I went wandering
just trying to discover
how things used to be.
In Berlin I crossed
over – East to West - and through
to the other side.
Spanish countryside
whirred past like watercolor;
my unfocused eyes.
Czech fields - white and black;
rabbit runs to safety where
the sky meets the trees.
Too used to things
I discover trying won’t
Ease the wandering.
Life has been busy but happy as of late. Days run against days and sometimes weeks disappear into thin air.
I feel as though I am (finally) settling in to Istanbul. I started my Turkish class – replete with hilarious interludes from our instructor – “Come on guys! I’m so dyslexic! If I write it backwards you have to tell me, yes?” And so I spend each Monday and Wednesday night with 3 other foreigners babbling like 2-year-olds as he kindly translates our mindless chatter into meaningful sentences such as “Tonight do not buy milk, buy beer!”
I have also started practicing with a choir that is challenging, fulfilling and slightly frightening in its challenge level (no piano, all acapella). Right now, we’re working on a set of 6 short pieces with 6-part harmony (and plenty of lovely dissonance) that are set to the words of Omer Hayyam, an 11th century poet, mathematician, astronomer and fabled Sufi mystic.
Every day there are myriad minor victories in my life.
These include buying a bagel with soft cheese instead of cream cheese, understanding the curse words my students use in class (so that I can use their behavior against them later when they are least expecting it), ordering a basic doner kebab from the neighborhood guy without having to grunt like a cave woman to communicate and telling the taxi driver who is trying to rip me off that he is wrong (without sounding like the teacher in the Peanuts cartoon: “wahwahwahwahwah…. Wah wah…. WAH!)
Also, the days have started getting longer and somewhere in the back of my reptilian mind Shakespeare is urging me to get out there and gather my metaphorical rosebuds. Life is short, the bard whispers in my ear. Git goin’!
I’m quite sure the flowers will begin their blooming sometime in the next few weeks. That said, in the meantime I will continue my babbling, Sufi singing and relentless coughing – no, the hack is not yet gone.
Just before this present blossoming began, I went on a trip. 14 days, 5 different friends, 4 countries, 4 flights, 3 buses, 2 trains and a few very long moving walkways.
Over the course of my two-week winter break I visited friends in Berlin, Germany, Salamanca, Spain and Brno, in the Czech Republic, and was joined by friends from Istanbul in both Germany and Spain.
The first stop was Germany. Joined by my room mate, Sian, who describes Berlin as her “spiritual home”, we caught a late-night flight to Berlin, were picked up by my German friend Anne, whom I hadn’t seen in 12 years (!? We both look exactly the same, of course), and shuttled immediately to a bar near Oranienburger Strasse in East Berlin. After a few requisite German beers (ah, sweet nectar of the gods) and enough inhalation of Gauloises smoke to kill a small pony we headed back to her place to fall into a deep-on-vacation-sleep.
Anne’s house is an intriguing product of the post-wall-fall era in Berlin. After the wall went kablat, squatters moved in to her place in East Berlin and lived with no indoor heating, crappy plumbing and generally minimal frills until laws were passed which helped them to rehab the house, find buyers and set up a housing community, which shares a communal kitchen but has parceled out living quarters.
This social(ist) way of living pervades the heavily artistic and communal feeling in Berlin. We went to vegan breakfast buffets where the rule was “pay what you can,” and no one seemed to have a job, but everyone was a working on a project.
After living in Istanbul for nearly six months, Berlin seemed empty. The first night as we drove along the streets, I wondered at both the silence and the lack of stress. It felt almost like the Midwest suburbs on a school night.
Never the less, as we headed out on the town it was clear that something was happening, the music was pumping and the Turkish kebabs were hot and ready for any requisite late night craving.
Indeed, in Berlin I met the first Turks I’d ever met outside Turkey (with the exception of my friend Baris from high school). Originally recruited through a bilateral agreement between Turkey and Germany in the 1960’s to establish a guest worker program, Turks now comprise almost 30% of all foreigners in Germany.
On any flight in to Berlin, one will meet innumerable Turks traveling to Germany to see friends, family or to pursue a brighter future.
The population of which being mostly from the lower income classes, I was struck by how much the situation resembles that of immigrants who come from Latin America to the U.S. Indeed, these are not, for the most part, the Turks who populate the elite shopping malls and my classrooms, just as the people crossing the border from our sister countries are not the classes that live “up on the hill” in Mexico city, but the ones who live beneath the hill, or in the countryside, and are tired of those up on the hill. They are, indubitably, the more religious and less secular brethren of the folks I have made friends with during my time in Istanbul.
Over the next few days, Sian, Anne and I wandered around, crossing from East to West Berlin and visiting such landmarks as the Brandenburg gate, weekend flea markets, the Jewish memorial and Brecht’s theater, which was, I must say, so very Brechtian. All this was no small feat, considering that the temperature was -15 C (5 F).
And, in one last act of brain freeze, I, the “seasoned traveler” managed to get myself to the WRONG airport just 45 minutes before my scheduled flight left for Spain, meaning that I got not only a 6-hour salad bar break, but also a new ticket to Madrid. Nothing that ridiculous amounts of hard-earned savings won’t fix, I always say.
If Berlin was a woman with both hands frozen in the ice, Salamanca was a light-jacketed chap on siesta.
I hadn’t realized, I must admit, how much lack of language affects ones life. Being in Spain, I was reminded that (!?) I do actually speak another language, in which I am conversant and do not wander around mumbling like a small angry child.
I met up with my friend Glory (with whom I teach in Turkey) and Eli, a friend from Cincinnati, and as we three traveled through the countryside, I ordered (politely), asked menial (and yet somehow meaningful) questions, and generally enjoyed the naps, tapas, castles ruins, factory villages specializing in hocks of ham, walled medieval towns and beautiful countryside.
Our last night, just as the full moon in Leo (my August sign) rose in the Madrid sky, Glory and I arrived in Madrid and spent a lovely evening staying near the Sol (Sun) metro stop, with the palace, tapas, and home-brewed beer to keep us company. And the next day, after wandering around El Prado, I headed for my flight to Vienna.
Upon boarding the flight to Vienna, I found that it was delightfully empty and spread out across a few seats. However, after arrival in Palma de Malorca (a Spanish tourist town) a group of what seemed to be drunken Austrian truck drivers piled on to the flight and I spent the remainder of the intriguing (albeit) short flight waving away the smell of gastronomically revisited stale beer breath.
I cannot say much about Vienna, except that I stayed in a nice hostel and kept the majority of my roommates awake coughing most of the night. Luckily they were Japanese and far too polite to ever say anything to my face about it.
I seriously considered coming back to Istanbul, and yet the next morning, wrapped in the comforts of Turkish food – salty yogurt drink and lentil soup – from the restaurant around the corner – I decided to soldier on north to the Czech Republic.
Traveling north the next morning via train from Vienna towards Brno where my friend Brooke lives, we crossed frozen rivers, rabbits running across snow-covered flat fields and smoke stacks puffing merrily away in the afternoon freeze.
The Czech Republic was a world in white and black with trees punctuating the background.
Little towns with tiny, squat, yellow, green and orange houses stuck up from under the snow and puffing chimneystacks blurted out muffled smoke notes.
A man bundled up against the wind; head down, walking across his fields and silent bee hives lay dormant, frozen into mounds of snow. In each tree, mistletoe hung clustered together for warmth and swans congregated in a hole in a frozen pond. In backyards, outdoor brick ovens squatted in tiny backyards, waiting for the thaw.
As if waving to me, cross-country skiers lifted their arms in harmony, gliding along the river edges of one-steeple towns.
We crossed barren vineyards and goats eating in yards. And, finally, came to Brno, where my friend Brooke stood waiting at the station.
After a few days recovery, we decided that it was high time for a trip to Prague – bright lights, big city – and hopped ourselves a 3-hour-bus to town. Once there, we explored churches, castles, one infamous clock tower and one hidden vegetarian restaurant (an anomaly in the Czech – land of ribs and beer).
We even made it to a presentation by my friends – Thavry and Monkol (both of whom I worked with Cambodia). Both of them received scholarships to leave Cambodia and study near Prague with a local university. It brought tears of pride to my eyes as I listened to them present about Cambodia and their culture, so far from home.
After getting our full of smoky bars, real beer and bohemia (can one ever REALLY get enough of these things – minus the smoky bar part – bleck) we headed back to Brno via Kutna Hora, a small town southeast of Prague.
Kutna Hora is home to not only a beautiful cathedral, but also an ostuary, consisting of the bones of approximately 40,000 to 70,000 people, compiled during the 19th century in an artistic way by a local woodcarver, who created, among other works of “human” art, a chandelier that consists of every bone contained in the human body.
After bearing witness to such an artistic and humbling site, there was nothing left to do but eat potato pancakes, drink beer and wait for our communist-era train to shuffle in to the station.
Brooke and I headed back to Brno, a few more days relaxation and one last train southward (for me) back over my frozen fields in to Vienna. One last connecting flight through Germany, one last bus from the Asian side of Istanbul to the European side and one last ornery taxi ride from Taksim to my apartment and I was back. At 4 a.m., two weeks after leaving my apartment, I once again fell, deflated, into my bed.
Happy to be home and tired after my adventures, the last 3 weeks have settled themselves into a pattern that I enjoy.
Here I continue, to grow my hair long, and wait for life, to take me in her arms.
