Beautifully Maddening

Note: Fe Bongolan is currently in Istanbul, Turkey for the International Body Music Festival, which she wrote about for Planet Waves last year. She sent this postcard on Thursday. — Amanda

Rain is likely today. Lately, weather in Istanbul reminds me of crisp bright fall days in San Francisco. I’ve been here five days though I forget what day it is.

It may be, finally, a good day to visit the mosques and the Grand Bazaar. Schedule, jet lag and the already insane all night sessions the musicians have with each other lends itself to you losing, or resigning yourself to not having, an actual schedule with goals and plans. How can you? It’s Istanbul.

The words Maddeningly and Beautiful are often used together exactly in that order. But in Istanbul, I think Beautifully Maddening is more in order. To get anywhere in the city, you have to deal with navigating the many, many hills, the narrow streets, the foot traffic in the way if you’re in a taxi, or the taxis gently beeping so you move out of their way while on your foot path. Traffic jams are to be expected. A vehicle break down near the boulevard can cripple downtown traffic by an hour.

You need to plan for contingencies always.

Imagine then what it’s like to cater for an event when every last minute counts, and after the tremendous pressure of making sure each dish is cooked right and tastes right, you have to deal with transporting dishes a mile and a half downtown in a cab at rush hour. There are several definitions of insanity knitted into that equation.

The city itself is built in whorls of streets that make the city a bit of a labyrinth. San Francisco — with it’s ordered numbered avenues ticking off east to west to the beach and numbered streets guiding you north to south — was planned by the army after the city was destroyed 1906. Istanbul was built, layer upon layer, by the Ottomans, the Italians and after a few centuries, modernity itself. But like everyone and everything else, the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries are yet just another layer on an already complex place to which Western civilization owes it’s structure.

I have been having my most fun in the Pazari, of course. That’s where you buy your food. There are convenience stores nearby, but the markets have immense charm, and the produce here is spectacular. Figs the size of your fist. Yogurt is made fresh that day. My bacterial flora are plentiful and I haven’t had a bad turista day ever. I feel healthy here. More about food in a later post

Anywhere you go, there will be at least one hill to walk up. My legs feel incredibly strong and I am winded for Istanbul. Even with that, with the thought that you have to take a ten minute trek up a 45-degree grade to get a cup of coffee, you have to brace yourself. Inshallah, which I have been saying a lot, is your mantra, praying that you won’t croak carrying your groceries back home.

The Turkish people are very patient. Especially in insanity-producing traffic jams. People will get out of their cars to help the car that’s in trouble up ahead. I think about American bouts with road rage and selfishness, speeding by cars in trouble on the shoulder. Honking angrily if you go below speed limit in your lane. I feel embarrassed by our aggressiveness.

I know I am weaving a romantic first impression. There are skirmishes with Syria at the southern border. Yesterday, Prime Minister Erdogan reported in a speech that a plane was captured over Turkish airspace en route to Damascus, adding that Russian-made weapons-related equipment was found on board. There is no direct talk of war, at least not yet — it’s a political non-starter in Turkey, which is starting to reap the benefits of EU membership. People here in Istanbul, and everywhere else for that matter, have no stomach for war. My Turkish friends smell a rat, thinking this is yet another act of political theater — purpose yet unclear — involving Russia, China and NATO, which for all intents, means us as well.

The people here are big hearted, serious, studious and tolerant of the many differences that built this place up over the centuries. The city is more than an education of the mind. It is one of the heart and the senses. The more we share art music, and food, the more we become the same, whether under skylines with skyscrapers or minarets.

To me, being here is like opening up a vast encyclopedia of information, cultural and emotional, that makes me excited to learn more as I walk out the door to explore. Even as I stubbornly struggle with their language, I know enough to ask for help as I clumsily move my way through communicating my needs.

Like the lesson of yesterday’s traffic jam, there is something about helping someone who’s in trouble move, so that everyone else can move forward as well. We could use a lot more of that in the States. I think we could also use a few millennia of experience in civilization, like the Turks have under their belts, to teach us a few things about what it truly means to be kind, respectful, tolerant — civil — with one another. It’s time to go back to school.