Breaking Down Walls
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Istanbul-not-Constantinople, waiting for some friends to arrive from the US for a visit. This is one of my favorite cities—it’s a glorious jumble of history and peoples and contradictions and laughter. When anyone asks me why I love Turkey, I say it’s because the people love to laugh. That assessment still holds true. Plus there’s baklava. So. Much. Baklava.
Breaking Down Walls
I have three clear, vivid memories of our first visit to Istanbul (aside from the heat, because Turkey in August is hot). We were on a Mediterranean cruise with Lee’s family, back before we started traveling full time.
On the first day, we walked across the Galata Bridge, and a man in front of us who was carrying a shoe shine box ‘dropped’ a brush. Lee picked it up and handed it to him, and thus began the scammiest scam to which we’ve ever fallen victim. By the time we realized what was happening, we were out twenty dollars, and my sandals had been ‘shined’ with a grimy toothbrush. The whole episode shook our confidence in our own judgment.
Later that day, we were in a taxi, stuck in traffic, and a woman was weaving between the cars, asking for money. In one hand she held an IV bag that was running a drip into her arm. I was appalled—I had never seen someone hooked up to an IV while loose on the street.
The next morning, Lane ran out of clean clothes, and the ship didn’t have a self-serve laundry room, and sending laundry to any overpriced hotel laundry is anathema. So we decided it would be more sensible to just buy the kid some new underwear, and make do.
Lee and I went to the market area surrounding the Grand Bazaar, and plunged into the crowd, which in my memory was mostly women, all in dark robes and headscarves. When we found a shop that looked like it had men’s underwear, Lee sent me in. I don’t remember why—I guess because I’m the mom, and I bought my kid’s underwear in those days? I bravely went in, and bought some kind of boxer briefs from the group of men who staffed the store. It was excruciating. I had thoroughly convinced myself that being a non-Muslim female in a men’s underwear store full of men was somehow taboo, and I was probably going to be stoned to death at any moment.
It was my first time in a majority-Muslim country; it was my first time in a developing country outside of the Caribbean; it was my first time in, well, anywhere quite like Turkey.
I loved it, but I also found it chaotic and distressing and alien and difficult to understand.
Most of all, though—to be perfectly frank—I was daunted by the Muslim-ness of it. All those terrorism movies that have filled American screens in the last twenty years were lodged in the back of my mind, and I don’t even watch things like that. I like fluffy, mindless rom-coms, preferably with kittens and glitter unicorns.
It took a lot of introspection, and a lot of time in the Arab world, for us to stop seeing threat all around us. Lee and I have deliberately come back to this part of the world, time after time, to confront our own biases.
On our second trip to Turkey, we stayed for six weeks, and I read a bunch of books about how the country came to be. That was early in our nomad days, and it was a formative period for me. I refer to it now as the time when the world began to blow out the walls in my mind. I learned—among other things—that women in Turkey spent years fighting for the RIGHT to wear the hijab. That wasn’t the narrative that had been drilled into me by my western culture.
Nowadays, when I walk around Istanbul, I see the full range of life. I see women dressed in every way you can imagine, from the skimpiest to the most conservative, the most drab to the most colorful. I see poverty and wealth, history and modernity, and every shade of humanity.
And now I realize—I could’ve just gone to the mall to buy that underwear.
Take care,
Lisa
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