Istanbul, büyükşehir belediyesi.

On our last days in Istanbul we ambled arbitrarily.


We took the ferry across the Bosphorous and watched the black cranes congregate on the breakwater beyond the bobbing kadıköy balon.


One afternoon I stared into the bustling throttle of an underpass between the Eminonu esplanade and the Yeni Camii, waiting for the emergence of the only recognizable face. In time this became osmosis with the microcosm.


I became recognizable on the streets as "girl with toothpick",


sometimes incarnated as "dragon with toothpick."


I photographed the architecture of colliding eras.


We befriended cats and watched them conduct social etiquette far less amicable with each other than with us.


Andrew got a 1 up.


We ate perfectly collaborated meal combinations and had our last sliver of baklava eyed by a cat.


And then it was skipping stones at dawn, to München before the great hop of the Atlantic.

Amasra, black sea.

We administered a last scramble to the black sea coast before we were due to fly out. We veered though Safronbolu and came out into the crescent of scraggly rocks that is Amasra.


Directly across the sea, though completely indiscernible, lies the jutting landmass of Sevastopol, Ukraine.



More readily apparent was the landfill directly across from the workout park.



Mystery tickets to the wind.

nargileh + chess.

When I first got to Istanbul someone exposed to me to a nargileh cafe behind a graveyard in the University district of Cemberlitas. It felt like a smoking room on a luxury liner from the early part of the century, probably right up to the class segregation.


Waiters would shuffle up and down the aisles stocked with pyramids of tea amidst shelves of Turkish academia. They'd put a glass down on your table when you appeared finished, making 1 lira tallies on your corresponding order sheet accordingly.


Assuming you obliged this gesture regularly, you could were welcomed to spend hours smoking a single pipe of nargileh. And we did, every day, for at least a couple hours.





Perhaps nothing is more conducive to chess.


Aspects of my genial subconscious are forever indebted to the Turk Ocağı.

a (minor) jaunt to Sofia.

We from Beirut back to Istanbul on Christmas Day. The allure of the overcast weather and clouded minarets won out as the opportune setting for the holiday. The odd marriage of Christmas trees and the Lebanese national symbol added to the always surreal mirage of parades, carols and seasonal lighting. Back to the shadows.


But as New Year's encroached, so did affordable accommodation. While not short of spending a week developing a committed romance to long afternoons of nargileh and chess, we sorted this out by opting for the night bus to Bulgaria a couple days prior to the year-flip.

The bus stewardess was so charming in her care for our well being during our border crossing that I psychologically adopted her as my Bulgarian mother figure. She had a long parka that stood as an indicator of the cold eastern-european winter that lay ahead.


She wore it righteously, Bulgaria was cold.


Sofia, the capital, is pretty close to the western border of the country, surrounded by Romania, Serbia and Macedonia - well landlocked and far from any warming Mediterranean air. Unlike Turkey, commercial (and specifically, culinary) establishments paled in abundance. Signage was modest, and when we finally found a hostel; it was hiding in rooms wedged off the trunk of a dim, tight concrete stairwell. It felt post-communist and nascent-capitalist; I suppose it felt like eastern europe.


A fantastic, ragged old orange tram snaked through the city. It was right outside our window and routinely sparked in passing - loud crackles heard from our freezing, white room. Later we realized the driver would have to scuttle out to manually switch the tram's path on the rails.


The streets were only occupied in an objective-oriented manner, people shuffling on the ice from point A to point B. The market felt like a crippled product port, consumers working against the much lauded normative temperature of the human body. We did find a coffee house packed to the brim, stuffed as tight as a subway at rush hour and boasting with energy carried from both vodka and coffee. Certainly, the place to be.


On New Year's we bought an array of groceries and prepared a buffet dinner in our attic stronghold. We acquired wine from the nearest street-side barrel, and watched the sparks from the tram crackle by before and after the fireworks.


We assimilated well to being objective oriented civilians living in an urban landscape in winter. We left our dwelling to seek goods and carry out tasks, and travelled to get places in the most direct fashion.

Otherwise, we stayed indoors.


While pleasurable in moderation, it all felt a rather poor way to visit a country, though we had little incentive to do much else.


And so, as per the deduction of getting the most out our travels, aborted Poland and Germany.


And on New Year's Day we took the night bus back to Istanbul.

(All pictures taken from the attic, which is to say in Bulgaria, by Andrew C.H.)