Yesterday was a very long day. It started with a set of the cutest goddamn kittens I have ever seen wandering the halls of our class building. So small that we picked them up and delivered them to the other side of the hallway to prevent them from being stepped on by passersby. Heart-melting, like the Ark of the Covenant. After class and lunch, my class, along with the other advanced class, set out for a trip, or gezi, with our TA to the İş Bank Museum in Eminönü, the area by all the touristy shit. She works at İş Bank, and so was able to get us access. Photos were not allowed, but I will say that the museum was surprisingly cool. It was fully of photos, videos, and texts dating back to the early years of the Turkish Republic, and even before. A lot of texts were in Ottoman, and so we relied on our PhD friends to translate. There was one video exhibit that featured video interviews with REALLY old Turks about their memories of the bank when it first opened. One man was born in 1883 and interviewed in 1984. Do the math. He was 101 years old. The video had Turkish subtitles because his speech was so slurred, and the subtitles were almost unintelligible for me because he used so many Ottoman (read: Arabic and Farsi) words. It is crazy to think that he lived under the Ottoman Empire for 40 years before Turkey was founded. After that, we descended into what I liked to call "The Future."
For those among you who worry what the future will look like, it is a long white hallway onto whose walls is rapidly projected a stream of white numbers on a blue background. You walk this hallway for about 40 feet, and there, at its end, lies once more the past. "The Future" is apparently a real crowd pleaser. When we left the museum, we walked to the Galata Bridge (now in its fourth incarnation, after fires destroyed previous versions), and the group sat down for a beer at a restaurant looking out over the water. The bridge, for those who don't know, is two-storied, and the upper story has the street and an army of fishermen casting over the side to catch the tiny, relatively useless fish of the Bosphorus. Their lines are hanging down in front of you like a giant harp, and I always find myself wanting to grab one and tie it to a chair, and give them something to get excited about. Or just pull their rod down and scream "SHARK! SHARK!" Of course, they all probably secretly wish to be eaten by a fish so big.
Our TA actually haggled for us to get a lower beer price, and it worked. It was an incredible maneuver: the Walkaway. Name your price, if they don't meet it, you Walkaway. Bam. They follow and agree. We hung out there for a while and practiced our Turkish, talking, reading Turkish comics, and people watching. Eventually, we walked across the bridge and hopped in the Tünel, the world's second oldest and quite possibly the world's shortest subway. It takes us from the Karaköy neighborhood up the steep hill to the far end of Istiklal Caddesi, the main drag in the city. When we got off, there was a need for a restroom among many in the group, and so we found the nearby public toilet.
I have used public toilets here before. They usually cost 50 kuruş to pee, and 1 or 2 lira to "büyük yapmak," or "drop a deuce." This place, being at the end of one of the world's busiest streets, gets away with charging 1 lira for peeing. I paid it to a man who was sitting at a table inside the bathroom, and who formed the barrier between the outside and the mens' room. The smell in this place was enough to make even the most seasoned camper and outhouse user stop in their tracks. It's not hard to imagine why: thousands of people use it every day. Thousands upon thousands. I washed my hands twice and then used hand sanitizer, then dipped them in boiling water, scraped off the outermost layer of skin with an awl and hammer, then set my clothing on fire. This, I suppose, is why we stopped in a store so I could buy a new shirt featuring a B-Boy with a boombox on his shoulder. While on our way there, a man stopped me in the middle of the street and said he knew me in Turkish. Turns out, he just got his PhD from Georgetown in linguistics, and we had met a while back but didn't remember each others' names. Now we do. He lives around here. Small fucking world.
This concludes PART I. I need to sleep. Fucking exhausted. More to follow FULL STOP.
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