Orient Express #4: Museum of Innocence - Part #2

Note: this is a delayed post about a trip back in June this year.

Getting tear-gassed in Istanbul wasn’t part of the Itinerary. 

Before we got to Turkey, protests had erupted over the development of an urban park in Istanbul into a shopping mall. Friends and family sent us worried messages: are you sure you want to go there? Are you going to be safe? 

I dismissed their concerns. 24 hour news channels have a way of sensationalising events, and urban planning isn’t exactly the kind of subject matter that inspires revolutionary fervour.

Besides, we weren’t stupid enough to insert ourselves into the middle of Gezi Park. Common sense gets you a long way, you know?  

And for the most part I felt perfectly safe in Istanbul, even though we stayed near Taksim Square where the protestors congregated. The atmosphere during the day was quite festive. People sung and danced, youths graffitied whatever surface they could manage to spray. At night, the sky above Taksim Square was lit up with fireworks set off by the protestors, the chants grew louder, more boisterous. But in general, most of the people there seem to be both protesting and having a grand time with their mates. 

On June 11 however, things turned a bit sour. 

We were returning to our rental apartment after a day of cruising on the Bosphorus when we decided to stop by Istiklal St - a pedestrian shopping strip running off Taksim Square - for a kebab.

Suddenly we saw protestors running towards us, their faces covered in masks and before we knew what was happening, a tear gas grenade had gone off, and we were paralysed by the heat. I couldn’t breathe through my nose, I couldn’t breathe through my mouth, I couldn’t open my eyes. It burnt up my nostrils, into my chest, it stung under my eyelids, it stung at the back of my throat. I stumbled through the streets half blinded, surrounded by footsteps. 

Suddenly someone grabbed my arm, “LADY!” he yelled, pushing hair out of my face, “look at me!" 

I looked up just as he sprayed some antacids in my face. As I blinked, the stinging stopped, even if it did leave me with the appearance of having toothpaste on my face. 

Realising things were only going to get worse, I grabbed my friend and ducked into an alleyway running off Istiklal. The sole bar in that alleyway was closed, but the owners were banging on their glass windows and motioning us to come inside. The door opened and we walked into a room full of protestors, sitting in front of the TV, smoking and watching live footage of Taksim Square on CNN. They handed us masks, water, napkins and gave us a minute to breathe. An awkward silence descended.

"Welcome to Turkey,” I said, wiping toothpaste and eyeliner off my face. And suddenly, everyone was laughing, shaking their heads in exasperation.

Two girls emerged from the back who spoke fluent, American-textbook English, and they took us to the roof top where we watched from afar as the riot police - in line formations - slowly cleared the protestors out of Taksim Square with water cannons and tear gas. 

I didn’t want to take sides or hold an opinion on the domestic politics of a country I was visiting, but it seemed hard to justify such heavy-handed tactics on perfectly legitimate protest. What was even harder to understand was the rationale behind the plan to turn public green space, which benefits local residents, into a profit-generating mall that benefits private enterprise.

It just seems to be the kind of dystopian world once described by a wise lady called Joni Mitchell: “they paved paradise, put up a parking lot …" 

Media van at Taksim got completely trashed. 

The one episode above aside, the rest of our time in Istanbul was splendid. At Istanbul Modern, the city’s gorgeous contemporary art gallery, I jotted down this poem on the wall, which aptly described what I had seen, heard and felt up to that point on my journey. 

And thus spoke the place: 
Bring me the thrills of the first time you saw me,
Each of which became a path for you in a different work.
Bring yourself to me. 

The remains of every single piece, mixed up in the earth.
Bring me a piece of my old guests,
That piece you used to love to dearly.
Bearing the faces of 19 people lined up side by side, looking at us.

Sculpted in solid wood by Kurimbu villagers,
The story of each suspended in faraway places, like empty suitcases.
Bring me 19 suitcases,
Each concealing the memory of a different person. 

Bring me all the moments you were lost in,
The moments you will look through lenses to seek the traces of time.
Bring me back my old chairs, 
Each will unite me with a different memory.

Bring me that poem of Rumi.
That beings with the lines, "How good to migrate anew everyday.
And how beautiful to settle anew everyday." 
And ends saying, "So many words that belong to yesterday.
Now we need to say new things." 

Bring me the people,
May each be the storytellers of their home towns. 
Bring me your dreams,
Those dreams that turned me into you, head to foot, as I lived. 
Bring me my own memory
That memory I yearn to meet.
Bring me everything, 
Each thing the everything of something else. 

Suleymaniye Mosque was my favourite in Istanbul - partly because it was far quieter than the Blue Mosque, and partly because it was situated in an area where every single street sold just ONE thing: there was a mop street, a rope street, bucket street, screw driver street … you get the drift.

Ain’t no way to do capitalism, Istanbul. 

On the Bosphorus cruise with a group of school kids who kept on shouting "KONICHIWA” in my face. Geez friggin Louise, at least pick the right stereotype. 

I can attest to the fact that EVERYTHING at the Spice Market was DERICIOUS. 

Orient Express #4: Museum of Innocence - Part #1

I meant to finish writing about my travels back in June this year, but life has taken a turn for the cray cray: I’ve changed jobs, started studying again, taken on more language classes and began dedicating every remaining spare second I have to recovering from the sheer enormity of each day.

It took a while for me to get around to sorting the photos from Istanbul, so long in fact that when I finally did, they made me want to go back to that hazy, sparkling, topaz-coloured city that is neither here nor there. A sui generis stuck between Europe and Asia, with traces of the Romans, the Byzantines, and Ottomans littered all over the city.

We spent a week in Istanbul (with a quick trip to Gallipoli - a story for another time), and it was easily the best time we had on the entire trip. I kept a written notebook this trip, and pages and pages of it were filled with stories from Istanbul, accounts of the food we ate, the sights we saw, the history and stories we heard, or the wonderfully passionate people we met along the way.

But for now, I’ll just let the pictures tell the tale. The place really did have such stunning shades of blue, and not just because of my tendency to oversaturate my photographs. 

Orient Express #3: Brasov

The original plan was to head to Bucharest from Budapest, but after hearing a lot of negative feedback about the Romanian capital, we decided to stop instead in the Transylvanian region of Romania, and the city of Brasov became our base for the region. 

It all started with that long train ride overnight, chugging away gently into the Carpathian Mountains. The landscape looked more and more agrarian. Peasants worked in the field with their hands and simple tools. Everything looked like a scene from a bygone decade where life was hard but simple. 

Old Town Brasov, like every other European city, centres around a square. The architecture was mildly Germanic, due to the strong Saxon influence in the area.

Venture out of the old town a little and it immediately starts to look industrial and post-communist. At times when I’ve walked past a particularly hideous set of apartment blocks, I could’ve sworn I had been there before - back in the China of the 1990s. Communism has a unique talent for producing the same grotesquely sombre architecture all over the world.

Rope Street, famous for being the “narrowest street in Eastern Europe”. Of what significance this is no one really knows. But it does have a nice ring to it. 

Our gorgeous apartment, right at the foot of Mt Tampa and the famous BRASOV sign. 

The Bran Castle behind me, remotely associated with Vlad the Impaler, also known as the real life Dracula. But in fact, the castle curated some more interesting stories about the former Romanian royal family than our old friend Vlad. 

On our third day in town, we decided to hike up Mount Tampa, the mountain just behind the Brasov Old Town. The mountains near Brasov are famous for being bear-infested, and it’s not a rare occurrence for tourists to come across bears, so I was a little alarmed as we were hiking.

But in the end, the only wild life we saw were some deers. The woods blocked out all the sounds of traffic from below. Bird twittered. The damp ground smelled like rain and moss. The sun eventually peeked through the dense forrest, and we were loving the dose of nature after a week of city hopping. 

Compared to Paris and Budapest, Brasov was somewhat off the beaten track. The tourist infrastructure was poor, even though Brasov was considered to be a tourist town. As obvious foreigners, we had to fend for ourselves a lot more, hire drivers, watch out for scams, and know when to trust our own instincts. 

But Brasov was also where we lived it up, dining out at the best restaurants in town, drinking copious amounts of vino blanco, hiking and cycling deep into the countryside where little old ladies with square scarfs around their heads stared as if they’ve never seen an Asian person before.  

The more savvy English speakers we met listened to our tales of gallivanting across the countryside and hiking in bear infested mountains like we were crazies. In Brasov, we felt bold and active and onto something special. 

And indeed we were. 

xx doots

Orient Express #2: Budapessshht.

“First things first: a pest is an epidemic disease, and my beautiful city is not that. So from now, you will call it Budapesht”. 

That got a giggle from the crowd. It was a cheery start to the “free walking tour” of Budapesht, the second stop on our journey from Paris to Istanbul. 

We had rented an apartment on AirBnB, and coming from the opulence of Paris, it was a shock to step into the apartment complex and see decay - decay everywhere. Peeling art nouveau walls, rotting elaborate door frames, rusty iron handles on creaky lifts. The apartment itself was newly refurbished, but it seemed out of place, stuck in a building that was literally falling apart, crushed and forgotten by age.

We would later learn that this is fairly common in Budapest, particularly in the some old neighbourhoods where many apartment buildings are still owned by the government. The rent is low, there is no body corporate and little incentive for individual renters to fix what they regard as common property, so many art nouveau buildings are simply left to rot and completely fall apart. Indeed, in some cases, the government would get more money out of redeveloping the land after a building has been demolished than to restore an old building to its former glory.

But what is the long term effect of this kind of defacing of a city? It seems to be a tension wherever I go in the world. And even when you do restore heritage, how do you keep it real at the same time? How do you do it without raising the rent, without excluding those on the margins who have been allowed to live in relatively peace in their rotting old town apartments?

I’m not sure if there is an easy solution, but I do remember feeling a sense of pity when I brushed away the dust on the staircase of my rental apartment to reveal white marble underneath.

Our apartment building. 

Museum of terror

But as the Mumford song goes, you must know life to see decay. Budapest has known a lot of life, and even in its apparent post-communist, decaying dormancy, we saw signs of a vibrant culture: the glittering opera house and some of the cheapest opera tickets you will ever be able to buy (we paid about $50 for front show box seats). The cafes and ruin bars tucked away in dilapidated yards in the Jewish district. The hipsters with a licence to wear their grandpa’s loafers. Cheap drinks, delicious (much underrated) wine, artery-cloggingly rich food. 

We ate, drank and lived like kings at night, and walked through streets filled with the smell of cinnamon during the day, learning about history, Hungary’s long history of resistance and adaptation - first as foreigners from Central Asia who settled at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, and later as a people dealing with a taut relationship with their successive invaders - the Mongolians, the Turks, the Habsburgs, the Communists … 

There are some cities that you bookmark for “One Day”. That One Day when you’ll have the time, the leave, the opportunity to visit again. I left Budapest with a bookmark, hoping that when I return on that One Day, there will be less decay and more dusting off of the brilliant city beneath the decades of dormancy.