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I’m in Bahrain now on a pseudo-vacation. I arrived here at an ungodly hour this morning after spending 24 hours in Istanbul. During those 24 hours in Turkey, I decided to be as close to being an istanbullu as I could.

In the hotel in which I was staying, I was immediately put off by the unimaginative man working at the reception desk. When I asked him about interesting things to see in Istanbul, he just gave me a very generic, “Oh, just go to the Sultanahmet Hippodrome District. Many things for tourists over there!”. This gave me all the more reason to do just the opposite.

***

In my younger years, many of the Summer vacations I went on with my family involved Istanbul. My last visit to Istanbul, however, must have been just over eleven years ago. When I was younger, I didn’t like Istanbul as much as the other places we visited in Turkey. I don’t know why Istanbul always left a bitter taste in my mouth: I felt that it was too familiar to me in its Eastern ways (at the time, Turkey never struck me as being Western because of how people seemed to be moving and I didn’t know anything about Turkish nationalism or history for that matter). My impressions of Istanbul come to me in broken strings of memory: Dirty and sad. Many stomachaches. Playing with obnoxious tourists’ kids on little ships while crossing the Bosphorus. Feeling bored while rummaging through the goods on sale under gigantic roofed bazaars. Surviving (barely) the heavy-handed taunts of the ice-cream vendors with the long mustaches. Bathing in hot springs that just burned me all over from their heat. A begging boy with a hunchback - just like Quasimodo’s - displaying his physical deformity boldly so that people would take pity on him as his sister (I think) gathered donations (now that I think of it, the only face I can attach to that boy is the face of a musician I worked with last year who was nothing more than a charlatan after a few odd episodes - but I digress!).

This short visit to Istanbul was my first in many years, and my first alone. Over the last two years, I have been interested in learning more about Istanbul after discovering the works of Orhan Pamuk and Aziz Nessin, who drew a very striking image of the city in which many of their protagonists felt like outsiders within the city in which they lived.

***

I stepped out into the cold wind of Istanbul that awaited me outside the hotel door after not getting any useful hints from the information desk: I didn’t want to be a spectator - I wanted to be part of the theatrical acts that unfolded within this city. I remembered being enchanted by tales of how in past centuries, it was rumored that many Ottoman sultans would roam around Istanbul’s streets in disguise to keep up with istanbullu society and understand it.

My disguise - although I am far from being your average Ottoman sultan - involved wearing a very dull coat and khakis that didn’t attract any attention, good walking shoes, no backpacks and no cameras. I also had to walk like they do in the city: I quickly picked this up by emulating a few of the locals walking in front of the hotel. This walk involved good spinal posture and a slightly lowered head that highlighted the dark, pregnant clouds that hung over Istanbul and offered no real threats of rain or tears. I took those clouds to symbolize the hüzün, or melancholy, that all istanbullus seem to share, as Orhan Pamuk suggested in his Istanbul: Memories & the City; the type of hüzün that accompanies the collective sense of loss and defeat that haunts the city.

I followed the swim of pedestrians through what was obviously Ottoman ruins and very new paths and roads. Some of the roads I passed by literally hurried through gutted Ottoman fortresses that were deemed as cannon fodder in the face of the Turkish plans of Westernizing. Other roads passed under aqueducts thirsty for sheaves of years.

My feet carried me all the way to Taksim Square. From Pamuk’s descriptions involving Taksim Square, I always had the impression that it was a vibrant part of town. It’s also been described as ‘humdrum’ and ‘drab’ by a friend who had visited Taksim recently. Since I was there, and since I was all alone I thought that it would be a good idea to do a little spelunking down this little road that had the downward slant of a dark cave bound to be filled with bats and other mysterious wonders. Just by looking at the meanings hidden in the faces of passersby I found Taksim as being quite representative of being an istanbullu in our modern times. Taksim Square is just the entrance to small paths that led to different parts of Istanbul.

Taksim seemed to be filled with a few of the usual suspects you would expect to find on a packed street in a big city: Young teenage boys smoking cigarettes and shouting out crude remarks at girls passing by, lottery ticket vendors who promise good fortune, many people standing outside the locked gates of the Swedish Entry wanting to go in, many beautiful faces, many not so beautiful faces, many people digging holes in the street, many people staring at those digging holes in the street, many people selling bread, no one speaking in any language in which I am fluent (which I didn’t mind), a bookstore keeper who reminded me of my grandfather as he worked in his old bookstore in old Manama.

Istanbul was cold - colder than Tokyo. This cold, however, seemed to unite everyone walking up and down the streets of Taksim.

***

At the end of the street was Tünel, which is where all the bohemian artists like to hang out. Tünel is a very, very narrow passage that is framed by musical instrument shops and chaihanes , or teahouses, on both sides. In Tünel, I walked extremely slowly while I just marveled at all the different types of musical instruments on display. Almost all the shops had their lights off, which made me wonder whether they were in business or not, but the shadows moving inside told me that they were all open after all. After sizing up those shadows and musical instruments behind the glass facades of the shops, I drew a deep breath and entered on of them. The shop owner and a customer were smoking cigarettes and improvising some music together on the baÄŸlama as they sat under the hanging corpses of scores and scores of beautifully crafted instruments from the East and West. I gave the standard Middle Eastern greetings, and apparently they understood what I was saying. Horray, I didn’t need English or Japanese here. In fact, that was the only thing I said during my time in that music shop and the others I walked into. I just picked up an Oud and improvised. I actually was asked if I was Iraqi because of the style of music I played - Much to my joy, I took this as a compliment and ended up buying a lot of little books with musical scores (including a very rare collection of works by Sherif Muhiddin Haydar (Targan) and plectrums. All we did were taqasim (improvisation), and no language other than music was needed. In between playing music on different beautifully crafted instruments, I took breaks to sip tea in little chaihanes and just try to catch a glimpse of the types of people who hang out on this street: they all looked really looked like artists.

I felt sad that no such street existed in Bahrain.

***

After a few other episodes around Cihangir that involved me just staring at a line with about 30 people waiting to have a go at the ATM machine outside of a bank (I realized that all ATM machines seemed to have a long line of people waiting in front of them!), and picking up a few novels from a small bookstore named “Robinson Crusoe” (which I thought was quite cool for the name of a bookstore. Robinson Crusoe is also considered to be the first novel written in history) and many Turkish CDs that I’ve been meaning to get a hold of through amazon.com but never had the chance.

***

Time just moved in fast-forward until I arrived back in Bahrain, where I punch in these last few lines. I don’t remember much of the flight except for that there was a young woman who was sitting in my seat (I always like to have window seats) and pleading to switch seats with me. I wasn’t prepared to argue about this and allowed her to take my seat while I sat in the yucky aisle seat, which meant that everyone passing down aisle to and from the restroom or wherever people walked to on planes kept ramming into my shoulder (mostly by accident, but I would like to imagine that some were probably intentional).

There was also a guy sitting/sprawling himself all over the backseat behind me who was obnoxious. Before the plane took off, he pressed the “Air Hostess Call” buttons and when an already impatient air hostess asked him what he wanted, he asked her if she passed around sticks of chewing gum to passengers. She said no. In the middle of the flight, there was a strong spell of turbulences that rattled the plane badly, which led our friend sitting in the seat behind me to yell out, “Does everyone know how to swim?!”. No one found that funny.

He snored the rest of the way.