(The notes and photos are at https://sive.rs/met/at-16)
I just spent 12 days in 10 different neighborhoods in Istanbul, meeting up with 30 local people for 60 hours of conversation.
Bad news first: most people are frustrated.
The #1 issue is the economy. Prices of everything are double or triple what you’d expect. Manhattan prices but Turkish salaries. Life is unaffordable, and everyone mentions it all the time. It feels like a full-on crisis.
Turkish people are famous for their sweet generosity, but financial desperation can make anyone selfish. Many people said they feel a big difference in Istanbul culture: pushing, cheating, and impatient anger.
The #2 issue is politics. The government jails opponents, including the mayor of Istanbul, so people are wary and self-censoring. I chose ten different coffee shops for meeting, but two different friends refused to meet me at one of them, explaining, “We boycott that one because it’s owned by the government.” People wear the image of Atatürk - the 1923 founder of the country - as the symbol of resistance.
The rest is good news.
Istanbul is super-social. Faces look at friends, not phones. Cafés, restaurants, coffee shops, always full of people talking. The later the hour, the bigger the crowd. Coffee shops are open until midnight.
Yes that clashes with the economy issue, and I’m not sure how both are true. Maybe people are skipping big expenses, and allowing themselves the relatively-cheap pleasure of tea with friends. I noticed they nurse their drinks longer, so they’d have one cup of tea for every four or five of mine.
I’ve never seen so many women with plastic surgery bandages on their face: nasal splint, wrapped jawline, black eyes, yet still out working, walking, and talking in cafés. Istanbul keeps you social, no matter what. No hiding.
Almost everyone is Muslim, with a wide variety of observance. The call to prayer comes over the loudspeakers of the mosques, five times a day. I loved talking with people about Islam.
A surprising number of people I met had attended Robert College - an American high school in Istanbul.
Although the people I met were all fluent in English, most people here aren’t. Turkish is an interesting language and I grew to love the sound of it. Turkish uses the same word for he, she, and it: “O”. So it was sweet hearing people accidentally mix up gender when speaking English, like, “My sister, he is visiting.”
20% of the population is Kurdish, but when I asked anyone about Kurds, they were visibly uncomfortable. Two people asked me to remove any mention of it from my notes from our conversation. So it’s clearly a very sensitive subject.
Public transportation here is great. I took only one taxi in 12 days. The rest was bus and subway and especially the ferry. Oh man, I love the ferries. Such a wonderful functional pause. Water divides the city - (defines the city!) - so I took the ferry twice a day in all directions. The quiet, the view, the perspective, the break. Then after 20 minutes you’re back on land and back in the pedestrian rhythm.
Istanbulites don’t like seeing the unbounded sea as much as lights twinkling back at them. Real estate prices are lower for open sea views, and higher for homes that can see something on the other side.
The variety of neighborhoods is amazing. As if New York and Los Angeles were side-by-side in one big city. Each side says the other side is crazy or lazy. I stayed in ten different neighborhoods in ten days, and barely scratched the surface. To get to know it better, I plan to come back and live here for at least a year.
The notes and photos are at https://sive.rs/met/at-16
We’d love to meet you in Brasil.
Interesting.
Let me know when you come to Quebec city!