Istanbul, Turkey

Since I last wrote, we've been to Istanbul and back!  Turkey!  Never in my life did I think I'd end up walking the streets of that city, completely anonymous, to later have 400 people watching me and 5 of my dearest friends perform on stage. What an amazing contrast.  

Yet again, being there feels a bit like a dream that never happened.  We got off the plane and were met by a woman hired to be our assistant for the show.  She'd arranged a van to pick us up.  Cozy bucket seats, blue track lighting on the roof, and curtains. party.  Driving from the airport into the city took a good while.  The highway seemed to stretch on forever with the city right at its side.  Tons and tons of apartment buildings with uniform rectangle windows filled the spaces between commercial lots, which ran parallel and oddly close to the highway (really, if your Frogger skills were quite advanced and you had an insatiable lust for danger, you could hop yourself across 6 lanes of traffic, then cross one calm street and find yourself at the front steps of some giant clothing store.  strange!).

After 20 minutes or so we were near the heart of the city.  Our hotel lay smack in the middle of cobblestone, curvy streets of tall, colorful buildings.  The architecture was classic European city center in style.  Beautiful, seemingly old, multipurpose buildings that looked as though someone might work or live above a first floor retail space.  Many closed storefronts were shielded behind metal, rolling garage doors, like in New York.  But what was most striking to me that first night was the amount of bustling energy in the streets.  It was nearly 11:30p by the time we walked back from dinner, and people were all around!  Tables and tables of old men, even, having drinks and appetizers!  It reminded me of Spain, where the nights are long and the mornings start late.  

However, it's difficult to know what a city truly is.  Istanbul is the second most populous city in the world, with roughly 14 million people.  That's 2 million larger than New York City.  And of such a large city, we were definitely on a street filled with hotels, which was just behind a street filled with shops and restaurants.  ...Perhaps my perception was a bit crafted, probably by people in an office somewhere.

My night ended relaxing in the hotel room, drinking Raki with Travis and talking about life and such.  Raki (pronounced more like ra-kuh, I think), is the traditional liquor of Turkey.  It's crystal clear until you add just a dash of water, turning it into this cloudy, hazy white.  It's flavored with Anais, giving it a light licorice taste.  I sipped on a small glass of it while we wondered out loud about what in the world we'd be doing if we weren't in this band, the usefulness of our dusty college degrees, and the great paradox of touring--it is the joy of traveling and playing music every night for a "living," and truly feeling how special that is and the  occasional feeling which intrudes upon said notion and cries, "Uhhh, I'm in another dirty rock club and am hungry and constantly tired and haven't had more than 5 minutes to myself in weeks--remind me, whaaat exactly am I doing with my life?"  

I think it's impossible not to feel that after a weird show, or a reserved crowd, or after you've found yourself tip toeing through another bathroom where the floors are somehow perpetually covered in water, where the stall door may or may not lock, where you likely don't actually want any part of yourself to touch the facilities and the soap dispenser shows no traces of ever having lived up to its name.  Or your "lunch" stop (which is really probably your breakfast) is a gas station croissant, or a hamburger patty without a bun, or just some water and a dream.  

But then, some nights you get to stroll the streets of an old city so incredibly far from where you were born, where men in carts are selling freshly roasted chestnuts and creating the smell of winter.  And when you walk on a stage, 400 pairs of hands are clapping, and people in Istanbul are yelling out for songs you wrote in a living room in Austin, Texas.  And they all seem so excited.  And they all seem so happy.  And then you remember why you've taken on this strange, nomadic, transient way.