Day 19-20 – September 19-20 2024 – İzmir – Eskişhir – İstanbul – Berlin

Günaydın İzmir!

Our journey started with the end of one journey, the return of Clio to B2 Rentals. Having pressed B2 and found we might stretch our drop-off time to 2pm, but no further lest we incur another day’s charge, we had some hours beforehand. I’d slept reasonably due to reasonable dreams, horses throwing their riders, me quietening the disturbed beasts. Much better than elaborate high-tech start-up plans for VR character tokens. We had blueberry Dost yoghurts sourced from our dinner expedition, a little peanut cake left and 2 nectarines; a pot of coffee; and then down the steep drunk-killer steps to cityside, today bound for Art and Sculpture Museum, unwarrentedly neglected, said guidebook.

The heat climbing, 25C, steering courtesy of Apple, we walked precisely 40 minutes, down a street which could have been K’Dam, except that it boasted endless gown boutiques, sequined bridal gowns, feathered ones, bodiced ones, flounces out-to-here ones, departing-from-virginal white ones, green and burgundy ones, ball gowns, cocktail gowns, drapers selling the materials for gowns, boys pushing bolts of fabric to and from the boutiques on trolleys, traditional-style gowns, belly-exposing dancer-style, black and beaded, gypsy-like gowns …

… Into culture park.

Round the side of the large-scale buildings. One art museum closed. Info telling us the one we were looking for had moved from the Kordon, the harbourside walking area.

No Art and Sculpture. Choosing Art and History instead, through a monumental pond and pillared entry, a modern building. We asked at the door. The young woman had emerald green eyes eyes and the palest skin. She said free.

It was. A. Bit. Dry. Printed display boards and the odd display case. One with boxes from the early 1900s, Camel Figs. Smyrna. printed on them. A brand image very close to that for Camel cigarettes. A picture of Greek soldiers in the uniforms that resemble tutus, tights and slippers. A picture of Smyrna on fire in 1922. This, the decisive battle, for Atatürk and, presumably, for Turkey, since without it it would not exist.

Made our way back, via the Kordon.

A chintzy area, restaurants, women in Med white, sprayed hair, heavily made-up in what passes for good taste. The sounds of a brass band. And everybody on the street stood at attention. Arms straight down by their sides. Even the cars stopping. A square where the band was playing. Rows of white-flat-topped hats, the navy, soldiers in khaki, police in dress uniforms, all in rows before a podium and surrounding the scene more police, jandarm, even riot-ready police with plastic shields, helmets and batons at the ready. The tune, we imagined must be the national anthem ended, and everybody came back to life, except the massed armed forces of the Republic. The fishermen went back to fishing in the toxic purple waters behind the breakwater, rubbish being pulled up more than fish. Although we did see one good-sized fish brought in. Back up the drunk-killer-steep steps.

Made the airport in good time but couldn’t get into the carpark where we were to drop Clio off until a possibly frustrated van-driver came to the window and pointed at the ‘show passport’ notice. Still a mystery to us, he reached in through the window, to point at the B2 Rentals ‘passport’ in the hollow below the radio. Which didn’t actually lift the barrier. So he issued a parking ticket on our behalf and when we were through indicated from his van we were to follow him. We did. Into the carpark building where we wouldn’t have known to go.

Got away with 12 euros to pay in tolls. No scratches noted. Not the brief curb scrape or the bottoming out earlier from a steep descent off the same hill as drunk-killer steps.

Caught a taksi into Baslamı gar. Past Atatürk’s face carved into a hillside on the scale of Lincoln and co. in the States.

Tipped off by an online source we knew, since the lockers although there were plenty were not plugged in, we might leave our bags at a certain büfe. It turned out to be the one right in the small station. The owner told us, when he came around the back to accept our bags, he spoke Greek, and spoke some. Then he said he had worked in Saudi Arabia. Cement-something-worker. Now he could relax, on his chair behind the counter of the shop.

Freed, we looked for the agora.

Through the dirtiest stretch of a city we’d been, and stopped at a sidestreet Türk kahvlesi place.

Young man serving. After we sat down the coughing started, from behind us, echoing out the open window as if from a ward for the afflicted. And some strange drips kept hitting us which we hoped weren’t from the same source. No, they weren’t they were from the foliage of the potted trees beautifying the seating area.

The coffee was good. Cost 40 lira. Young man had to run down to another store to get change for 100. Is a pattern here. When we bought the bag yesterday, with no cash and no bankamatik handy, the seller led us away down the lane in through the backdoor of a tobacconist grog shop where we could use the eftpos, the owner of that shop passing him over the cash.

The agora was cool and we ate our packed lunch there in the shade of a pomegranate tree. I forgot the pomegranate juice I got off the streetseller who used a manual press, taking two fruit to fill a cup. The water of life!

The agora …

… was cool for the water flowing through from the Roman plumbing, its source reportedly still a mystery.

detail showing lower layer of mosaic floor tiles, curiously similar to those above,

the neighbours, pushed in, so a little daubist,

J brought some photos back from the WC. I’d shown her my ‘Dog Scratching below Turkish Flag.’ She bettered it with ‘Toilet Cubicle with Sleeping Dog on Floor’ and ‘Second Toilet Cubicle with Sleeping Dog on Floor.’ Surprising for a WC visitor since the lights were dim inside and dogs very still and quiet in the cool.

note the bags of herbs and spices for rolling your chicken legs and other bits in,

Our way back to the station or to anywhere else to wait out the hours until we might board for a 7.05 departure was broken by a stop in at the Kadın Muze, Women’s Museum. It was a work in progress. But nicely foregrounded the presence of women in social progress, progress by way of protest. A particularly touching instance of which was the protest for the disappeared resembling those that took place in South America, the ones in Chile Ariel Dorfman presents in his superb play Widows. Silent women holding the photos of their departed sons, brothers, fathers, husbands. Day after day at the same time, standing silently holding their photographs.

The area down by the railway station was where the black immigrants had come, it seemed. There were hotels around the Women’s Museum they stood or sat outside, like the Turks do, but looking out of place, dressed differently, with a diffidence and resentment that are not Turkish.

Perhaps being out of place is the essence of resentment. It brings to mind our trip out to the airport in Auckland, the taxi driver ruing the nz attitude when at home for him his mum would always hug him when he left the house, until one day he asked her, Mum, why do you hug me when I leave the house? And she said, Because you might not come back. It was true. 40% or so of the time, you might not come home; but in nz, how likely is it that you may not? With 99% certainty you might say, I will come back. I saw, he said, the police, even the police, pick up a drunk from the street. And. Take. Him home.

NZers. Out of place. The other word is alienated.

Slept in the park of culture where we hadn’t found the art and sculpture museum, on a park bench.

Had a snack at the estd. 1960 Gar Café, chips dipped in hot salsa, while J ate the cheesy tost.

And boarded the train. Rolling along on it now. The dream of a sleeping compartment finally come true in Turkish style. (Cf. here, 2010.)

…

Eskişehir at 4am.

So began another … what? … a leg? … episode? …

Tucked into our bunks, the white-shirted, open collar, black-trousered, black-shoed, and highly solicitous ‘guard’ had politely knocked on the door before bedtime to pi-something something? Ben anamılorum I could not understand. He had gestured at the top bunk and the sheets. And we had said, yes, evet, please, lütfen, make up the bed! …We had set our alarms for 4am, J top bunk, closed the gauze blind, allowing street-lights through, and … It was a feeling that came back, from the Silver Star, and the Northerner, and the Italian trains across Europe, in the 1970s, the luggage being rocked from the shelf overhead and cascading (I’m sure this was the word we used at the time) over the top bunk where my brother was largely unscathed, suitcases crashing onto the floor in the middle of the night (they were tan and Dad had put twin stripes of black and yellow insulating tape around them to identify them), the train we got fleas from, over the alps, that particular swaying syncopated with the cla-clack, cla-clack, cla-clack, and the shudder … and best of all the g-force cornering, pulling you down to the foot, raising you up to the top. And the light effects from outside. The closeness of the sound in tunnels’ sudden darkness, flashes of light. Into the expansive countryside and the sizzle of the metal, was it on the bridges, where the metal was released from the sleepers’ grounding, zinging and sizzling or swooshing. The sheets were narrow, getting a little tied up, and the woollen blankets too warm, but comforting… We both slept. I visited the loo in the night, J having discovered a sit-down bidet-style at one end of the carriage that was not awash with whatever had missed the hole or would not flush down, the night carriage, the corridor along the side of the sleeping compartments, couchettes, bathed in light and all the night sounds of the speeding train concentrated, increased by an open window …

The alarm off for me, J already awake, we ecstatic-fumbled, knowing as we thought the train to be arriving at Eskişehir at 4.50am, the bunks back to the wall, held out from it by the tousle of sheets and pillows and blankets, the seating, the bags out for a change of clothes, using the basin in our compartment to brush teeth, wash hands, rub water on face and the towels provided and sat with nothing more to do, still, watching the still dark landscape roll past … and here I might say I’ve wondered about the metaphor of time deriving from the experience of train journeys as landscapes and their features were said to roll past, to unroll ahead and roll up behind; but this would be to accord to the experience of sitting in a train only a visual existence. In fact, it is the noise, the sound of and it is the feel of it, the rocking and slight judders of the joins in the tracks, which dominate. And cinema unrolling silently is the experience pared down to its visual essence, the accompaniment of music or sound effects no equivalent and even in the activated cinemas with moving seats and spraying water in faces for the realistic experience of what is passing on the screen, these are easily disregarded: the visual dominates; so much so that it is said to be rare that we hear in dreams and even rarer that we smell or taste; sight is taken to be our chief source of sensory experience and therefore that of temporal experience as well. For us to see time passing is the model of the metaphor.

We waited, watching the darkness outside where it was broken by lit-up towns and lighted cityscapes, feeling a … kind of dread … as the minutes mounted up. Hadn’t we stopped for a long time in the night somewhere? Was that our stop? Had we missed it?

J consulted her phone. It gave a location nowhere near Eskişehir and time of arrival of 1 hour 24 minutes after the 4.50 arrival time we had, we knew we needed, to make the connecting train that would take us to İstanbul by hazlı tren, fast train, at 6.30. And indeed, trying another location-showing map, taking us another 10 minutes beyond that. Which. Could. Not. Be right. J insisted I ask. I could find no one to. Coming just short of pulling the emergency brake, she pushed for help. Still, no one. We had to know if we should get off … before we got all the way to Ankara and, whatever way it was cut, would by missing our train miss our flight to Berlin.

The dread deepened until J hunting through the carriages found someone to ask, and he said, Eskişehir is the next stop. It was confusing. Is it the next next stop? or the next one? I found the guard and asked. Eskişehir is an hour away. This was at 5.30.

When we got there anyway, ruing not having got the sleep we might have, we ran. Down into the station from the platform, having seen two tracks over, a snub-nosed fast train sitting,

where we had been on the way to Ankara 9-10 days before, up to the station, where we had waited, to the gişe, only one open at this time. She was unimpressed by our state. And able to issue tickets on the 7.30, economy? no. The only ones available were VIP class. Another 525 lira each, 1050 in total, making it the third time we had payed for this particular leg of the journey. …after which episode the connections worked. We caught our plane, uçak, flew to Berlin. I had finished John Ash’s Byzantine Journey at the airport in Istanbul. No entertainment. No meals on the flight. And it seemed to take far longer than we expected as well and we were again suspicious of sliding scales of time until J consulted the timezone. An hour difference between Berlin and İstanbul.

other VIPs,

The guy next to me was a tubby VIP who really wanted to make it clear he was. Seated, the çay trolley came through with breakfast boxes and tea, and tubby, despite that the service was for the newly boarded VIPs, us, demanded more çay in his whiny little voice. Little bitch #2, we designated him. See Chinese Crybaby, Day 2.) He fidgeted and grumbled, not able to get comfortable, but wanting the attention; picked up his phone, put it down; video-called his infant son, performing for him too.

We rolled into ‘Stambul, and from the station, on the Asian side, a short taxi trip, considering the speed he went, to the airport. To leave the Republic of Türkiye for Berlin, an island of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, as it was when I first went there, in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, no longer.

I had ₺35 in coins and notes in my pocket I wanted to get rid of. We stopped at a cafe in the airport and I asked how much for a single piece of baklava, bir tane.

Beer? said the cafeist, We don’t have beer. You have to go …

No. Bir, bir! türkçe dili … in Turkish!

We laughed and he went, putting a single piece inside, to get a box.

Then, not having heard the rest of my question, Ne kadar … ? asked for 10 times what I had in my pocket.

I said, I only have ₺35, showing him the bills. And, before he could protest about dirtying the box, turned around to leave.

I’d got about 50m away, still hearing him complaining from behind me, I thought about how I’d wasted his time; but he was calling me back.

He took the ₺35. And handed over the baklava. With a big smile. Teşekkür ederim!

… we went to our gate, waited; difficult to see from this shot, but the guys with tape around their heads are

frame-left. A cult? … We saw more of them. And more. All around the same age. All, except one, with black tape around their heads and what looked like a kind of tonsure but red, as if they’d been scalped.

There was the key. J looked up the phenomena and the answer immediately appeared, hair transplants. The tape to stop seepage.

Creepy.

We stopped at a kitapçı and I snapped some titles for wishlist,

Moved from one stinky gate, downstairs, near the smoking room, to another, which was back where, seeing the guys with recent hair transplants, we had been, our flying pig awaited,

…

In Berlin we were met. Wonderful. Here.

Having eaten over the previous 24 hours a bun and a piece of dry cake and nuts we … went out into the warm Kreuzberg evening, the temps having lifted to 23C … hearing a little Turkish on the streets, seeing the cyclists and everybody drinking beer in the clouds of recently decriminalised cannabis.