“How the heck do you know all these people around the world?” Calistoga asked me over IM as I sat in a house in Istanbul overlooking the Bosphorus Channel. That’s the funny thing. I didn’t even meet half these people after moving to Zurich. I knew most of them long before that, while living in my little condo in the suburbs of Mountain View. Of course, the number of people I’m meeting over here who are from other places entirely is growing, and I can’t say I haven’t had the urge recently to consider staying in Europe for the long haul, if only because I want a turn with my friends on this side of the world as well.
Someone is yelling in Turkish downstairs. “Jess,” BigG says faintly from the staircase,” “my mom wants you to come and eat breakfast.” BigG worked at Google with me in Mountain View. He’s on sabbatical the next three months, although everyone is convinced he isn’t going to return, because that’s what everyone does who goes on “sabbatical” at Google. I guess they become too busy constructing their lunar observatories or running plumbing to their private islands or preparing for their maiden voyages into space.
“But what would I do with myself if I didn’t go back?” BigG asks me while smoking a cigarette on his veranda. We’re sitting under a pergola with orange-flowering vines raining down around us, on a marble terrace with a view of his neighbor’s white-columned mansion and the tankers and sailboats traveling the channel. The wind is warm, almost hot, but it’s polite – a mellow breeze that twirls the ends of your hair over your shoulder in a teasing way. A brown tabby cat from another yard lays stretched out on the stones at our feet, his back legs reaching straight out like he’s just leaped from a high fence. Motivation is hard to come by here, but luckily, so are regrets.
I could think of things to do, but that of course isn’t the question. BigG is taking sailing lessons and working on the house and has a number of other projects he needs to complete before returning to California, but with no girlfriend or wife or children to tend to, his directions, like mine, are hardly predefined or clear. I don’t know if “What do I want to do?” is a question that BigG is used to asking himself. I don’t know him well enough to ascertain if he’s spent most of his time caring for others or for himself, and in my opinion there’s nothing immoral about either one except that it’s necessary to actively balance the two always. Caring only about yourself or only about others won’t confer peace or happiness in your soul either way. I was raised in a Chinese household that emphasizes guilt and the suppression of self-indulgence for the benefit of family and others. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with raising humble, grateful children, but after spending the majority of my life battling with what I wanted versus what other people want, my happiness against the happiness of others, I’ve come to realize that these things are in fact inextricably intertwined. Even the Dali Lama says that you must pursue your own happiness in parallel with helping to ensure the happiness and well being of others, because there is no way you can effectively induce happiness in others if you don’t possess the very thing you’re trying to endorse.
BigG’s mom has cooked us a veritable feast – an omelet of sorts with greens and tomatoes, feta cheese, fresh bread, homemade red and yellow plum jam from the trees in the garden, butter and olives and a bottomless pot of dark Turkish tea in curvaceous little glasses. I can’t stop eating the plum jam on the bread. Or the feta cheese. Or drinking the Turkish tea. “You’ll do well here,” BigG observes with his cigarette dangling from two fingers. “Most foreigners won’t eat this stuff.”
“I tend to be a garbage disposal,” I say, spreading red plum jam on one side of a piece of bread and yellow plum jam on the other, so as to use the maximum surface area. “I have my limits though. You won’t see me eating chicken feet or pig’s knuckles. I guess I’m not a fan of olives either,” I add.
“Olives could be a problem,” he replies. “Of course, if you like olive oil you’ll be ok.” Olive oil I can do. And baklava. Sweet, cavity-inducing baklava. We’d gone out to a cafe earlier in the week where I’d had the baklava sampler and eaten nearly all of it. I’d only left the one piece because as BigG pointed out, “That piece is not really baklava.” I know an imposter when I taste it.
Istanbul reminds me a little bit of Cape Town, South Africa, with its amazing natural resources, innate beauty, and glaring dichotomy between wealthy and poor. Ever since the government dropped all the zeroes at the end of its currency, the Turkish Lira has been strong, and we easily spent as much as I did in Zurich on dinners, the only difference being that here we could sit on roof terraces with views of the sea and listen to the calls to prayer sung all day long from the minarets of the dozens of mosques along the shores of the channel. Of course, this increase in wealth never benefits everyone, and this can’t be any more apparent than in Istanbul where everyone is trying to sell something all of the time, since all of the time there is a need to survive. BigG and I spent most of our three days eating and drinking tea instead of being tourists, which I was happy to have a break from being, which also meant that he had a lot more time to point out the intricacies of living in this big, beautiful, corrupt city than he would otherwise had we been running around from mosque to mosque taking pictures.
Living in Istanbul has an element of overwhelming personal invasion, terror, and delight to it that I haven’t yet experienced anywhere else. While driving and crossing the street are daily adventures in and of themselves, there’s a sensation of lawlessness that permeates all aspects of life here and makes each day a bit unknowable. “It’s not that there are no laws,” BigG explained, “it’s just that it’s never clear what’s allowed and what’s not allowed.” You can talk your way out of a lot of things if you know what to say, and as is to be expected, you can also talk your way into places with a smile and even a bit of honesty.
BigG and I were walking down the street enroute to his old university when I saw a poster I particularly liked advertising a music event. It featured an illustration of a bright-eyed crow holding a piece of cheese in its beak and was plastered all over a temporary wall along with myriad other ads. “That’s a great poster,” I remarked. “You want it?” BigG asked. “Ok,” I said, instantly onto his intention. We tore it off the wall, rolled it up, and continued on our way along the water. When we got to the university, a guard came out of the booth at the foot of the road leading up the hill to the main entrance. BigG explained in Turkish that he wanted to show his friend the university. This sparked a long, skeptical conversation during which the guard asked why I had a large camera around my neck and why I was carrying a rolled up poster. Apparently he feared us pasting political propaganda all over campus. BigG unrolled the poster and showed it to him, but he still looked doubtful. Five minutes of conversation later, and BigG had him patting him on the back and shaking hands like they were old friends, saying, “Welcome to your school!” and inviting us to walk up the road like VIP guests.
“What the hell did you say to him?” I asked BigG as we climbed the steps to campus. “I just told him we took the poster because we liked it.” “And he believed that?” I said. “Maybe it reminded him of the days when he did that kind of stuff just because he could. Telling the truth doesn’t hurt, either.” No, it really doesn’t. In fact, that little bit of wisdom could have changed the past five years of my life, had I bothered to employ it at the time.
We wandered around campus in the late afternoon light while BigG entertained me with tales of undergrad in Istanbul. We eventually ended up sitting on a high stone wall overlooking the water until dusk, surrounded by students chatting, smoking, and blasting music on their laptops. Invariably we started talking about work, people at work, life at work, and how choosing to work where we did ended us up here. “I never got into Stanford like my mom wanted,” I said. “But if I did, I suppose I wouldn’t be sitting in Istanbul right now musing about how I didn’t get into Stanford.” Unfortunately, the infinite nature of “what if” means that I could still have ended up in Istanbul, or I could have been married already with three kids, or I could have been a veterinarian treating horses with colds, or I could have gone to law school instead of skipping out on the LSAT the day I was supposed to take it, or I could contemplate the infinite possibilities for an infinite amount of time like the chimpanzees with their typewriters who eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare, and I’d eventually come up with what? The life I could have had a year ago that I think I still I want back? If I had an infinite amount of time and possibilities, would I really come up with exactly the same scenario I had before? Clearly, the probability of this is small, but being a mere mortal and unable to think infinitely, it’s easier to fall back on a pre-invented life than it is to create a new one with unlimited constraints. The irony is that is nearly what I have before me – the opportunity to create whatever I want from here on forward with nothing to hold me back except my own colorfully ambitious but timidly pragmatic imagination.
BigG smoked until his cigarette box fell off the concrete ledge and into the bushes far below. “That’s God telling you not to smoke so much,” I said. “Wouldn’t God strike me with a bolt of lightning to tell me not to smoke rather than do something that just seems like an accident?” he asked. “No,” I said, “God doesn’t always need to be dramatic to get his point across.” Sometimes, I thought, He just bores you to death until you get the point, which I think is His way of making you think you came up with the idea to do something else on your own.
Case in point. BigG brought up a failed flirt with someone he had worked with on a project team back in Mountain View. “She turned out to be boring,” he said. “All she talked about was herself.”
“But that’s all anyone ever talks about,” I replied. “Themselves.” BigG looked at me as if to say, “Yes, but…”
“Yes, but,” I continued, “I understand, you have to have opinions on things, viewpoints on the world, stuff you’ve read about, ideas to share. Otherwise, you’re just boring.”
“Exactly,” BigG said.
I’ve started to think I have too many opinions. Perhaps there’s a line you cross where you go from interesting to annoying, and I have a tendency to jump that line all the time. By day two in Istanbul I’d already managed to get in a big political fight with BigG about Canada, gun control, the NRA, and the Constitution. We didn’t speak to each other for an hour while sitting in his living room on our laptops, cartoon wisps of smoke wafting from our heads. Luckily, both of us get bored easily, even with grudges, and an hour later we were chatting as if the argument had never occurred. The trouble is, not everyone is so forgiving, and my penchant for opinionated tirades and outbursts of personal belief remains in the memory of others for a lot longer than I’d like. It’s a reaction I learned, I know, from my mother, who taught me to never let anyone walk all over me, and while that’s both a great defense and offense, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for compromise, or what BigG pointed out this week as “the benefit of the doubt” – not assuming that everyone is out to get you, and that in fact some people, especially those you love, even have your best interests in mind.
It’s almost crazy that BigG has come up with this attitude in of all places, Istanbul, where everyone seems to be trying to swindle a little extra out of everyone else and where it seems next to impossible to get the whole story out of anyone. He and I were walking down the street trying to locate a cafe (as we spent much of our time there doing) when a distraught man interrupted to ask us in accented English if we understood him. He then asked BigG if he was Turkish, and if I was as well, which is when I saw that I looked just ethnic enough to pass for a variety of nationalities around the world. He said that he was from Ethiopia and had lost his credit card and was told he needed to call a number back in Ethiopia to cancel the card, but had no calling card or money to pay for the call. He asked BigG if he could use his cell phone. Every red light in my head was now flashing and I thought for sure that if he used BigG’s cell phone there’d be some $500/minute charge on it from somewhere in Nigeria. BigG dug in his pocket but didn’t pull out his cell. Instead he pulled out a twenty lira note and handed it to the guy. “Is this enough to make a phone call?” he asked. The man looked flabbergasted. He wanted to get contact information to pay it back. BigG declined, saying it was no problem. The guy thanked us profusely, then headed up the street.
“Do you think he was telling the truth?” I asked BigG as we started walking again. “Probably,” BigG said. “But if we run into anymore Ethiopians with lost credit cards, we’ll know.” It likely didn’t matter if the guy was telling the truth or not. BigG had just done a good deed whether that man was going to make a phone call or use the money to buy dinner. Even if your scam is to run around Istanbul telling people you’ve lost your credit card, it’s not exactly a profession with a 401k and excellent health benefits. And anyhow, the benefit of the doubt meant just that – that the guy probably had lost his credit card and we’d just saved him a hell of a lot of trouble.
If you’ve looked at any of the photos in the gallery by now (having had to take a break from this absurdly long entry), you’ll see that I did convince BigG to take me to a few touristy spots, or at least, the ones that he could stomach for longer than twenty minutes. He absolutely refused to go to the Grand Bazaar, but he still indulged my desire to pick up those cute and curvy tea glasses and saucers at the Turkish equivalent of Crate & Barrel, and let me run around trying every variation on Turkish Delight in the Spice Bazaar, and went into Hagia Sophia (built in 532 AD) and the totally cool Basilica Cistern, an enormous underground water cistern built in the 6th century. The cistern isn’t full today otherwise you wouldn’t be able to go inside, but at capacity it could hold over 21 million gallons of water, acquired from aqueducts in the Belgrade Woods, 12 miles away. Interestingly, the ceilings leak in places, and we weren’t sure if this was coming from the aqueducts or the street above. BigG said that when he was a kid, you could tour through the place in a rowboat, but since then they’ve built wooden platforms throughout the cistern.
There’s all this stuff that I thought I didn’t like before I went to Turkey, such as baklava and pistachios, but now I even know the difference between the fancy Turkish delight made with honey by confectioners and the cheap kind made with glucose that’s a whole lot sweeter but a whole lot worse for you. I also know that hazelnuts in Turkish Delight are too overpowering for this subtle candy and you should always stick with the original pistachio version. I still won’t eat pistachios by themselves or baklava made in California, but at least my dessert world has gotten a little bit bigger.
The Spice Bazaar really does have spices in huge, powdery piles with plastic scoops, chunks of gelatinous candy and dried eggplants on long strings. It also has a lot of things that annoy BigG, like those people peddling belly dancing outfits, colorful glass lamps, and Turkish Viagra. “Five times in the night!” one sign proclaims. “This crap didn’t used to be here,” he says as we walk through the market. “It all used to be just spices.” BigG also doesn’t seem to know what to do about the salespeople who accost you from all sides as you try to window shop. This happened to me in South Africa as well, but most of the time the salespeople had a limited set of English phrases to choose from and you got used to the routine. Like in South Africa, the lines here went something like, “Looking is free,” and “No charge for coming inside,” and “Best prices!” and “I give you good deal!” We walked through this shouting, with the occasional salesperson stepping in front of us to interrupt our stroll.
“You and me, we were in Vegas!” I looked over at a guy who was gesturing towards his wares. “I don’t think I was in Vegas with that guy,” I said to BigG. “But I suppose anything is possible.”
“Hey, Charlie’s Angels!” another guy said as he darted out of his shop to pull aside three women.
“Let’s get out of here,” BigG said as he started hustling for the exit. BigG may hate bazaars, but he’s a sucker for tea cafes. I actually think he’s a on a personal mission to drink tea at every cafe in Istanbul. This is a good thing though, as he’s also now on the lookout for the best baklava in all of Istanbul, so when I return in September he’ll know where to take me.
If you haven’t checked out the Istanbul gallery yet, it’s here.
And by the way, the story of the crow and the cheese is an Aesop fable about vanity. It’s winter, and a hungry fox sees a crow sitting high up in a tree with a piece of cheese in its mouth. He keeps talking to the crow but the crow won’t say anything because he doesn’t want to drop his cheese. So the fox asks the crow to sing, because he wants to hear his beautiful voice. Eventually the crow is narcissitically convinced, opens his beak to caw, and drops the cheese for the fox to steal. And as everyone knows, crows will never win American Idol, so the crow is left with no dinner and no glory either. Of course, hearing this fable as a child, I felt bad for the vain crow instead of good for the clever fox, even though I think the lesson you’re supposed to learn is not to be vain. What I took away from it: everyone wants a piece of someone else’s cheese.
