Here’s an Istanbul travel tip you probably won’t find in any guidebooks, a guest post of mine at JetSettlers Magazine.

Ellen Rabiner interviewed me at Talking Turkey. We talked about jealousy, buttheads, and cops.

My wife ignored the shopkeepers that day. She was fed up with this very common Istanbul practice, and she had decided that she was going to park in that space come hell or high water. It was, after all, a public space, she was a taxpaying citizen, and who were these shopkeepers to claim that space for themselves?

So as the shopkeepers stood at the curb and yelled at us with increasingly-offended self-righteousness, my wife finished pulling into the spot, turned off the engine, got out, slammed the car door shut, and started walking away.

“Uh oh,” I thought, “this is not going to go well.” My wife was hell-bent on seeing through this particular course of action, and I knew from experience that there was no stopping her. I unbuckled my seat belt and got out too, shutting the passenger door behind me and hustling off to catch up with her before she got too far away.

We weren’t half a block from the car when I heard footsteps rushing up behind us. Within seconds a furious, hulking lunatic of a man brushed me aside and went straight for my wife. He was in crazed animal mode, and he grabbed my wife’s hair and started kicking at her.

In my mind at least, the scenes that follow play back in slow motion with a muffled soundtrack, because as soon as I saw that bald-headed thug grab my wife’s hair with his thick stubby hands, I was aware of only one thing in the whole world, and that was a man attacking my wife. I too went into crazed animal mode. I launched myself between them and tried to separate them, furiously prying the thug’s hands from my wife’s hair as he redirected his kicks at me.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a small crowd running towards us from the direction of the market, and I was relieved to realize the crowd included this thug’s father, an elderly man with a long beard who I thought would surely put a stop to this insanity. What father, after all, would allow his son to beat up on a woman? If I saw a son of mine beating up on a woman, I would kill him myself right there on the spot.

But this old man didn’t come running towards us to stop his son. He actually began egging his son on, and his other sons, not to be shown up in front of dear old dad, joined the melee.

Within moments my wife and I were surrounded by the brothers and their buddies from the street in a scuffling, confused mass of humanity. At one point someone threw a punch at me, but there were too many bodies knocking each other to and fro, and the fist merely glanced off my cheek.

Thug #1 continued to kick and scratch at my wife while his brothers and their buddies pulled me away from her, threw me into the street, and surrounded me like a pack of wolves. I quickly realized what was about to happen and I thought, “Oh man, this is not going to go well.”

As the wolf pack closed around me, my wife began screaming at the top of her lungs. It was a piercing, desperate, terrified and terrifying scream no human being should ever have to hear. I had never heard anyone scream like that before, not even when that woman upstairs was getting thrown around by her husband, and I hope to god I never hear a scream like that again.

Evidently, everyone in the crowd was as startled by her scream as I was, because for a split second they stopped what they were doing to look over at her and see what could possibly be issuing such a horrifying sound. Recognizing the brief window of opportunity and knowing what would happen if we let it pass, I pushed through the crowd, grabbed my wife by the shoulders, lifted her halfway off the ground, and pushed her backwards towards the corner. “Go, go, go,” I yelled at her, knowing that if we didn’t disappear around the corner in the next couple seconds, the crowd would snap out of their disorientation and come after us again.

Badly shaken but safely around the corner, we rushed the remaining half block to her parents’ vestibule, pushed our way through the door, and ran upstairs to be greeted by a pair of confused parents bewildered to see their daughter and son-in-law appear out of nowhere pumped with adrenaline, crying hysterically, and stammering out a bizarre story of parking and assault.

As we told our story to my wife’s parents her father grabbed the phone and called the police, who told us they’d be right over and we should go downstairs to wait for them. While we waited on the street below, I began to calm down, confident right would soon be restored.

A few minutes later I was happy to see a cop car turn the corner, but my heart sank quickly when I saw the two cops inside lazily smoking cigarettes and looking at us with expressions that said our petty call for help had annoyed them. I was about to find out why my neighbors back at that apartment building in Moda had laughed at me when I suggested we call the police.

This is an excerpt from Matt Krause’s book A Tight Wide-open Space. In 2003 Matt met a Turkish woman on a flight to Hong Kong. They started going out, and within a year Matt found himself adjusting to a new life in Istanbul. A Tight Wide-open Space is about that adjustment — going through the culture shock, becoming one of the family, learning to love the country. The book is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and for the Kindle.

Later that afternoon, after miles of walking and hours of exploring the Sofia, I decided I could finally show up at the hostel where I’d be staying that night. I headed in its direction, and after a slight delay wandering through the wrong streets, I found it tucked into a quiet cul-de-sac.

I opened a creaky wooden door, stepped into its nice, warm lobby, greeted the manager, filled out some guest registration paperwork, and handed over my payment in Turkish lira. The manager looked at me apologetically and said, “I’m sorry, we only take Bulgarian lev, dollars, or euros.”

I felt mildly insulted. “What,” I thought, “my money isn’t good enough for you? You’ll take your own little podunk currency, but you won’t take the currency of your much larger neighbor to the east who, by the way, used to own you?” I had only been in Turkey for 3 months, but I was already feeling a sense of its prickly national pride.

For a week I had been wearing my most composed, most stoic game face, but the truth was it wouldn’t take much to send me spinning off into the lost confusion that had caused me to blow up at that beggar kid back in Istanbul. So instead of starting what I knew would quickly become a ridiculous argument, I simply smiled and said, “Certainly, of course. Can you tell me where I can get some local currency?” He directed me to a cash machine nearby, and I came back a few minutes later armed with a fistful of Bulgarian lev.

Having paid the manager with a more desirable currency, I dropped my things off in my room, smiled warmly at my bed, and thought, “I’ll see you right after dinner, that’s for sure.” I turned and headed out for a bite to eat.

I walked to a nearby restaurant and picked out a small, sheltered table shoved back into one of the corners. I was feeling a little raw and worn at the seams, a lonely, disoriented foreigner who had left one foreign country to seek momentary solace in another foreign country. I ordered a plate of pork strips in cream sauce with shallots, something I could definitely not get back in Turkey, along with a little taste of “home,” a Turkish-like Shepherd’s Salad made of diced cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions, with a little feta cheese sprinkled on top.

By the time I finished eating it was barely 7:30 pm, but I had started the day early and walked 20 miles exploring the city in sub-freezing weather with a pack on my back. It was time to call it a day, so I paid the check and walked the short distance back to my room. The next day I would get up early to hop a bus back to Istanbul, but in the meantime I would sleep. I set my alarm, collapsed into bed, and fell into the deep, dark, needy sleep of the desperately tired.

This is an excerpt from Matt Krause’s book A Tight Wide-open Space. In 2003 Matt met a Turkish woman on a flight to Hong Kong. They started going out, and within a year Matt found himself adjusting to a new life in Istanbul. A Tight Wide-open Space is about that adjustment — going through the culture shock, becoming one of the family, learning to love the country. The book is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and for the Kindle.

When you love something, you understand its good side and its bad side are two sides of the same coin. Whether your love is for a person, a place, or a thing, you have no choice but to accept that person, place, or thing in its entirety. You have to take the bad with the good. You don’t get to cherry pick the parts you want in your life.

As we grow old, we want someone next to us who knows our history as a human being, someone who understands our actions today against the backdrop of our past. When the wrinkles are spreading across our faces and our stomachs are sagging and our butts are heading south, and east, and west, we want someone next to us who will see the youthful exuberance we had so long ago. In order to have that in life, you need to come to understand that love is a nuanced thing, that you can’t be with someone unless you learn to accept the bad along with the good.

Just like you can love a person, you can also love a place or a thing. I am not a city person. In fact, in my more extreme moments I will thump my chest and loudly proclaim that the truest beauty in all the world can only be found when no man is present, and that cities are nothing but cesspools of human filth. The more subtle truth, though, is that I love cities in general and Istanbul in particular. Despite the scuffles over parking and the cops who don’t care and the cats who fight in the bushes and the exhaust fumes that belch forth from buses and the warbling screeches that come out of the loudspeakers, Istanbul is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It is where natural beauty and man-made beauty come together to build on each other.

Istanbul is the Beyaz Firin bakery and the beautiful buttery crispness of its pastries. It is the tall glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice so fresh they don’t even cut the oranges until you order it. It is the blond, creamy grain of the bakery’s wood block tables. It is the professional and courteous, but not obsequious, deft hand of the counter help who load up your tray and ring up your sale. It is the tiny bubbles that rise from the sugar cubes you drop into your tea, sugar cubes so fresh they begin breaking up before they even land on the bottom of your glass.

Istanbul is a cool summer night when the square just north of the Ortakoy mosque is filled with people young and old, milling about, chatting easily with each other, enjoying the clear skies and the brilliant full moon as it rises over the hills across the Bosphorus. It is sitting in the square’s tea garden, mere inches from the currents of the Bosphorus, using a toothpick to munch on a late night plate of french fries while a massive tanker from the Black Sea sails silently down the Bosphorus, so silently that you only know it’s there because its silhouette blacks out the twinkling lights on the other side of the river as the ship glides smoothly towards the open sea.

Istanbul is knowing that on Sundays between eight in the morning and noon, you can hop in the car and see the city before the masses awake and return it to its crowded chaos. It is knowing that during this time you only have to drive 20 minutes in order to stumble upon a peaceful, sparsely-populated pocket of the city, a place where goats still graze and vegetables still grow, and chances are you will have to slow down for a cow standing in the middle of the road, refusing to budge and looking back at you like he’s challenging you: “What are you going to do now, huh?”

When you are crowded onto a standing-room-only bus and a soccer game just got out and traffic isn’t moving an inch and you are watching old people with walkers speed past you on the sidewalk, you think of the expression on that cow’s face. You think of the juice so fresh you can still feel the orange essence dancing on top of the liquid as you lift the glass to your nose. You think of Fatih Sultan Mehmed, someone who lusted after the city so much he was willing to pull his ships overland in the wee hours of the morning just to have it for himself.

When the city tries your patience, when it makes you fight just to be there, these are the things you think of, and that is how you love it.

This is an excerpt from Matt Krause’s book A Tight Wide-open Space. In 2003 Matt met a Turkish woman on a flight to Hong Kong. They started going out, and within a year Matt found himself adjusting to a new life in Istanbul. A Tight Wide-open Space is about that adjustment — going through the culture shock, becoming one of the family, learning to love the country. The book is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and for the Kindle.

I climbed past the riot police deeper into gece kondu territory. The houses at the edge of the gece kondu, the ones nearest the riot police, had tapped illegally into the city’s electrical grid, and leading from each power transformer was a rat’s nest of wires strung to the nearby houses. As I climbed further, even those amateurish attempts to wire the homes for electricity dissipated, and soon there was no sign of any power whatsoever going into any of the homes. Some of the homes had doors propped open and I could peer inside to see kitchens with no appliances and living rooms with no TVs. Even the old Datsuns had disappeared and I could walk in the middle of the street with impunity.

I began to notice the residents were staring at me, not because I was a foreigner, but simply because I obviously had no business to conduct there. No one just passed casually through that neighborhood, because there was nowhere to go. There was only one road winding up the hill at that point. It was the road I was walking on, and it had narrowed from a two-lane road to a one-lane road, and that was narrowing to a half-lane road.

I was almost at the top of the hill, with less than forty vertical feet separating me from the huge rock outcropping I had seen from below. What had appeared from below to be a park at the top of the hill was just an empty lot next to the rock, a place where the locals hung out at the end of the day, drank themselves silly, and left behind their beer bottles. They couldn’t afford to ride the bus, but they could apparently afford to drink.

As poor as Basibuyuk was, it was high enough up the hill to have one of the most spectacular views of the city I had ever seen. Looking west from just below the top of the hill I could see the skyscrapers in Taksim and Sisli, and the long ridge that forms the spine of Istiklal Caddesi. Panning to the left, I could see dozens of tankers and dry cargo ships queuing up for a chance to pass north through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. Further left along the Asian side of the city I could see the neighborhoods of Kadikoy, Fenerbahce, Bostanci, Maltepe, Pendik, huge parts of the city where millions of people live and work. I could even see urban forests I had never realized were there because they had been so easily lost in the urban sprawl.

With only a few vertical feet left before reaching the top of the hill, I began feeling exposed and vulnerable. I was starting to feel a little freaked out by all the locals staring at me. I stopped climbing, turned around, and started hiking back down quickly, trying to keep a lid on the panic suddenly welling up inside of me. I became acutely aware of the fact that there was only one road out of this neighborhood, and I wondered what would become of me if some drunk, testosterone-pumped teenagers decided I needed to be harassed. I began to long for the safety of riot policemen and witnesses who might speak up if they saw something happen to me. I was anxious to duck back under the safety blanket of the state, eager to return to a place where legal electricity, televisions, and city buses would tell me I was in the arms of a society I knew.

Once I descended past the riot police I knew I was safely back in the maw of Istanbul. As beat-up old Datsuns and taxis and city buses began passing by me I relaxed back into the rhythm of the city. I reached the bottom of the hill much faster than I expected, and I walked quickly along the completely deserted four-lane arterial leading out to the coastal highway. Within 20 minutes I was standing next to the highway, happily breathing exhaust fumes and waiting to catch a bus home.

This is an excerpt from Matt Krause’s book A Tight Wide-open Space. In 2003 Matt met a Turkish woman on a flight to Hong Kong. They started going out, and within a year Matt found himself adjusting to a new life in Istanbul. A Tight Wide-open Space is about that adjustment — going through the culture shock, becoming one of the family, learning to love the country. The book is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and for the Kindle.

When I got to the top of the hill, I saw the police setting up barricades and pushing back a gathering crowd of onlookers. I started asking what had happened. My Turkish wasn’t very good, but I managed to latch onto and understand the word bomba. There had been a large bomb blast near the British consulate just off Istiklal Caddesi a few minutes before. Some people were dead, many were injured, and the streets were quickly filling with ambulances and police cars.

Istiklal and the surrounding streets were littered with glass. The cell phones were down, so I skirted the barricades and stopped by my girlfriend’s brother’s workplace, about 3 blocks from the blast, to make sure he was okay and to tell him I was okay too and to try to get word to my girlfriend, who would be worried about us.

I stepped back out onto the street and saw the police busily cordoning off the area, so I cut through their barricades and quickly made my way home. I’ve never walked over so much broken glass in my life. I think there was so much of it that I walked a half mile without my feet ever touching the pavement.

After that second set of bombings the city was definitely on edge. A single set of bombings it could write off as a one-time event, but two? For a couple hours that day people didn’t even know how many bombs had gone off around the city. At one point it was rumored there had been six. Later that day we learned it wasn’t six, it was just two, the one at the British consulate, which I walked past, and another one a couple miles north at the HSBC bank building.

In the days that followed, the Turks did a lot of soul searching. The United States was fighting a war in Iraq, one of Turkey’s neighbors to the south. Turkey and the US had been close allies for decades, so Turkey wanted to stand by its pal, but was this going to be the cost? Were things like this going to happen on a regular basis now? After years of relative peace and prosperity, was Turkey going to slide back into civil war and martial law?

I was confused, too. Did this mean I should go back home to the US, like some of the other Americans I had met were going to do? Would I have to walk down the streets of Istanbul now with teeth clenched, wondering if the next parked car was going to be the one with the bomb?

As nerve-wracking as the situation was though, I never gave serious thought to actually leaving Turkey. What captured my imagination more powerfully than thoughts of returning home was the idea of sticking around to see how the Turks were going to respond.

The next morning I walked back down to Istiklal Caddesi to check out the neighborhood. It was abuzz with people carrying brooms and trash cans and busily clearing the last of the debris from the streets. The sidewalks were not clogged with ambulances and police cars anymore, they were clogged with trucks delivering new panes of glass for the shops.

After a major bomb blast that brought death, blood, and destruction, the city was busy cleaning up so it could be fully operational again 24 hours after the blast. And what’s more, two days later a Turkish friend of mine was having a birthday party just a few blocks away from one of the blast sites, and the party was NOT cancelled.

The people of Istanbul did not need to know what was going to happen next. They did not need to know if attacks like this would become a regular occurrence. All they needed to know was that their world was a mess, and it needed to be cleaned up. They were showing the world that they were bigger than the men with the bombs. They were showing the world that they felt the fear, but would rise above it.

When I saw that that was how they reacted to an attack on their own soil, I fell deeply in love with that country and its people.

This is an excerpt from Matt Krause’s book A Tight Wide-open Space. In 2003 Matt met a Turkish woman on a flight to Hong Kong. They started going out, and within a year Matt found himself adjusting to a new life in Istanbul. A Tight Wide-open Space is about that adjustment — going through the culture shock, becoming one of the family, learning to love the country. The book is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and for the Kindle.

When the coffee is drunk and the talking is done and the young man’s father has asked the young woman’s father for his blessing and the young woman’s father has given it, the ceremony ends. Like most Turkish ceremonies, the soz ends abruptly.

The comfort with abrupt endings is something I like about the Turks. They are proud of their ceremonies. They are proud of their celebrations of life. They like to think they sit around together eating and drinking and dancing all through the night like a bunch of Italians. But the reality is that events end early and they end abruptly. It’s not a rude abruptness that requires apologies, it’s simply an abruptness that says, “We’re done here, thanks everybody, move on.”

After the soz the young man and the young woman are not engaged, but they are exclusive, and an engagement at some future point is assumed. It’s like being pre-approved for a mortgage, plus both families will make sure neither of the two young lovers starts stepping out on the other. After all, by approving the match the families also make a commitment to watch out for and honor each other.

This was the ceremony my girlfriend and I would go through in order to make our relationship official in the eyes of her family and friends. But in a proper soz the kids basically sit back while the parents do the heavy lifting. If you’re the young man, you don’t need to work up the courage to ask your girlfriend’s father for her hand in marriage, because your dad’s going to do it! What could be better than that?

I was on my own in Turkey though. My parents were very supportive of our relationship, but they weren’t planning to come visit for another few months, and my girlfriend had made it clear to me that the soz couldn’t wait until then. She and I were spending a lot of time together, I was coming over to her parents’ house to visit on a regular basis, and her extended family and family friends were starting to ask questions. One day she finally said to me, “My parents would like to know why you’re here and what your intentions are. It’s time for the soz.”

Part of me was mildly insulted, thinking, “Wait a minute, I’ve thrown everything to the wind and I’ve moved halfway around the world, and they’re not sure why I’m here?” But I knew how important the soz was, and one of the reasons I had come to Turkey was to properly ask my girlfriend’s parents for her hand in marriage. So soz time it was.

On the appointed day I dressed up in a suit and tie, bought some flowers and a box of chocolates, and hopped the bus over to their side of the city.

When my girlfriend’s parents greeted me at their front door, they too were dressed to the nines. I had seen them dressed nicely before, but I had never seen them dressed up quite like that. As I stepped inside into the entryway I felt even more puny, alone, and intimidated.

The five of us, my girlfriend’s mother and father, her younger brother, and she and I, sat down in the living room. I felt awkward, sitting so formally on the same couch my girlfriend and I would lounge on together on any other weekend. The five of us made small talk for a bit, and then my girlfriend stood up and disappeared into the kitchen to make the Turkish coffee. I tried not to fidget, sitting there alone on that couch, everyone all dressed up, everyone knowing exactly what we were there to do but not doing it yet.

Finally, when my girlfriend had finished serving the coffee and had taken her seat next to me, an expectant pause fell over the room. I turned to my girlfriend and whispered to her, “Can I start now?” She nodded yes, so I put down my coffee, straightened my tie, took a deep breath, and opened my heart.

This is an excerpt from Matt Krause’s book A Tight Wide-open Space. In 2003 Matt met a Turkish woman on a flight to Hong Kong. They started going out, and within a year Matt found himself adjusting to a new life in Istanbul. A Tight Wide-open Space is about that adjustment — going through the culture shock, becoming one of the family, learning to love the country. The book is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and for the Kindle.

Late one morning in Istanbul I was walking back to my apartment in Harbiye from a teahouse in Taksim. The normal phalanx of shoeshine boys started running after me, chanting, “Shoeshine, shoeshine, shoeshine.” After a block or two of me ignoring them they gave up and fell by the wayside, all but one who pursued me with unheard-of tenacity. This kid would not take no for an answer.

He walked alongside me for an extra block or two and then, from the corner of my eye, I saw him dip two of his fingers into one of his dusty tins of shoe polish. He scooped up a good-sized chunk of the black gunk and held it up in the air. He waited until I glanced over at him, and then he smiled at me mischievously and glanced down at my shoe.

I knew what he was going to do next and I thought, “Oh no, you don’t.” But oh yes, he did. As we walked next to each other, he reached down and dabbed that big glop of shoeshine on the top of my shoe.

That was when I completely lost it.

I laid into that little boy with the longest string of obscenity I think any kid anywhere has ever heard. And when I was done cussing him out, I escalated my verbal barrage to threats of bodily harm. I threatened to kill him. I threatened to kill his friends. I threatened to kill his brothers, his sisters, his mother and father. I threatened to scorch every square inch of earth that kid had ever stepped foot on. I threatened to forever turn his world black and burn it to the ground like some post-nuclear hellhole.

When I was a kid that age, if someone had yelled at me with a small fraction of the fury I was showing I would have pissed my pants, but that kid stood his ground. He rocked back onto his heels and stared at me with wide-eyed shock and horror, and his face was white with fear, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He was a brave kid.

When I was done with my tirade, I pivoted abruptly and stormed off down the street without looking back. I walked briskly and kept a stoic face, trying to hold back the shame and embarrassment welling up inside me, trying to look normal for each new crop of strangers passing me on the street.

The walk back to my apartment took less than ten minutes, but it felt like an eternity. When I got home, the moment I heard the door click shut behind me, I collapsed to my knees, dropped my forehead to the floor, and started crying. What on earth had possessed me to act like that? I had just blown up at a little kid on the street in broad daylight. I had just threatened to snuff the life out of a little boy barely tall enough to reach my belt. I hadn’t even been in Turkey for three months yet. What was I becoming?

Even a traveler needs a change of scenery every now and then, and right there I decided it was time for me, too. The next weekend I hopped an overnight bus for Sofia, the capital of neighboring Bulgaria, for some much-needed R&R.

By the way, one night about a year later my girlfriend and I were walking down a side street in that same neighborhood. I had my arm around her and it was winter, so I had pulled my cap down low, the brim hiding my face from the wind, my chin tucked inside my collar. There were some beggar kids hiding out in a nearby doorway, and as we approached we caught their eye. A couple of the older ones skipped out to approach us.
Spotting their approach in my peripheral vision, I slowly raised my head, showing my face and making eye contact with the beggar kids. They stopped dead in their tracks and their faces froze as they whispered a panicked warning to each other, “Stop, stop, it’s the crazy one.”

This is an excerpt from Matt Krause’s book A Tight Wide-open Space. In 2003 Matt met a Turkish woman on a flight to Hong Kong. They started going out, and within a year Matt found himself adjusting to a new life in Istanbul. A Tight Wide-open Space is about that adjustment — going through the culture shock, becoming one of the family, learning to love the country. The book is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and for the Kindle.

I wrote a guest post about how we are fascinated by difference, but travel actually ends up opening our eyes to sameness, over at Talking Turkey.

I wrote a guest post about my mixed feelings about Istanbul, over at Perking the Pansies.

I wrote a guest post on Turkish food and learning to love sucuk, over at Being Koy.

I could take bus #139 or 139A from Istanbul to Sile, but today I am in a car. In fact, I have always taken a car up to the Black Sea, because in a car I am better able to feel the gentle, wavelike rhythms, the sweeping curves and the swells and dips of this particular highway.

The grasses, shrubs, and hills we pass remind me of the scenery along California’s central coast, north of Santa Barbara but south of Paso Robles. When I was small, my mom and my Aunt Mary used to take my brother, my two cousins, and me to play in the surf at Pismo. This outing reminds me of those times.

On the road to Sile there is a string of rustic restaurants where my companion and I like to stop for breakfast. The restaurants are far enough from Istanbul so that my spirit has had time to begin decompressing, but not close enough to Sile that the expectation of arrival can overcome my hunger. All the restaurants look the same to me, and they are staffed by short, stout elderly women who are at least 100 pounds heavier than me. These women could easily take me in a wrestling match, but their faces are gentle and their eyes calm. They dress peasant-style in colorful scarves and patterned cotton dresses. I wonder whether they dress like this all the time, or just for work.

About ten kilometers outside of Sile we turn and begin heading west along the coast, the sea visible now to our right. I am looking for a beach with no people, no loud music. It is late enough in the summer that most of the beaches are empty, but we need one still open to the public. We find one, completely deserted. Even the house on the nearby bluff appears to be empty. Its owners probably went back to the city a few weeks ago. We park at the edge of the pavement.

Before I even step out of the car the surf begins calling to me. I dance on the balls of my feet as my companion and I pull our things from the trunk. She shoots me a strange look. I wonder why she is not enjoying this trip as much as I am, and then I realize she is probably nervous because she knows if something happens to me out here, there will be no one around to help. I think it’s great there isn’t a soul for miles. She finds it nerve-wracking.

As I run out to the waves I notice storm clouds coming up from behind us, heading north. They have already passed over Istanbul and are now beginning their journey across the Black Sea towards Ukraine. I watch them approach, wary of them until I see they are going to pass us to the west. They have brought rain to the suburbs of Istanbul, but they are not going to bring rain to us. I know clouds do not have feelings, but I cannot help but admire these for their bravery in venturing out over the Black Sea. I swear that every time I glance at this sea I spot a flicker of anger, isolation, and loneliness before it puts on its beautiful face. I love playing in it, but I also fear it.

I dance and bob around in the waves. If I stand, the peaks of the waves are not high enough to block out the horizon, but their troughs are low and if I crouch down the peaks appear higher than they really are. As the cool water crashes over me I shed the worries and stresses of city life. I remember what it’s like to feel joy.

The undertow here is so strong I know that if I stumbled it would pull me out beyond the breakers before I even knew what was happening. In the back of my mind I tell myself that should that happen, don’t fight it, just relax and float up to the surface where the undertow has no power. Another wave approaches and as I crouch down I grab onto the waistband of my shorts, knowing that my shorts hang on me loosely and the sea will take them if I am not careful.

The wave breaks over my head and passes. I shake the water from my face and glance back at my companion sitting on the beach. She is watching me nervously. If she had any idea how strong the undertow is out here, there is no way she would allow me to play like this. She calls me back, waving at me because she knows I cannot hear her above the roar of the wind and waves. I run back to her, careful not to kick sand onto her towel. She asks me can we go now? I say five more minutes, just five more minutes, okay? as I kiss her forehead and run back out to the sea.

I am vacationing in a tiny village on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Less than a hundred people live in this town, perched on a narrow shelf at the bottom of a cliff that from the top looks like it drops straight into the sea. The town is so small, its cobblestone streets so narrow, no one drives anywhere. On foot they can cross from one end of the town to the other in less than a minute.

I spend the day lying in the sun. Actually, I lie in the shade, shade created by a beach umbrella I guard with a territorial defensiveness probably unbecoming to me given the village’s relaxed vibe. Without the umbrella I would burn easily, my skin pale from many months sitting indoors staring at a computer screen.

To break up the hours snoozing on my chaise lounge, I slip into the sea a few times each day. The water is so clear I can’t tell if it’s one foot deep or ten. The orange and blue and yellow stripes on the fish are so vibrant I wonder if God photoshopped them just for me.

In the evening I dine on a stream of appetizers, cool cucumber slices in yogurt with garlic, red bell peppers marinated in oil pressed from olives grown nearby, and then the main course, steamed fish, accompanied by a bottomless glass of raki, a clear anise seed-based drink that turns white when the waiter adds water.

First-time visitors to this region often marvel at how close the Greek islands are. Some of the islands are so close I can practically stand on the Turkish mainland, pick up a rock, throw it really hard, and watch it land on Greek soil.

Because the Greek islands are so close to the Turkish mainland, they are a hotbed of illegal immigration. Today it is Iraqis, Afghans, Somalians, and Palestinians heading west, trying to enter the EU via Greece. Seventy years ago during World War II, the tide went the other way, people fleeing war-torn Europe for a neutral Turkey and the free world beyond.

But the Greek mainland itself is 150 miles away. Why are these islands Greek?

A couple hundred years ago, these islands were part of the Ottoman Empire. They were controlled by Turkey.

Then as Greece tore away from the Empire in the 1800s, the inhabitants of most of these islands chose to go with it.

The death knell for Turkish control of the islands came in World War I. The Ottoman Empire lost the war, and the Allies occupied Istanbul and began carving up the Turkish mainland. Eager Greeks invaded and pushed to within 50 miles of the new Turkish capital Ankara before being repelled by the Turks and shoved back into the sea. In 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne formally recognized a new Turkish nation. The Turks had overcome the terms of their WWI defeat, terms which would have lost them even the mainland, but in the process they had to formally accept Greek control of the islands.

Then during World War II Germany invaded Greece, occupying its mainland and its islands with the help of fellow Axis members Italy and Bulgaria. Towards the end of the war the Allies pushed the occupiers out and returned the islands to Greece.

Humans have been fighting over these islands for thousands of years. They have been controlled by the Greeks. They have been controlled by the Persians. They have been controlled by the Romans. They have been controlled by the Turks. Someone is always controlling them, and someone else is always lusting after them. Today it is the Greeks doing the controlling, and the Turks doing the lusting. Tomorrow it will be someone else.

Lie in the sun, feel the sand between your toes, snorkel in the clear water. And then at the end of the day, when you watch the sun set behind the islands, remember that you are sitting on the Turkish mainland, but most of the islands you are gazing at are Greek.

I am not saying that the islands should be Turkish, or that they should be Greek, or that they should be anybody’s in particular. What I am saying is that if you have the privilege to travel to this region, don’t get so distracted by its beauty you go home without imagining how edgy you would be if your mortal enemy lived next door to you, where he could stand over his kitchen sink and peer into your bedroom window. The next time war breaks out over these islands, you will be better able to understand why.

Sometimes love just isn’t enough. After 8 years together, 5 of them married, my wife and I split up. In fact, we split up while I was in the middle of writing this book.

Our love for each other did not go away. Our relationship just didn’t work out. It was always off-kilter. We spent years trying to figure it out, years trying to solve it, but trying to solve it was like trying to punch our way out of a gigantic paper bag. We made a lot of noise and we exhausted ourselves trying to escape from the bag, but the bag just flexed one direction when we punched it one way, and then it flexed in another direction when we punched it in another. It never tore open. We never saw a sign that said, “This is the way out of the paper bag.”

Perhaps we put too much strain on the relationship too soon after meeting. Perhaps it was too much to expect we could uproot ourselves and move to a new country and embark on new careers and learn new languages and do all the other things we had to do in order to make it in Turkey, and build a healthy relationship too.

There are many things I don’t understand, but what I know for sure is that when I write about how she is as graceful as a gazelle, or about how much I loved watching her explore Amsterdam, or about how I called her “my little fish,” none of that is diminished by the fact that we are not together anymore. Our splitting up does not negate the memories I carry with me. What is done is done though. Some balls of string are just too tangled to unravel. Sometimes you just have to walk away.

I originally went to Turkey for her, but even though my relationship with her is over, my relationship with Turkey is not. Turkey is a timeless land where I see stories layered upon stories layered upon stories. It is a land filled with surprises, a place where I can turn a corner and see something completely not what I was expecting. And perhaps best of all, it is a land that showed me that just about anything can happen and I will be fine. There is nothing more freeing than knowing that.

In 2010 I moved back to the US. I spent some time with my family and with Milk Dud, the black lab whose unruliness led me to board that particular flight to Hong Kong back in 2003. Milk Dud, by the way, is my dad’s dog now. My parents took him in when I decided to go to Turkey, and he has been with them ever since.

Shortly after returning to the US I found a job in Seattle and moved back to the city I had left almost eight years before. For the first time in eight years I was back in an office, answering emails, sitting in meetings, shifting widgets. It didn’t feel right. I had done that already, and I had left it. I had left it to explore the world.

Taking that job was me aborting that exploration so I could jump back onto Track A, the default track in life that goes something like this: “Get a job, then get a bigger one. Get a car, then get a bigger one. Get a house, then get a bigger one.” Trying to jump back onto Track A had me feeling like I was wearing shoes that were too small. I couldn’t bear sitting in meetings, shifting widgets, trying to pretend I cared.

So less than a year after taking that job, I left it. I’m not sure what’s going to come next, but it’s going to be more Track B, the alternative track, the track I started going down when I left Seattle the first time. Track B is the path we blaze when we realize Track A isn’t going to work for us anymore.

For me, Track B is probably going to involve living in Turkey, at least for a while. I like it there. It’s not easy living there, but it doesn’t need to be.

When I tell people I plan to go back to Turkey, they quite understandably ask me what I’m going to do there. And I don’t know what to tell them. If I could say I’m going to go back to Turkey to sit at a desk and answer emails and shift widgets, perhaps people wouldn’t look at me as if they wanted more of an answer. But at this point the only honest answer I can give them is, “I am going back to Turkey because I still have work to do there.” That answer is cryptic, and it is evasive, but it is cryptic and evasive because even I don’t know what that work is yet. I would rather find out than not, though. I am not done with Track B.

[This is an excerpt from the conclusion to A Tight Wide-open Space.]

When you love something, you understand its good side and its bad side are two sides of the same coin. Whether your love is for a person, a place, or a thing, you have no choice but to accept that person, place, or thing in its entirety. You have to take the bad with the good. You don’t get to cherry pick the parts you want in your life.

As we grow old, we want someone next to us who knows our history as a human being, someone who understands our actions today against the backdrop of our past. When the wrinkles are spreading across our faces and our stomachs are sagging and our butts are heading south, and east, and west, we want someone next to us who will see the youthful exuberance we had so long ago. In order to have that in life, you need to come to understand that love is a nuanced thing, that you can’t be with someone unless you learn to accept the bad along with the good.

Just like you can love a person, you can also love a place or a thing. I am not a city person. In fact, in my more extreme moments I will thump my chest and loudly proclaim that the truest beauty in all the world can only be found when no man is present, and that cities are nothing but cesspools of human filth. The more subtle truth, though, is that I love cities in general and Istanbul in particular. Despite the scuffles over parking and the cops who don’t care and the cats who fight in the bushes and the exhaust fumes that belch forth from buses and the warbling screeches that come out of the loudspeakers, Istanbul is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It is where natural beauty and man-made beauty come together to build on each other.

Istanbul is the Beyaz Firin bakery and the beautiful buttery crispness of its pastries. It is the tall glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice so fresh they don’t even cut the oranges until you order it. It is the blond, creamy grain of the bakery’s wood block tables. It is the professional and courteous, but not obsequious, deft hand of the counter help who load up your tray and ring up your sale. It is the tiny bubbles that rise from the sugar cubes you drop into your tea, sugar cubes so fresh they begin breaking up before they even land on the bottom of your glass.

Istanbul is a cool summer night when the square just north of the Ortakoy mosque is filled with people young and old, milling about, chatting easily with each other, enjoying the clear skies and the brilliant full moon as it rises over the hills across the Bosphorus. It is sitting in the square’s tea garden, mere inches from the currents of the Bosphorus, using a toothpick to munch on a late night plate of french fries while a massive tanker from the Black Sea sails silently down the Bosphorus, so silently that you only know it’s there because its silhouette blacks out the twinkling lights on the other side of the river as the ship glides smoothly towards the open sea.

Istanbul is knowing that on Sundays between eight in the morning and noon, you can hop in the car and see the city before the masses awake and return it to its crowded chaos. It is knowing that during this time you only have to drive 20 minutes in order to stumble upon a peaceful, sparsely-populated pocket of the city, a place where goats still graze and vegetables still grow, and chances are you will have to slow down for a cow standing in the middle of the road, refusing to budge and looking back at you like he’s challenging you: “What are you going to do now, huh?”

When you are crowded onto a standing-room-only bus and a soccer game just got out and traffic isn’t moving an inch and you are watching old people with walkers speed past you on the sidewalk, you think of the expression on that cow’s face. You think of the juice so fresh you can still feel the orange essence dancing on top of the liquid as you lift the glass to your nose. You think of Fatih Sultan Mehmed, someone who lusted after the city so much he was willing to pull his ships overland in the wee hours of the morning just to have it for himself.

When the city tries your patience, when it makes you fight just to be there, these are the things you think of, and that is how you love it.

[This is an excerpt from the chapter "Ode to Istanbul" in A Tight Wide-open Space.]

Many times my wife has told me I am stubborn, but she is a pot calling me a black kettle. When push comes to shove, I will usually adopt a “When in Rome…” way of dealing with the world. She, on the other hand, will grab onto her principles tighter than ever and will insist on seeing them through to their logical conclusion, even if reality is going to steer that conclusion to a place that isn’t so logical.

Knowing that pressing charges would lead to three years of lawyers and court appearances and would result in nothing but the thugs’ exoneration and no jail time for anyone, but would bring repeated aggravation to my wife and I and to her parents, I saw an opening when the cop asked us if we wanted to proceed. I took it. I talked my wife down and persuaded her to drop the charges so we could go home and forget about it.

When we got back home to my wife’s parents’ house, my wife’s mother served us tea and snacks and tried to soothe our rattled spirits. She, too, though, was shaken. She knows her daughter better than anyone else on this planet. She knows how headstrong her daughter can be, and she knows that there have been, and will continue to be, times when that strength will become a weakness that puts her daughter in harm’s way. She also knows from decades of experience with her daughter that there is absolutely nothing she can do about it. But because she was angry and scared she scolded her daughter anyway, wagging her finger at her and reminding her that this was not her country, that it belonged to the magandalar, to the uncouth ruffians, and that she should never, never forget that.

Before I move on to the next chapter, I need to say something else about this incident…

When I look back on that day I have very mixed feelings about how I handled myself. When my wife was attacked, I tried my best to protect her, but my best was not good enough.

Then when we were at the police station and she was deciding whether or not to press charges, I used my knowledge of her to talk her down from her principles and steer her in another direction.

You see, I knew that the only thing that would trump my wife’s desire for justice was concern for her parents, and in the police station I played on that concern to get her to drop the charges.

I reminded her that her parents lived right around the corner from that neighborhood market. I told her that if we pressed charges, the case would drag on for years, and then, this being Turkey, we would lose. That meant for years, her parents would have to live around the corner from someone they had an open criminal court case against, and then they would have to spend the rest of their lives living around the corner from someone whom they had pressed criminal charges against, and then lost to.

Looking back on that moment in the police station, I think if I had to do it all over again, I would handle myself in the same way. I would be the compromising voice of reason using my knowledge of my wife to talk her down from her principles. It did not make me proud to seek anything less than justice, but I think there are some situations in life where no matter how we act, we will never be proud of ourselves. Sometimes we get caught between a rock and a hard place. We never forget those times, and we rarely get over them.

[This is an excerpt from the chapter "Don't call the cops" in A Tight Wide-open Space.]

Evidently, everyone in the crowd was as startled by her scream as I was, because for a split second they stopped what they were doing to look over at her and see what could possibly be issuing such a horrifying sound. Recognizing the brief window of opportunity and knowing what would happen if we let it pass, I pushed through the crowd, grabbed my wife by the shoulders, lifted her halfway off the ground, and pushed her backwards towards the corner. “Go, go, go,” I yelled at her, knowing that if we didn’t disappear around the corner in the next couple seconds, the crowd would snap out of their disorientation and come after us again.

Badly shaken but safely around the corner, we rushed the remaining half block to her parents’ vestibule, pushed our way through the door, and ran upstairs to be greeted by a pair of confused parents bewildered to see their daughter and son-in-law appear out of nowhere pumped with adrenaline, crying hysterically, and stammering out a bizarre story of parking and assault.

As we told our story to my wife’s parents her father grabbed the phone and called the police, who told us they’d be right over and we should go downstairs to wait for them. While we waited on the street below, I began to calm down, confident right would soon be restored.

A few minutes later I was happy to see a cop car turn the corner, but my heart sank quickly when I saw the two cops inside lazily smoking cigarettes and looking at us with expressions that said our petty call for help had annoyed them. I was about to find out why my neighbors back at that apartment building in Moda had laughed at me when I suggested we call the police.

The police sauntered over to the market and began asking the shopkeepers what had happened. Then the police, instead of asking the shopkeepers why they saw fit to beat up on a woman, turned to my wife and asked her why she had tried to park there when the shopkeepers so clearly hadn’t wanted her to.

My wife and I, and now her father, who had lived in that neighborhood for over 40 years, reminded the police that this was a public curbside and anyone could park there.

When my father-in-law told the sergeant to do his job and defend the public spaces, the sergeant grew silent, looked down at the ground, dropped his cigarette, stubbed it out with his toe, and looked back up at my wife and repeated, “Why did you try to park here?”

Eventually, seeing that we weren’t going to give up easily, the cops sighed and told us that if we wanted to press charges we could, but we would all have to go down to the precinct station.

So to the precinct station we went, my wife and I to the offices inside to press charges while the Thug Brothers hung around outside the station smoking cigarettes and joking with the cops.

Inside, the desk sergeant took down our report, but then he set down his paperwork, looked at us, and sighed and said, “Are you sure you want to do this? You know how this will play out, don’t you?”

We had been in Istanbul long enough to know exactly how it would play out. My father-in-law, supportive as he was, knew exactly how it would play out, too.

…

[This is an excerpt from the chapter "Don't call the cops" in A Tight Wide-open Space.]

My wife ignored the shopkeepers that day. She was fed up with this very common Istanbul practice, and she had decided that she was going to park in that space come hell or high water. It was, after all, a public space, she was a taxpaying citizen, and who were these shopkeepers to claim that space for themselves?

So as the shopkeepers stood at the curb and yelled at us with increasingly-offended self-righteousness, my wife finished pulling into the spot, turned off the engine, got out, slammed the car door shut, and started walking away.

“Uh oh,” I thought, “this is not going to go well.” My wife was hell-bent on seeing through this particular course of action, and I knew from experience that there was no stopping her. I unbuckled my seat belt and got out too, shutting the passenger door behind me and hustling off to catch up with her before she got too far away.

We weren’t half a block from the car when I heard footsteps rushing up behind us. Within seconds a furious, hulking lunatic of a man brushed me aside and went straight for my wife. He was in crazed animal mode, and he grabbed my wife’s hair and started kicking at her.

In my mind at least, the scenes that follow play back in slow motion with a muffled soundtrack, because as soon as I saw that bald-headed thug grab my wife’s hair with his thick stubby hands, I was aware of only one thing in the whole world, and that was a man attacking my wife. I too went into crazed animal mode. I launched myself between them and tried to separate them, furiously prying the thug’s hands from my wife’s hair as he redirected his kicks at me.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a small crowd running towards us from the direction of the market, and I was relieved to realize the crowd included this thug’s father, an elderly man with a long beard who I thought would surely put a stop to this insanity. What father, after all, would allow his son to beat up on a woman? If I saw a son of mine beating up on a woman, I would kill him myself right there on the spot.

But this old man didn’t come running towards us to stop his son. He actually began egging his son on, and his other sons, not to be shown up in front of dear old dad, joined the melee.

Within moments my wife and I were surrounded by the brothers and their buddies from the street in a scuffling, confused mass of humanity. At one point someone threw a punch at me, but there were too many bodies knocking each other to and fro, and the fist merely glanced off my cheek.

Thug #1 continued to kick and scratch at my wife while his brothers and their buddies pulled me away from her, threw me into the street, and surrounded me like a pack of wolves. I quickly realized what was about to happen and I thought, “Oh man, this is not going to go well.”

As the wolf pack closed around me, my wife began screaming at the top of her lungs. It was a piercing, desperate, terrified and terrifying scream no human being should ever have to hear. I had never heard anyone scream like that before, not even when that woman upstairs was getting thrown around by her husband, and I hope to god I never hear a scream like that again.

…

[This is an excerpt from the chapter "Don't call the cops" in A Tight Wide-open Space.]

I mentioned earlier that at one point I had an apartment in Moda. Moda is a relatively quiet residential neighborhood on the Asian side of the city. It is a neighborhood of artistic elites, of the well-educated and the theater-going types, of the worldly internationals. I loved that neighborhood, and I loved that apartment. The apartment was three times too big for me, but I had never lived in a place with marble hallways before, and it was just two blocks from the sea so I could walk down to the water in the mornings and listen to the waves lapping at the shoreline while I drank my tea.

Life in Moda wasn’t always idyllic though. In the apartment above me lived a couple that, shall we say, didn’t get along. One day they had a particularly nasty fight that went on for hours. There was more than the usual amount of yelling, and when the verbal argument turned physical, the yelling turned into screams of terror. The walls and ceilings of that building were not particularly thin, but that day they seemed like they were made of paper.

When I hear a woman scream like that, two alarms go off in my head. One alarm tells me there is a damsel in distress and I as a self-respecting man must provide assistance. The other alarm, however, tells me to not be the one who provides that assistance when the dispute is domestic, because an enraged husband will kill anyone intervening in “his” business. There’s a good reason cops around the world say domestic violence calls are the most volatile, and potentially the most dangerous, in the business.

Not sure which alarm to heed, I wandered out into the hallway to see what my other neighbors were doing. They were all standing in their doorways whispering to each other, saying, “What’s going on?” “Should we do something?” and “I wonder if she’s okay?”

In halting Turkish I stammered out a suggestion, something I was almost too embarrassed to say because I assumed that of course they would have done it a long time ago. I said, “Should we call the cops?” Their whispering stopped dead and they looked at me expectantly, as if they thought I was about to deliver a punch line. Then a moment later when they realized I was serious, they burst out laughing.

Confused, frustrated, and angry, I wandered back to my apartment and a few minutes later walked down to the sea to calm myself. I couldn’t bear the crashing sounds of the fight any longer, and I couldn’t understand why my neighbors had laughed at my suggestion to call the police.

A few years later I found out, through first-hand experience, why they had laughed at me…

One day my wife and I drove over to her parents’ place for lunch. We were excited to find a parking space just around the corner from their home. Istanbul is a congested city and it’s rare to find a public parking space anywhere near your final destination. My wife was driving, and as she maneuvered the car into the empty space the owners of the neighborhood market we were parking in front of ran out to shoo us away, telling us no, we couldn’t park there, that that space was reserved for customers of the store.

In Istanbul this practice is quite common. Markets block off spaces at the curb outside their front doors, even if the curb is public domain and anyone is theoretically allowed to park there.

…

[This is an excerpt from the chapter "Don't call the cops" in A Tight Wide-open Space.]