According to their logic, if they can’t hear their conversation over the music, they should talk louder. If their conversation gets so loud they can’t hear the music anymore, they should turn up the music. Then if the music is so loud they can’t hear their conversation anymore, they should talk even louder. And so on. Being in Istanbul is like being in a noisy nightclub all day long, every day.
Istanbul doesn’t have one central downtown area the rest of the city feeds into. Instead, it has half a dozen transportation and commercial hubs spread around the city. Taksim is one of these hubs. Just north of Taksim is a neighborhood called Harbiye, and in Harbiye was my first apartment in Turkey.
I found that apartment online before I left Seattle. One day in Seattle I couldn’t bear waiting any longer, so I jumped online and found a no-lease, month-to-month, small but clean building that catered to foreigners. I reserved one of the apartments sight unseen. That’s how I came to live at the Istanbul Suites.
When I made the reservation I didn’t realize how much my girlfriend wanted to be the one to find me my first apartment in Turkey. I considered finding that apartment over the internet a sign of eagerness and initiative. My girlfriend, however, saw it as a lack of trust in her and a usurpation of her duties. As is the normal practice in Turkey, she had moved in with her parents. The apartment I had found was on the other side of the city, and my girlfriend had hoped to find me a place nearer to her when the reunions with her family and friends subsided.
Now that I look back on it, I realize I had only needed to wait a few more weeks, but at the time all I knew was that I was in Seattle, and my girlfriend was in Istanbul, and I was eager to move on to the next phase of my life. Each additional week tooling around Seattle waiting to go to Istanbul was feeling like a year.
My girlfriend never forgave me for finding myself an apartment before she did. Every time she’d bring it up in the years that followed I would argue that it just showed how eager I was to be with her, but I could never bring her around to seeing it that way, and eventually I just filed it away under “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Harbiye is a narrow neighborhood perched on top of a thin ridge running between the two much larger neighborhoods Taksim to the south and Sisli to the north. Harbiye’s streets are so small and cramped I could practically lean out my window and touch my neighbors across the way. On the eastern edge of Harbiye runs Cumhuriyet Caddesi (Republic Boulevard), a major thoroughfare connecting Taksim and Sisli. On the neighborhood’s western edge, a mere five blocks from Cumhuriyet Caddesi, is a steep drop-off at the bottom of which runs another major arterial, home to dusty car repair shops and used tire stores.
Harbiye is a gritty neighborhood, but it is centrally located and I could get to just about anywhere from it. It also has plenty of beauty once I learned where to look. Less than one block from my apartment was the Vatican City consulate, and behind the consular walls grew a lush garden that spilled over the walls and pressed out into the street.
Some of the neighborhood’s restaurants and bakeries maintained open-air seating out back where I could step in off the street and enjoy a cup of tea while perching on a bench in a hanging garden.
Adjacent to the Vatican City consulate is a popular private school where, if I happened by at just the right time of afternoon, the sidewalk would be crowded with lively, freshly-scrubbed children in white polo shirts running around yelling and joking with each other as their teachers scurried around trying to herd them onto the school buses waiting to take them home.
…
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Bombs away” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]