Istanbul, Turkey - August 1997
In August of 1997, I made the transition from Budapest to Istanbul. I found a pretty key location near alot of tourist sites and quite quickly met a few other travelers to hangout with. Istanbul was quite interesting, and a city I very much enjoyed exploring. I was also able to get to know it better than another tourist because i was running all over the city looking at different English schools to possibly teach at. This brought me way off any kind of beaten track and some interesting stories beyond just the tourist sites.
One particular story I have in mind was being in a tie and shirt and going to a job interview, and being on a train. While standing up, some man was passing through from car to car on the train yelling and shouting ALLAH ALLAH! The tone of his voice was kind of freakish in itself. I turned to look at him, and he had his shirt ripped off down his shoulder, and something that almost looked like a fist was almost jumping nearly six inches from around his shoulder region. It was almost like a fist punching trying to get out of skin from the inside. As I looked at it in shock my jaws just dropped and the whole feeling of the train was kind of really creepy. It instantly had the sensation that if I did not give money to him I was nearly in danger of losing my own sanity or mind or some sense of feeling like that. Other people were just dropping money left and right into whatever container he had as he passed, and as he approached me I felt a sense of something really really just not quite right at all. When I didn't drop money into his container, he of course passed, but everyone looked quite nervous and whatever that was pumping and jumping looking like it was trying to get out from inside his body was beyond words can describe. As he eventually left our train there was a sense of relief and just an odd unsettling feeling.
Anyhow, I ran around to alot of schools for teaching English. Here is another interesting story. One particular class I sat in on the students, and we talked for awhile. Interestingly the Istanbul young women had this word for a countryside Turkish men. Apparently it was very common for these guys to come to the big city from the country and see all these women in kind of sexy clothes, or not necessary sexy, but just modern. The men always got the wrong perception of them and would apparently follow them up and down the street thinking they were really loose and easy and wild. Then in itself didn't surprise me as I'd heard many foreign women constantly complain of that. But what did surprise me is that it happened so routinely to the local Instanbul girls and they had a Turkish name to describe the kind of countryside men who did just that. On an additional note, one of the students joked that these guys almost always have a mustache. This was kind of funny in itself, although personally even many of the Istanbul guys had mustaches so I couldn't necessary tell the difference.
Just as a cultural aside, I did see the Turkish Whirling Dervishes. This is a group of performers, generally men, who swirl in cirlces in a sense of pattern and routine. I always see pictures of them in tourguide books and everything else, so finally got to see them. It was kind of interesting from a cultural aspect. But personally, I like the more raw stuff that comes from just wandering around and getting lost among wherever I might wander.
It didn't take too long and I did eventually find a school that wanted to hire me. I was planning to sign a 9-month contract, and I even met an American woman who was also looking and signing with the same school. They would even have housing for their teachers, but unfortunately it wouldn't be ready for three weeks, and in the meantime I'd have to keep myself busy wandering around or doing whatever. So I decided to spend this time and go see a little more of Turkey outside of the big city of Istanbul.
The first place I went to was Coppodochia. This is where all the sandstone carvings and old christian churches use to be shortly after the time of Christ. In many of these dwelling places, there were saints and other christian symbols and such, but in every single one of them the eyes were carved out. Apparently this had been something the later muslims had done for some particular reason. I wish I could recall the exact reason, but unfortunatrely the experience happened nearly 7 years ago at the time of writing this down in this journal now. The town itself was a little boring, but the history around it was quite fascinating. As a side note, I'd met three people who knew each other from Seattle, and was traveling with them.
I think it was either here or the next town that in a hostel I discovered Turkish MTV. I should also add in addition, that back in Istanbul, there was regularly a Turkish bellydancer who would perform a few times at the hostel. Something about Turkish music that was quite intriguing and fascinating. Particarly the music videos. As an aside note, I was equally fascinated by Indonesian MTV years later upon a month visit to that country as well. I don't know what it is, but something so sensual about the music even though the culture itself isn't really all that sensual. Its quite a contrast. On additional note, one thing I significantly recall about Turkey is the massive amounts of tabloid type newspapers with foreign girls and everything else scantily clad on the beach. It was kind of selling the images of sex to the men at how wild and crazy and insane things were in the West. It was almost fascinating how much this stuff sold and how much of this tabloid stuff there was in most shops everywhere I went in Turkey. The fact that it was somewhat taboo, made it so desireable to see and read about and such.
Shortly after Cappodochia, I made my way to a coastal resort ttown which name seems to escape my memory at this time. I remember there were a few bars in this town, and I remember seeing a woman who I perceived to be Asian, I mean, like East Asia along the Pacific Coast. But upon trying to say hello, she was extremely unfriendly. For some reason, I had wanted to tell her that I had recently come from Pacific Asia and really missed it and wanted to go back there, but it didn't really seem to come out that way, and apparently she was kind of almost disgusted I even thought I was in the realm of being able to talk to her. On second thought, I now kind of wonder if she perhaps wasn't actually from Pacific Asia, but was perhaps raised in a Western country and kind of disgusted with any Western guy who she perhaps projected all to be something or another.. not sure what..
At some point, I made my way to Ephesus, and parted company with my new Seattle friends who were heading island hopping all the way to Greece. They had been good company, and of of them shared many great stories of his time hitchhiking and sleeping in fields throughout France and Italy I believe. They were pretty cool guys. Anyhow, I went to Ephesus on my own, and saw the ancient ruins of what once the New Testament's Biblical reference of Ephesus, which was the same place that I believe Saint Paul wrote about the Ephesians. The town itself was quite interesting. I almost experienced my first scam here. As I was walking back from the ruins, there were three Turkish men on motorcycles. They told me they were excavators from an ancient site and had uncovered some extremely old coins. They also said they would sell each coin for something like $25 each to me. At first I didn't really have the money to do this, so I had to decline, but it had my mind racing. One of them suggested that they would probably each be priceless in the States, but since they were in Turkey, it would be impossible for them to do anything with them. I pondered the idea of it, but I think I might have had $40 or $45 total in my pockets, and I was extremely hurting for cash, so its something I just could not possibly do. I tried to explain the situation, and they knocked down the prices more and more for me. Anyhow, to move the story along, I ended up buying like 5 of them and after ALOT of bargaining.. and then proceeded to walk home. The guys on the bike approached me again and again trying to unload the rest. Eventually one of them was so desparate to get rid of them that he asked me to give whatever change I had in my pocket, equivalent to about $1.50 or something, and he'd sell me another coin. Right about this time, I realized I'd pretty much been had. After that experience I was also kind of freaking out because I was thinking here I might have something extremely valueable and I'd have to smuggle it out of the country and could possibly be busted. Either way it cut it, I realized it wasn't that good either way. Anyhow, after that experience, I went to go ask a local carpet dealer that had befriended me, (just in case I wanted to buy a carpet, he was also my hostel owner). Anyhow, when I showed him the rare coins, he told me they sell them for next to nothing in all the tourist shops and I'd been had. As an end to that story, I think shortly thereafter while I did of course believe him, I didn't even want to keep them in my possession as a reminder, so I promptly threw them into some field. Also in the back of my mind I was thinking if they were actually real then I wouldn't want to be busted smuggling stolen artifacts, even though I'd given up on that thought as well. Either way, it just wasn't good to have mainly because no one wants a memory of when they'd been had.
The other thing I wanted to mention as well about Turkey is the enormous amounts of carpet dealers. Incidently, there was also ALOT of counterfetting going on around these as well. I had absolutely no intention of buying any carpets, but the shops were just about everywhere you could imagine, and every tourist/traveler friend I met seemed to want to at least look at them, so I found myself in and out of them constantly as well. One thing I found out was that a carpet should never be able to burn by fire or something like that. If a flame burned it, it was synthetic, and a real carpet was made of some other kind of material. Anyhow, I heard a ton of stories of all this stuff. One additional note, I also wandered into some skydiving contest near Ephesus. There was one American who had been a professional skydiver of some kind, went into the carpet dealer shop, and was going to buy just about every thing you could imagine for everyone he knew. At this point, I realized that that is why as an American I get so much extra attention at times. Actually, in all my travels, this is really the only time I ever saw this happen, really I almost never meet any Americans at all. But it was interesting to experience this phenemenom or stereotype at least once in my lifetime throughout all of the places I've been. So now I know its not complete 100% stereotpyes.
The other thing I did see, by the way, is an amazing skydiving air shows. As a white person who at the time had long hair and a goatee, I looked just crazy enough to be a skydiver, most assuming perhaps on a European team. So I was pretty much given free reign to wander in and out of tents and just hangout. I took my camera and got some great shots. Of course no one but the skydivers were allowed back there, but being white I was able to blend in extremely easy and basically had free access to go anywhere. At one point I went to talk to a few of the guys on the American team. The biggest observation I made at the skydiving show is that skydrivers are absolutely out of their heads in every conceivable way, generally in a good way. There were a number of pretty freaky guys. One of the most memorable was a short-haired dyed-blond I think American guy who drove some extremely fast motorcyle with two very sexy girls on his back racing to basically nowhere. Anyhow, he definetely had an aura of definite and extreme living-on-the-edge in every conceivable way.. and the professional skydiver went pretty much right in line with his entire image. Quite impressive to not only see the skydivers themselves but the personalities too.
Eventually I made my way back to Istanbul though. An odd thing happened on the bus. There was a very poor Turkish guy and his pregnant wife on the bus as well. Unfortunately he happened to be sitting right behind me and it was a very long bus ride - something like 6 or 7 hours I don't really recall. Shortly within the beginning of the bus ride he jabbed me a few times in the elbow, and as I turned around he kept putting his hand out and projecting that he was hungry and would I give him money. I politely said 'no' but he was pretty relentless and continously did this over and over to me at various times throughout the very long bus trip. I kept wondering how he even got on the bus with his family if he was going to beg for a $1 the entire way. The other aspect was I was dirt poor and desparate to start working in Instanbul as I'd been running on credit cards at this point. Plus after being conned by the ancient coins, I was extremely hurting financially as it was. Anyhow, it was a pretty big annoyance at the time.
For whatever reason, once I was back to Istanbul, and I don't know if was being conned or the guy on the bus, but I pretty much had felt I had enough of Turkey at that moment. I came up to a few conclusions actually. While I was definetely interested in Turkey, I felt at some point it had some of the things that I didn't like about Korea, for one, it was generally quite conservative in nature. The other thing was that the Turkish language was much like the Korean language in that it wouldn't really be that useful to me in the future. So when I arrived back in Istanbul, just about ready to move into my new apartment and start at my new school, I was trying to make a decision. Basically, that decision was to do something else that I had dreamed about for a long time, but had been just thinking it would happen someday in the far off future when I had more experience and more money. I began to think that I'd just to what I had really always wanted to do, which was to teach in Santiago, Chile. Throughout my life, I had always dreamed of Nepal and Chile as being my two most ultimate destinations in my life. About a year ago I had made it to Nepal and it wasn't as great as I had hoped, but I hadn't yet been to Chile, and I had the greatest hope for it. I had also had one teacher in Korea tell me that someday Chile would be the next great teaching English destination, and so somehow that had always stuck in my head. The other reason I began to seriously think about Chile at this point in time was that at least Spanish was something that I had always really wanted to learn. So, while thinking greatly about it, extremely concerned about my extremely dwindling finances - I had been using credit cards just to live at this point. I made the decision to go into a travel agency, buy a ticket to Santiago (through Amsterdam) and try out this dream. Also, Turkey had never really been a dream, although I did like it, it was more of an immediate decision to go to after not quite knowing what to do after Budapest. Anyhow, first it would be three days in Amsterdam before this sudden realization of a long ago dream to come true would happen.
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