Merhaba!
It’s Monday morning and I am done with Istanbul. Done with overpriced sights, with relentless restaurant promoters, and with haggling to make my souvenir purchases at a remotely fair price. I decide to see the Hagia Sophia at last, then retire to a cafe. Auf Wiedersehen, I am out.
An hour later I wonder how I let myself get scammed at the Hagia’s official ticket counter (ok technically it was a legal upsell, a dual ticket including an adjacent museum I didn’t ask for and had no interest in). Over a cup of çai I reflect on my trip. Istanbul has been stressing me out, but it’s because I made a mistake.
On my trip through the American West, I lived off the beaten path, mostly in small towns with strange names: Sturgis, South Dakota; Buffalo, Wyoming; Salmon and Priest River, Idaho; Dunsmuir, Palm Springs, and 29 Palms, California; Silver City, New Mexico; Cedar City, Utah. I forgot what it is like to walk around as a tourist with a target on your back.
Istanbul was a four day stop on the way to Bali and I wanted to be within walking distance to the major sights. And I was! I picked a lovely family-run bed and breakfast (great price, clean, nice people; would recommend). But of course, the area would be a giant tourist trap.
“The traveller of old was one who went in search of knowledge and whom the indigènes were proud to entertain with their local interests,” Robert Byron reflected in The Road to Oxiana on the time when visitors from distant countries were rare. “If you can come from London to Syria on business, you must be rich. If you can come so far without business, you must be very rich.”1
Affordable transportation made the tourist a global phenomenon. Byron believed the relationship to the locals changed. Interest on both sides declined. “No one cares if you like the place, or hate it, or why. You are simply a tourist, as a skunk is a skunk, a parasitic variation of the human species, which exists to be tapped like a milch cow or a gum tree.” That’s how I often felt in Istanbul: like a cow to be milked, a wallet to be emptied.
Byron explored the world in the 1930s, before globalization and smartphones eased the friction of travel. This new convenience can turn into a trap. Here in Bali a woman proudly showed me her BEEN, a map of all the countries she’d visited. She’d seen an impressive chunk of the world, yet it seemed to me that entire cultures had turned into a to-do list, a badge to collect for bragging rights.
“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move,” Anthony Bourdain wrote. “As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
But how we move matters. If travel is just another form of entertainment (or a way to boost the follower count), the mind can remain comfortably closed.
At one of the kebab restaurants I met a Pakistani waiter, perhaps in his early 30s, slender, very friendly. He was in Istanbul to get his MBA while working 12-hour shifts. “Not healthy,” as he put it. His tired face agreed. The workload affected his attendance and grades but his professors were indifferent to his struggles. I found something noble in his eyes, the way they seemed to gaze past the busy street, toward the future, with stoic determination. I regretted not having a longer conversation (I didn’t even ask his name?!).
That night I woke up and felt my heart overflowing with empathy for the world’s working immigrants, for everyone striving for a better life, caught between cultures.