I Guess I Should Start My Storytelling

Ciao Tutti!

I've put it off for too long now. Daunted by the impossibly humungous task of telling my Istanbul story with any semblance of conveying the incredibly transformative effect it had on me, I have continuously put off its telling. Maybe if I use big enough words and contrived enough sentences I can make up for it.

Recently I finished my travel log, embarrassed that it took nearly 2 months to finish the travel log for a 1-week trip. The good news is that it's finished. The bad news is that it's 105 pages long, so posting the entire thing on this blog with not only BORE THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS OUT OF YOU ALL, but probably crash the Internet in the process. I'm just kidding, of course. I know very well that four score and 25 pages isn't enough to crash the Internet. Either way, I do want to type up what I wrote so that it can have some permanence in case of a fire or something like that, do my love of Istanbul and its wonderfully warm people can continue in some shape or form, and as I read I will select my favorite stories and put them on this blog for you all.

Happy?

Sorry there are no pictures. I am working on my mom's computer right now, so no pictures yet. Refer to my first Istanbul blog for those, okay? I'm glad we have an understanding.

For those of you who hate reading introductions, start here

Whenever someone asks me about Istanbul, I like to tell this story. I like to tell this story because I want to demonstrate the full extent of how warm and welcoming the now-good friends I met in Istanbul were, even though we had never met each other except through a few force-fed emails written with our professors looking over our shoulders ("Hi, we have a research paper to write and so do you. Can you speak English?"). Basically, we didn't know each other at all. And yet they were so unconditionally accepting and friendly to us, overflowingly so.

My friend from New York, Julia, was talking with our Turkish friend, Merve [MAR ve] outside a high school we had just visited. Julia is a girl who is always smiling and always has something nice to say, even when things are not so nice inside her head. So with this in mind, Julia noticed Merve's flowing purple scarf and said,

"Oh, Merve, that is a beautiful scarf!"

"Do you like it?" said Merve, holding one of the ends (I remember this so distinctly). "My mother made it for me."

"She did?" gasped Julia, who can also be a little dramatic at times. "It is so beautiful! She did a wonderful job."

Wide-eyed and sincerely, Merve asked, "Do you want to keep it?" She held one of the ends out.

It took Julia a few seconds to realize that she was serious. "Oh, no! I can't take that from you! Your mother made it for you!"

"Well," reasoned Merve. "My mother can make me another."

In the end Julia did not take the scarf, too kind a gift. But I like this story because it shows a kindness and a pure joy in seeing others happy. Merve would have rather seen her scarf with Julia and make her happy than around her own neck. There was no passive-aggressive desire in Julia's voice or eyes during the brief conversation, and there was no sense of Merve feeling pressured or feeling any regret for offering. It was nearly automatic to be nice.

There are other examples of this sort of gift-giving I could draw upon. I wanted to buy a single Turkish tea cup, but they only came in sets. After bantering with store owners in Turkish on my behalf, Gizem [Gi-zem] said that she would give me one of her old cups. "I have so many," she laughed. Once she bought me some special Turkish chocolates to taste, and had to repress her feeling of being offended when I offered to pay. She explained to me, "In Turkey you should never do that. Here we give gifts, and you should just say 'tesekkuler.'" I learned quickly.

I suppose before I go on I should explain what I was doing in Istanbul in the first place. Simply put, I was there to do research. And we actually did research. In fact, sight-seeing was unimportant to my experience there. I did see the major monuments (though we had no time to see the Archeology museum where Alexander the Great's tomb is and where the oldest surviving peace treaty is), but the hi-light was meeting and falling in love with the people. This was possible because NYU was paired up with a university in downtown Istanbul, Bahcesehir [BAH-che-she-hir] University. We were in contact with a psychology class there, and the students there, as well as our amazing tour guide Yasin, were our chaperones throughout our time in the city.

I should say now before I forget: In our group there were 20 girls and 8 boys. In their group there were 42 girls and 6 boys. So if you heard any rumors that I was a ladies man during the trip, they are absolutely true. That is, if being nice to people who happen to be mostly ladies = ladies man. It was impossible not to be! Give me a break!

Back to business.

Because we were there to study, we saw a lot of things that none of my readers will probably ever see. We were studying "Perceptions of Islam," especially pertaining to education, so we visited a variety of schools, both public and private, throughout the city. We also attended lectures at the university to learn about psychological and migrational issues, especially with regards to young children and adolescents. Lectures were all in English at Bahcesehir, and all the students were required to know English to attend school, some having taken a year of English prep. Even the Turkish professors, like our NYU visiting professor contact and program orchestrator Dr. Sirin, lecture in English despite the fact that everyone speaks Turkish best.

I am getting side-tracked. I knew this would happen.

By the way, "Sirin" = "cute" in Turkish. Isn't that cute?

I'm getting side-tracked again.

The point is that we did a lot of studying, and by the time we got around to any free time at the end of the schedule when all the museums were closed. Besides, it was more interesting to spend time with my new friends on the streets of Taksim rather than doing that mechanical tourist thing I learned in Italy.

My topic for research was "Perceptions of Turkish Politics," which was a good choice because local elections were being held a week after we were to leave, so it was on everyone's mind. There were flags everywhere, and that is not an exaggeration. They were draped back and forth across the streets and around poles. Posters for the parties adorned every surface, and busses paraded down the streets with megaphones, blasting party propaganda or the party song. I was eager to talk with the Bahcesehir students about politics, and I was glad that they were equally as eager to teach me, lessening my fear of being politically incorrect in a foreign country. I quickly learned that most of my new friends were either unhappy with the political system as it is or foretelling another wave of depression in this new set of elections. The religious party, the AKP, has been in control since 2002, which was chaffing my friends considerably. However, the CHP, party of national hero and country founder Ataturk, is like the Democratic party when Bush was elected: more competent as a party but filled with inadequate leadership. In fact, the Turks would explain their repeated election of Erdogan as similar to our reelection of Bush. Just as often that I would ask, "Why did the country vote for the AKP if they are so horrible?" they would ask, "Why did you vote for Bush again?" Of course this is a blanket statement and doesn't apply to all, but many people I talked with were fairly outspoken. And they tended to be curious about American politics as well. Quite a few wanted to know what Obama thought about Turkey, and I found out that most of the country believed Obama to be a Muslim (It was a big deal that he wanted to eat pork when he gave a speech there in April).

I can go on and on, as you can see. Mandatory voting, European Union relations, religion in public, and other issues are all visible everywhere in Turkish society, so I'm sure I'll be able to cover it all, assuming I actually UPDATE THIS BLOG EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE!

Before I say arrivaderci, there is one more important element of our trip, which was the email correspondence, which was very important even with our professors looking over our shoulders. Actually, the professors were more important to the others; I had a free-flowing correspondence every day with my Turkish pen pal leading up to the trip. And I was paired up with one of the 6 boys, Can [JOHN, roughly], which ended up being a great thing. Into playing music, history, writing stories, writing music, and political musings, we hit it off right away. Of course it helped that he spoke English very well, and he proved to be the best English speaker of the Turkish group. It is really impossible to explain with any adequacy how much he individually reached out to me short of posting the 60 emails we sent back and forth before the trip. It was the kind of thing that could make someone believe in Internet dating; it really is possible to connect to someone so deeply, so quickly, without even knowing what the other person looks like or how to pronounce his name (I was still calling him that thing soup comes in).

On the first day that we met our Turkish ambassadors, Can, 6'3" with Jesus-style red hair, a thin beard, and the English word "trust" tattooed on his arm, invited me to Taksim for dinner and a drink. I knew what he looked like from some pictures he sent me, but it was quite different in person. He really stood out, and would prove to be the beacon to follow on a crowded street ("Follow the hair!" he would say). We were to meet in the hotel lobby at 6:00. I told Julia and my four wives (Oooh, another story for another time! Ladies man...) that they should come so we could get to know our Turkish partners better, or to know them for the first time. Our American group soon ballooned to 7 girls and me. I started to feel very guilty; what if Can had wanted to have dinner and drink with me alone? We were partners, after all. I asked my roommate and bandmate Jordan if I was making a mistake, and he said,

"No European guy would ever say no to a large group of American girls."

Just to be safe, I went to the lobby earlier than the other Americans to apologize (and to give Can an "I love New York" T-shirt I had brought for him), and there he was taking up the entire lobby with 8 Turkish girls. I had nothing to apologize about. Our giant group took to a restaurant, and jet-lag was no longer a factor. Only adrenaline and joy mattered, even that early on.

The next day Dr. Sirin asked me, "Did you see Can last night?"

I said, "Yes. Did he tell you?"

He said, "No, I could just tell."

-Sam goldsmith