m acting as a buffer between two children.