Beskitas

30 Days in Istanbul: Day 2

Welcome to Istanbul! We know you haven’t had a good flight, but we’ll still say we hope you did. Please remember not to leave any candy cane chew toys in the seat pocket in front of you, or bonk anyone on the head with your extra dog carrier bag as you exit the aircraft.

For the first week of your stay, you’ll be in the neighbourhood of Besiktas, which, as you’ll learn, is an onomatopoeia. What you would expect to hear if football fans, late-night bars, motorbikes leaping out of thin air and birds that sound like they live in the jungle all collided outside your bedroom window? Yup: Besiktas.

Specifically, you’ll be staying at the apartment of a friend you met once while olive picking, who has generously offered you his space while he goes on holiday. This is wonderful for many reasons, one of them being that inflation in Turkiye has gone up 300% and Airbnbs are not so affordable. Also, because of Jimi.

But first, the apartment. Handed down through generations of friends and undoubtedly rent-controlled, in it, you will find the following amenities:

• a purple velvet couch

• violet bedroom walls

• a Bob Marley Matryoshka doll

• tiny piles of weed on various surfaces.

Your friend leaves early Saturday morning. Jimi has stayed the night the couch, and along with another friend who has come from the other end of town see him, you decide to make a big Turkish breakfast. So you and Jimi head out to the shops together, and you soon realize that Jimi (who also lived in this same apartment once upon a time) knows every single corner of this neighbourhood.

You buy eggs and vegetables at the supermarket, which will be sub par to the market-fresh stuff you get in Fethiye, but that’s the price one pays to be in the big smoke. Jimi then steers you to one shop to get dried apricots, and another to buy two kinds of cheese and one kind of salty black olives, all the best you’ve tried since arriving in Turkiye. Then he heads off to buy simit (like Turkish bagels but - dare I say it? - better than bagels) and a brown bread with walnuts in it, and also chicken for Django, which Jimi has instructed the local chicken guy to cook without spices.

Everyone arriving in Istanbul should get a Jimi for the day.

You have breakfast, and he and the friend chat. She doesn’t speak English and your Turkish doesn’t go much beyond “what is your work,” and you are still so tired, so you nap. Oh, the glory of being in your forties and no longer trying to be polite and make everyone like you. In the late afternoon, after they’ve gone, you and Django take a walk through Besiktas.

Wow.

It’s like Ottawa on Canada Day, but it’s just a regular Saturday. You have to be incredibly vigilant that Django doesn’t get run over or stepped on, because the crowds just keep coming in waves. You can’t stop to check your map without getting in the way. How do people live like this?

You walk down to the square where the ferries across the Bosphorus come. It’s beautiful and sunny, and there are buskers and skateboarders and families, and it is the most unrelaxing outdoor experience imaginable. You wander back through the side streets, which wind and curve at angles so steep you are at once climbing the ground and almost kissing it. You dodge scooters and cars (how do people park cars on these hills?) teaching Django to jump up onto the tiny sidewalks whenever you hear a motor.

But it’s magical. Like time has stopped up here, away from the bars and restaurants and fast fashion shops. You greet cats, congratulate yourself on the cardio you are getting, and gaze into old, regal apartments and threadbare doorways and at baskets on ropes lowered for groceries.

What you would expect to hear if football fans, late-night bars, motorbikes leaping out of thin air and birds that sound like they live in the jungle all collided outside your bedroom window?

Finally, you come back home and have snacks.

Jimi has invited you to join some of his friends out tonight. These friends are part of the LGBTQIA2+ community, a space where you have always felt more connected and real, despite being (as your queer friend put it) “the straightest woman alive”. You really want to go. But you are so tired, still. But you came here to make friends! Finally, you tell Jimi no, and he says no problem, let’s hang out tomorrow.

Your living room, you discover, overlooks a very popular bar. You could literally hang out of the window and join the revellers, if you so chose. You do not choose. You choose to get dinner delivered from a nearby restaurant, including a very unTurkish Oreo-based pudding so delicious you have a full conversation with it. You choose to write and do an online 12-step meeting, surrounded by the sounds of partying and bar fights and some kind of hundred-person singalong to Frank Sinatra. And it does not feel like FOMO. Not in the least. It feels like automony. It feels like listening to your body. And it feels like listening to your dog, who is a trooper and has been so brave but could probably use a snuggle.

And, with earplugs and a pillow over your head and Django on his back with his legs in the air, you sleep.

The best part is, the streets are so quiet the next morning. You and Django walk to the park, taking in the glorious silence under the heavy grey sky. A guy with a backpack runs past, his legs flailing like a wind-up toy as he sprints down one of the steep hills. Coffee shops open. Bakeries emit heavenly smells.

And happily, so happily, without a single regret, you go back to bed.