Our flight from London to Istanbul took a little over three hours on a sparce British Airways plane, half empty on a wintery January Saturday, without entertainment unless you allow for the turbulence that shook the plane alarmingly at times, but we will survive all this as we are taking the slow road to Australia this January: short flights, what you might describe a “luxury” hotels, car services and interesting stop overs. Istanbul, the first of those, is a strategic city, one that has been regarded for a very long time as being the meeting point of Eastern and Western culture, although today it might be more accurate to say it is a place of relative peace with conflict all around; to the north across the Black Sea lies Ukraine, to its south Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Israel. Despite this, and the fact that there are many refugees, mercenaries and probably spies from wars nearby, it feels a safe and prosperous place, indifferent even to its geographic position and that is because it has been this way for centuries, more than anything you come to realize it is a city of pragmatism, acceptance and resilience.
I approached it with good intentions and only a school boys knowledge of its history and left feeling even more helpless in grasping it complexity. Months ago I had bought a book by Turkeys best known contemporary novelist, Orhan Pamuk, and a recently written history of Istanbul both of which remain unfinished, there was something too emotionally dense, complicated and claustrophobic about them both which didn’t align with my frame of mind at the time. Yet I was looking for more than a practical stop over on route to Dubai which I can’t fully articulate, a common problem for many westerners in Muslim countries, which Edward Said, another much quoted intellectual who flies above my head, has made it his life’s work to explain. I quickly came to realize that I had ridiculously high expectations when visiting a country like Turkey and a City like Istanbul and so was destined for disappointment.
There are several ways to discover a city, my favored one is to get lost, stumble across a place full of locals, gain first hand a perspective of its size and temperament, assess its architecture and the physiognomy of its people where history is truly written, wander without a goal through side streets and alleys wondering belatedly if they are dangerous or not. And as we only have effectively two days we decided to spend our first in this way close to our hotel and the second more focused on the historical (and tourist) sights in the old one across the Bosphorous which divides the city but which was once, and presumably still is, its life blood.
We tackled the new city on foot on a cold, grey late Sunday morning and found our neighborhood to be the typical collision of wealthy clothing stores and internationally known coffee shops which improbably to strive and prosper. The area closest to our hotel is apparently the new “hot spot” and early in the day it felt drab, unpopulated but later that evening at 10.45 PM we had finished our drinks and walked out to streets that were full of people, sitting on sidewalk cafes drinking tea and eating sweet cakes which left me thinking this is what a city should be; a meeting place, a magnet for different communities, an arena to for the locals to flirt and to be seen.
Our trip to the old city was to see there of the most visited sites; the Blue Mosque, the Basilica Cistern and the Hagia Sofia Mosque. The most impressive was the Basilica which was not a site of worship but an underground cistern to supply filtrated water and at one time was surrounded by greenery. It was built in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justin, or more accurately by 7000 slaves, on the site of existing water infrastructure that goes back several years earlier by the Romans. Its beauty couldn’t be tempered even by the tedium of our guide, an relentless source of uninteresting data and facts, which was exhausting and paradoxically left me wanting to know less, rather than more, about the site due to its governmental or institutional bias (or lack of one) a bland monologue which would certainly be approved by anyone of authority.
On our final day we visited the Museum of Innocence, a house full of ephemera associated with Orhan Pamuk and his novel of the same name. It was a cleverly installed set of rooms which owed a lot to twentieth century artists like Hans Bellmar, Sophie Calle, Joseph Cornel and Christian Boltanski and mostly consisted of found objects presented in cabinets which were supplemented by the contemporary addition of video screens. The most interesting part of the project in my view was the modest manifesto at its entry where he speaks of museums having the air of government office about them and that his realization is that museums can speak to individuals like novels. He states that he is against these precious monumental institutions being used as blueprints for future museums. Museums, in his view, should explore and uncover the universe and humanity of the new and modern man emerging from increasingly wealthy non western nations and that the aim of big, state sponsored museums is to represent the government. It neatly summed up my view about travel; we are steered towards the monumental sites and fear that we are missing out on key landmarks and institutions and by doing this we miss the meaning of place itself.
Your view of a city is also skewed by the place or places you come from and this had an impact on my opinion of Istanbul. Three weeks before we had been in the Caribbean Island of Bequai, a week later the brassy cities of Philadelphia and New York, then the week before we travelled to Istanbul we were in the UK; Marlow, Bath, the Cotswold town of Stroud and London. The UK had enjoyed typical weather for this winter month and it felt like we were under a dome of grey sky, almost as if we were within a cloud rather than under one, for the first four days saw no sign of sunshine and that opacity made the colors of the landscape even more damp and saturated leaving a shadowless, almost magical, spectrum of dense browns, grays and greens. It may sound depressing, to be in place where the day isn’t defined by the sun, but for me the opposite was true and I rejoiced in the absolute silence walking along the Thames and greeted a fellow walker un-ironically with “beautiful day!” and received back keen agreement.
We flew from Istanbul to Dubai, a flight as long as a Marin Scorsese movie, one of my goals of this trip, a joke however that is a little outworn already. The fasciation with the city comes from it giving us so obviously a view of the future as it has started almost from zero. We had the great fortune of having a friend living here, a person in the fashion world, who guided us to a lovely Arabian cafe reminding us of the elegance of middle eastern cuisine with its honeys, mint and halumi, then a boat ride with the local workers to the gold market at night under a cresent moon which reflected sensuously in the still waters.
Later that night we were taken through a secret door in a hotel to a large beautifully dark room where four dancers dressed as a Aztec warriors (if pre Colombian women had access to underwear and fishnet stockings) who entertained us by striking poses with the agonizing backdrop of thumping noise coming from the DJ. It was impossible to converse in such circumstances so we exchanged enthusiastic smiles across the table and I tried not to look at my watch too obviously although I was relieved to be out of there into the car park and watch our friend get into her BMW sports car and drive out fearlessly into Dubia’s midnight traffic. The next day we went to an arts foundation but found that the restaurant had extraordinary food so we settled in and enjoyed the middle eastern cuisine again before, a little too shamelessly, deciding to skip the museum itself, calling an Uber and back to the hotel where we watched movies and walked around the marina. Overall there was something hard to grasp on a first visit to Dubai despite the drama of the skyline, with a few ambitious skyscrapers defining it tucked amongst the many generic new buildings, it felt very much like Miami; a place growing too rapidly in an environmentally hazardous location, it needs more time than a casual stopover like this can provide.
A few days later we were happy to be on a plane to Bangkok, a trip of a little under six hours, arriving at night. Our hotel had a view across the city and again we were faced with the inevitable westernization and urbanization of the world, with unexceptional skyscrapers and aggressively developed freeways to meet the constant demand for car traffic. We had a stroke of good luck with the news via friend that the contempory artist Sam Samore was in town and willing to show us around a little. We were joined by one of his friends, an artist from Romania, Alana Teodorescu who arrived side saddle on the back of a motor scooter – the favored and quickest way to traverse the city – who had a mission to find a pop up couture show in one of the buildings nearby. Sam knew the area well so we set out to first get a coffee and then as we wandered around the undeveloped pocket of low rise and older buildings he started jotting down the “for rent” signs as this is the best way to discover new studio’s. It had the feeling of SoHo or Shoreditch in the late 1980’s early 1990’s – already starting gentrification but in a positive way, with young entrepreneurs and artists working together to make interesting spaces. As the afternoon wore on we had cocktails in what at first seemed a lovely, light filled former hospital, which now had an abundance of taxidermy, midcentury industrial light fixtures and candles that on closer inspection turned out to be electronic and rechargeable. Despite the elegance of the low lite room I could help accept that we could be almost anywhere in the world with this level of elevated styling and the more I noticed this added dimension of fakery I couldn’t help but feel a little offended by its cunning, almost as if these objects crated over from the West were in a conspiracy against me, to spoil the authenticity of my experience. All around there were similar new places to eat, a Spanish restaurant serving Tapas populated entirely by Europeans who, like ourselves, are happy to pay international prices and comfortable with the ambiguity of it all..
The following day was wasted on a trip to the (highly recommended on-line) weekend market, a long and joyless drive to a place where there was nothing we wanted to buy. There is an over abundance of “things”, everything we can get in the west but at a fraction of the cost, and it is overwhelming to be in the midst of such consumerism even though at night when everyone is out and driving on their scooters and eating in the open air restaurant’s its exhilarating to be within the vortex of such vitality. Our final day in Bangkok was at the Jim Thompson house a silk weaving entrepreneur who died, or rather disappeared, in mysterious circumstances in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands. His house is a group of traditional structures all painted uniformly a deep red which contrasts with the greenery all around. His collection of Asian artifacts was enviable and included antique prints, Budda’s and various china objects in display cases and it was impossible to ignore his appreciation for the craftsmanship, aesthetic and visual beauty of these local antiquities.
This trip to Bangkok was both a starting and ending point as up until this destination we had existed in a comfortable pre-booked set of flights and hotels and in some ways traveling like this protects us from places, or rather lets us place a foot tentatively into them without any serious commitment. As you as you arrive in Thailand you are struck by the numbers of Western tourists, many of them much younger than ourselves and carrying large back backs living cheaply, and I recalled a conversationinthe Hamptons with an elderly women who had frequently scuba dived across Asia fifty years ago saying that it is all now ruined. At the time my first instinct was to think that it was simply less attractive for westerners wanting to observe the combination of natural beauty, architectural monuments, a very different society from our own and sadly poverty of the locals themselves. (On the other hand it has brought them hygiene, comfort, medical services and an opportunity to improve the quality of their lives). I remember being annoyed at her comment at the time which had a colonal perspective but now I have been back to Asia I tend to agree with her for different reasons, it has been damaged by the lack of central planning; the traffic jams, the ugly high rises, the USA branded junk food and thanks to cheap airlines, the westerners (like ourselves) who dominate the restaurants and tourist sites.
jnmanson 