Soulja Sojourns: Istanbul Sojourn, Home to Jordan

As the plane landed on Jordanian soil, I was struck by the difference in my emotions from the last time I experienced such a touch down. I lacked the jittery expectancy of my beginnings in Jordan, but I had gained this incredible sense of homecoming, of familial fondness for the surge of taxi drivers outside the airport all shouting and asking if we needed a ride, letting "King's Academy" roll around on their tongues several times just to hear the sound of it, talking wildly amongst themselves and then a good five minutes later finally deciding upon the taxi driver who would deliver us to our destination, the initial taxi driver we'd asked. I actually missed the ridiculous inefficiency! I am glad to be back.

I still feel inordinately lucky to be able to travel to places like Istanbul for vacationing. I wasn't able to continue updating the blog during the trip because my computer battery went dead, and the wall outlets were non-compatible with either a Jordanian or a US plug. So now I have an overload of pictures to share, and hopefully I'll remember details about what we did each day. On Sunday, the third day, we took a ferry out across the bay to a section of Istanbul called Kadikoy and spent the day there walking around and sitting at various cafes and restaurants with the staple of Turkish tea at each stop. Kadikoy is right on the water, a port, and also much quieter and more relaxed than Istanbul which made for a nice change of pace.

First we stopped in a mosque and I got pooped on by a pigeon. Since I was in a mosque and pigeons are considered holy to Muslims, I believe it was a sign of very divine good luck. Yep.

The standard Turkish tea served EVERYWHERE. Delicious.

I saw many vendors selling tickets to play the following game: they'd place three cans in a triangle, two cans in back just a little bit wider than the width of the ball and one can in front. I watched countless people attempt to knock down all three balls with one kick and it's surprisingly much more difficult than it looks. Hence, the business plan, I guess.

On Monday, I wasn't feeling well in the morning. I hadn't realized how sterile the desert is until encountering the much dirtier and more populated Istanbul, but it's the first time I've been sick since I crossed the Atlantic. I rested and read that morning but ventured out for food at some point during the day. As I was walking along by myself in a region of the city I wasn't yet familiar with, I stumbled upon what looked like a huge protest. I'd never seen so many people before. I couldn't understand what they were saying but they were shouting one phrase in unison and there were men with machine guns monitoring the situation. I was certainly nervous, and immediately walked in the opposite direction as I'd been instructed to do by Jordanians. Later, while talking to an Australian girl at the hostel who'd asked one of the policemen about the "protest," she informed me that the crowd had congregated due to the filming of a Ben Affleck film in Istanbul. Figures! Goes to show I shouldn't jump to stereotype-based assumptions every time I see a crowd of people in a country near the Middle East.

The next day, Tuesday, we walked around some of the poorer sections of Istanbul as well as some of the spice markets and spent the evenings scoping out the club and bar scene in Istanbul, which was lively and full of Turkish dancing and music. Wednesday was perhaps my favorite day, which we spent at a Turkish bath and then at Hagia Sofia. The Turkish bath was comical and wonderful and bizarre; outside the bathes, sat a very young woman missing her front teeth and surrounded by baby kittens. She welcomed us inside with the typical "Come in, Lady," (everyone in Turkey refers to women they don't know as "Lady." I think they think it is polite like "Ma'am," but it gets sort of inconspicuously irksome after a little while.) We're hustled inside and commanded around with one-word phrases by several brusque Turkishmen and women, mostly commands, in English. In the dressing room we're given tablecloth-like coverings and I wear huge pink plastic shoes (5 sizes too big). Then, Katie and I are led to the women's wing and Darion and John to the men's wing of the bath. Katie and I are led through tunnels of tile and stone to a bathing room with three fountains and a stone-domed ceiling with holes in the top letting in blue and yellow light. One large tile on the wall has the elegant patterns of red, turquoise and royal blue that are common in the city and decorate the old Ottoman palace. Here we are handed pink and purple plastic containers and told to "Pour" and then are left alone. For about 30 minutes we are left there pouring hot water on ourselves and it's soothing and cleansing though I wonder if we've been forgotten. Finally, a woman leads me alone out of the domed room and into another tiled room with just a slab of marble in the center. She orders me quite scornfully to remove my bra and underwear as if appalled I would appear in her presence in anything more than nothing. She is old and beautiful and rough and quite funny in her aggressive motherlyness. She knew the following words in English, "Turn," "Relax," and "Lay Down," and she used them all abruptly and defiantly, although I wasn't put off by it. The Turkish bath was therapeutic though incredibly rough and businesslike; I was somewhat fearful for my more sensitive areas although I loved getting my hair washed as well as the leg and arm massage. She had this very interesting technique of swinging a white T-shirt filled with soap so that it blew up like a balloon and then swinging it all over my body. After the massage/bathing, we are given another dry tablecloth and some Turkish tea.

Hagia Sofia, a former Orthodox Christian basilica, later a mosque, and now a museum, was one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. I was captivated by the mixture of Christian and Muslim symbols in one place, but I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, though, of course, they can never do full justice. When I finished looking around inside, I sat on the back steps of the Hagia Sofia and people-watched. I saw a woman sitting beside me in full burqa and I couldn't even see her eyes because she was wearing Ray Bans with red rims. She was playing on her iPhone. She finally looked up and saw me staring and smiled at me. I could tell she smiled by the way the fabric moved, as if her mouth was curving upward underneath the black cloth.

On Thursday, we went to the Modern art museum in Istanbul which was one of the coolest art museums I've ever seen. There's no way to communicate how original and interactive and experimental it was but I took pictures specifically here and there I'll send along via emails. The art was set up in this cool old warehouse with tin sheets as room dividers. On the last day, we went shopping in the Grand Bazaar, though I was simply overwhelmed by the maze-like shops and persistent shop-owners. I spent much of my time fielding questions about my nationality from curious shop-owners. It was probably the hat I was wearing, but many thought I was French. I didn't buy anything, but I did get a beautiful free necklace from one young man who said his father told him "Never to let a beautiful woman leave without a gift." How many times a day he pulls that line, I do not know, but I appreciated the compliment and the gift of a necklace strung with the Turkish evil eye to ward off evil and bad luck.