Istanbul...

I never thought that I would call Berlin home or that I would crave the bed in my apartment and the purple love seats so much. Istanbul is an incredible city and city full of imagery and sadness. I loved much of what I saw but I also saw things that broke my heart.

Last year around December I went to the Dominican Republic. There, there is a very specific point where one city turns into two cities; this point is the line between rich and poor. I saw this same line, or border, behind Kanyon mall. Behind this brilliantly beautiful retail heaven lays the lives of families that have no shoes and live in under constructed homes. In the Dominican the same image was brought to the forefront of my eyes when I saw young boys running around on dirt roads into homes made of aluminum and cardboard yet the happiest people on earth. Istanbul with its bright lights, large night life and extravagant hotels screams rich and new, but around the corner it the sad, forgotten majority of their country forced to look out their window into a world that is out of reach, it torn me apart. How can people become so ignorant to the truths all around them, to the black and white of their worlds? I see now the melancholy that Orhan was seeing. I may not see it as a collapse of an empire but I see it in the minds and eyes of the people that remain in that fallen empire. In the ignorance about which they live their lives, in the lack of change that I saw people striving for.

This ignorance made me feel even further from home then Berlin had. While I have always had an ocean between me and my family upon coming on this trip, it wasn’t until Istanbul that I noticed this distance. I saw parts of my life in Istanbul, I saw the colorful speech that my mother uses when she gets excited, I saw the protective nature of my father in the eyes of the other men in our group as they watched with careful eyes over us. I saw the playfulness of my sister when bartering for jewelry in the Grand Baazar and I saw the curiousness of my brother in each of us as we explored a city that was so unlike any other place. While all of these things reminded me of home I also found that would out-weighted my culture was, simply enough, their true culture. A lack of respect was very evident and while the freeness of the country was refreshing at first I seemed to miss the structure of Germany and many other more “westernized” (if that even really works) nations.

After trying a “humom” for the first time I can literally say that a part of me is still in Istanbul but more then anything I found out about a piece of me that I had not known yet. I found my ability to be uncomfortable. I consider myself to be a fairly confident person, I rarely find a place or person that can make me feel uneasy or lacking, I pride myself on this ability to adapt well in many different places with many different types of people. Yet in this humom, completely out of element, with utterly no control over the situation I was in was terrify. Istanbul had put me in my place and showed me that it is ok to feel as if you are the one person who forgot to wear clothes to school or who didn’t have the “cool” lunch box in elementary school. It was OK! I survived to tell about the unique experience, and while it was not something I would most likely do again, I did do it and I was painfully uncomfortable the entire time. But it was OK!! And who would have guessed that a 200lb naked Turkish women would need to bath me in order to learn that simply lesson…I needed Turkey to break that border that was unknown in my life.

After all of the hills that define Turkey and all of the people that support the culture I was ready to return “home.” I was ready to return to a language that now to me sounded more familiar to my ears, noises that brought back memories from the prior weeks. Turkey was truly a place of color and flavor, of chiseled mountains that were dotted by the homes of both rich and poor, Mosques that not only added to the skyline but created a majority of it. I wanted Berlin with every cell of my body by the time the plane had finally arrived in “my” city. The noises I recognized and the people smiled and the buses were the right colors in my mind. I was back where I wanted to be, where I somehow thought I belonged.