Istanbul!

We made it! The ash cloud cleared enough, and our flight left Halifax YHZ late on Wednesday night as scheduled, no cancellation, no delay, no derailing of our schedule. We consider ourselves to be very lucky, as we landed at Heathrow, spent a few hours in the city, boarded our BA flight to Istanbul, and made it!

There were odd glitches of course, like no food on the flight to Istanbul except for orange juice, wine, and one cookie because they said Heathrow’s catering had been shut down and wasn’t running properly yet, but neglected to tell us before we boarded, promised us a voucher when we landed (we did wonder what we would do with a voucher in Istanbul), and gave us a good Turkish sandwich and a drink instead when we landed. But once we cleared the visa line and passport control and picked up our bags it was smooth sailing on the Havas shuttle to Taksim and a happy taxi ride with a happy taksici who chatted about how spring was even more beautiful over on the Asian side, all the way to the studio and a happy welcome from Gul.

This morning I looked out at Dereboyu Caddesi and thought, Here we are again, in our other home! It had struck both of us that way as soon as we boarded the Havas and it pulled out into the traffic and down onto the sahilyolu that we were back in the place we knew so well, and it felt so familiar and so welcoming. I spoke on the phone to my friend A. about this feeling that we were in some sense returning “home”, and she simply said, “It is addictive, isn’t it?”

The question, What makes Istanbul so addictive, is a complex one, and probably one that I don’t really ever want to answer. Walking down Dereboyu to Kullankoglu bakery and patisserie in the next block was just a matter of being there again as if no time had passed. The small guy who serves up sweets in the front of the bakery was really surprised when I told him it was a year since I had last seen him and that we had just returned from Canada. “Cok zaman,” he said, so much time, but it seemed to me that the time away from here was different from the time here, that I could be away for a year and find myself back, picking up conversations and relationships as if no time at all had passed.

Last year when we came back here, I called it our second life. Now I think of it as our other life; there is the life, so full and engaged back in Canada, and there is this life that we are so lucky to be able to step back into, to have people we love who welcome us back here like family, to taste the great kuzu sis and esme salata from Sisko (where K says they run a good grill – and they do!), to ride on the sparkling Bosphorus with dear friends, to soak in the hot pool at Yalova-Termal and then eat fish soup, kalamar, and shrimp salad down on the ferry wharf, to wake up in the studio to the sounds of the street, to watch the coloured lights changing on the Bosphorus bridge, to drink Turkish coffee and acik cay, to buy a new student notebook for this year’s journal from the courtly old man in his black suit with a red sale sticker stuck between his shoulders where he couldn’t see it, and to see two girls with chains of tiny daisies in their hair to celebrate cemre of the spring.

If you have not been here, this may not resonate with you as it does with me, and you may have to just humour me for my sentiment about this place and these people, but like A. told me, this place is addictive, and you do need a hit of it every now and again. Or, I should say, I do!