8/23/13 – Arrival in Istanbul/The Ausies
Plane
lands 5pm. Cymbals lost for 20 minutes. Someone moved them off belt. Find bus. Sit next to Ausie girl. Tons of
manikins in blocks of retail windows. Meet her sister and a lost Italian in Taksim.
Walk to café with jazz show that sister is playing. Check in at Neverland hostel quick. Show starts. Sister
plays acoustic Bright Eyes cover with bluesy deep voice. Turks shred guitar and violin. Bowl of
booze fruit punch 5 Lira. Narrow cobblestone street packed with people. Almost
get foot run over several times. Cops come. Show’s over. We buy beer and head
to Ausie’s apartment. Get onto roof. Overlook entire night skyline of city,
layers of splintered roofs, Bosphorus river, Rianna remixes climbing buildings. Drink 'til 5am. I stumble home with Italian guy.
8/24/13 – Tourist stuff/Club Kassette/the ”House
Party”
Wake up
in some hours at hostel. Stiff from no sleep and the drinking. Sit next to
three French girls. I don’t say anything until I finish
coffee. I say “I couldn't say anything until I finished my coffee.” We talk
about plans. They invite me to Grand Bazaar. I’d rather walk on own. I depart to
Golden Horn (tourist part). Review: Blue Mosque – really big, smells like feet.
Grand Bazaar – coolest mall I’ve ever been too. Hagia Sofia – great architecture
if able to see behind lines of tourists with cameras overhead. Tried to walk
all the way to Eyup for legit Muslim/Jew neighborhood. Passed out in park 1 kilometer away. Woke up an hour later very sticky.
Took bus back to hostel. French girls have multiplied. I
talk to one about Canada and electronic ice music festivals for a while. She
tells me she knows how to get into the Catacombs of Paris. I'm going to Paris.
Met Asli
1 in Taksim. Killer Kumpir for dinner under small roof (potato on steroids).
Both of us talk too much. Walked with her friend to club Kassette. Local Turk bar, dancing in alley, projection on wall. Dance for a few hours. I’m invited
to go back to girl’s place for party. Dudes getting weird and aggressive. Asli
grabs my arm, refers to direction of dudes, and says something along the lines
of “I’m so glad you’re not just trying to sleep with me" with her boob pressed
against my arm. I sigh.
Driving
deep into Asian side for party. I’m drunk and yelling with half my body out the
car window driving over the bridge to Asia. Get to party. Turns out it’s just a
handful of really high passing out people. We wake them up with box wine and
acoustic Radiohead covers. Hours go by. Asli passes out on couch. I can’t sleep. Dawn. I pass out.
8/25/13 – Big Breakfast Apartment/Eren
Woke up
at 2pm the next day. Huge breakfast. Play with bird. Leave at 5pm with a speedy
mini bus to meet up with Couchsurfer Eren in Asian side. We go to a warm bar
with lacquered wood and a hidden front door with no sign. Talk US and Turk
politics. I agree to go with her to a protest for Morsi/democracy that I’m not really on the right side of. Take night boat across the Bosphorus. Beautiful view of night city against the shore. Eren called me cute. Get to protest. Lots of people
praying. Afterwards some chanting. Overall – 3 stars. Eren goes back to
families. I walk to my hostel.
8/26/13 – Kumpir in
Ortokoy/Asli 2’s I-gah-han
Woke
up. Had to move hostels because overbooked. Found one up the street that sucked
(shower didn’t work, outlets didn’t work, lots of old hippies, cock roaches,
bed bugs or fleas or something). Walked to Ortakoy to get the best rated Kumpir
in the city (I find out this is one of the two traditional things without meat
– the other one being a waffle). Wind up on Bospohrus boat cruise watching fancy
hotels pass by between couples sucking face. Walk to Taksim to meet Asli 2. She
has two friends with her. I start talking to her friend Igahan (sp??). I yell
at her slowly in English so she understands. Turns out she’s an English
teacher. I apologize. She tells me she wanted to see how long I’d go with it. I
immediately like her. We walk to night hill with lots of kids drinking booze
over the Bosphorus. Sit together. Igahan speaks of her disdain for the US. I ask her if she’s ever
shot a gun. She tells me she was in the riots and was tear gassed every day. I
tell her shooting a gun is still pretty awesome. I explain the profound romance of her city, being so far from home, waving lights on black water. She tells me she never dates -
only 3 people who were professors and politicians. She tells me she never hooks
up – only with one guy. We walk
to the bus stop. She leads me to a bench right on the water before the bus comes. I ask her if I can kiss her. She
smooches me. I ask her if I can really kiss her. She takes a moment, says no, gets
up, and leaves. I sigh.
8/27/13 – Computer repairs and train tickets
I spend
all day trying to fix my computer, figure out a way from Istanbul to Germany,
and figure out how I’m going to kill myself after the night before with Igahan.
8/28/13 – Bus/No bus/The journey begins.
I wake
up late. Move real slow after failing to kill myself. Take tram to non-existent
international bus station. Head to the Golden Horn to catch a train. Hang
around train station for a while. Moments before I buy my ticket I hear a Dutch
girl yelling at the ticket guy about it costing 10 Euro more than it should.
She vents to me and says she’s going to hitchhike to Sofia, Bulgaria. I say okay. We meet
up with some other train riders and invite them to hitchhike. They’re not as stoked as us. We all go out for some food and drinks. Johanna (pissed girl) and
I catch a tram to a bus that’s supposed to go to a certain point of the highway
that’s good for hitching. We get on wrong bus. Get lost in the outskirts Istanbul. Talk to lots of people who don't know English/pretend to know what they're talking about. Finally 1 tram,
2 busses, and a taxi later we are where we are supposed to be. We hop huge
fences across a dark and terrifying 15 lane highway. We quickly catch a ride
with a trucker who speaks no English. Johanna and I talk of social centers,
radical politics, and all that shit. Turns out I’m jaded. We pass out smooshed in the truck cab bed.
8/29/13 – The
Journey: day 2
No real
sleep. Crazy traffic before the border of Bulgaria. We walk through the half
dozen different check points trying to see how many we can sneak by. A
kilometer later we are at the end and get breakfast at a truck stop. I get some
grits/soup that turns out to be entirely chicken broth. I eat only bread, not for ethics
sake, but because it was gross. We hang until noon intermittently checking to
see if Obama has bombed Syria yet. Find out our driver isn’t driving anymore (language
barriers are hard). Try to flag down cars. Every single car had a full family
in it (no exaggeration – real weird) so we go to the truck side. Get one ride
that drops us off early. Piss off some ladies in a copy shop who want us out
from in front of their store. It’s hot as fuck. We get a ride from an Iraqi who
doesn’t speak English. We go all the way to Sofia and find out he is going all
the way to Budapest. Johanna gets out and invited me to stay. I’m conflicted. I can't pass up such a free ride. I get
in the car with the Iraqi. I sigh.
The
Iraqi knows a few more words in English. He explains he is Muslim, has a wife,
but loves boning. He explains once he was at a disco and fucked seven girls in
one night. He explained he was driving from the United Arab Emirates where his parents are living. He shows me a
picture of him with the hawk they own and explained they have to feed their
other pet 10 kilos of food a day, because it is a tiger. We enter Romania by
night and he tells me “Here at night, Mafia stops you, takes money, if no
money, they take you.” We run over an already dead dog and dismount the break
line of the car along the dark empty potholed road. As we are putting it back I
point at a car that turns around and say “Mafia!” I laugh. He doesn't.
I start
to feel high during the late night drive. I think about how cool it would be to
get high while driving through a 2am Romania. I start sweating and having light
hallucinations of faces in the trees. Putting together that this guy asked me
earlier which water bottle was mine and him asking me next to a huge black river
if I could swim I convince myself that this dude has drugged my water and is
going to drown me. I decide it’s a bad idea to tell him that I feel really
funny. He keeps asking me if I’m tired to which I say “nope no not at all!” as
to convince him the drugs aren't working. I stop drinking my water and
eventually feel better. We pass out at a gas station with a stray horse. I
don’t die.
8/30/13 – Romania to Hungry/Budapest Sunset/Physics
Four
hour front seat sleep. Romania into Hungry. I’m invited to a wedding and
offered a job in Kazakhstan. He drops me off a few kilometers outside the city
at a gas station. Families picnicking in muddy grass and people selling knives
out of the backs of their Beamers. I catch a ride into the city from a finicky
university chef who is nervous about his English and makes schnapps. Every bump
makes his brass cauldron in the backseat ping complimenting his darting
scrambled speech. He drops me off on the first downtown bridge right in time
for Budapest under sunset. I watch for about a half hour. Walk to a hostel and
check in. Go out for a drink with an Italian PHD physics student at a bar made
out of pallets. Drinks are dirt cheap. Small glasses with good whiskey for a dollar. One turns into several. We get invited to go to a club
by a girl, we get uninvited to go to the club by her friend. Another girl who
edits a newspaper is provoked by her friend to talk to us, eats our French Fries, and talks about Syria. We get lost on the way home.
8/31/13 – The Best Bike Ride Ever/The Worst Judit
Woke
up. Rented a bike. Road for the first time in almost two months. Smooth
pedaling pushed silent rubber down Hungarian streets. Huge lap of the city.
Hero Square. Chain Bridge. An amazing island park
complete with drinking sunbathers, outdoor stage, elliptical machines,
water park, and trampolines - the perfect use of no-shit-for-sale space. Dilapidated cobble stone streets where the only place
to drive is the train tracks. Rushing down the huge hill of Gellert park for sunset.
Invited
to a Couchsurfing meet up by a person named Judit. Dozen people going to a
“ruins” bar for drinks (a building in ruins that people started serving drinks
out of). We all sat sharing where we were from. Where we’ve been. Travel
stories. Arguments about beer. Terribly dancing to techno disco with Judit. Dark Hungarian eyes behind black bangs. Timid
adorable smile. Conversations that we will never see all of the amazing places
there is in the world. We spoke for a while. Nice smelling guy in a collared
shirt talks to her. She leaves with him. I want to puke. I hang
out on the side of the dance floor judging human behavior. I sigh and lay in a
subway stairwell for a good minute on my back staring into the streetlight bleached sky.
9/1/13 – One last
bike ride/departure.
Check
out. Drop my shit off in a train station locker. Ride around for a while still briefly
wanting to puke imaging some bro pounding Judit. Zigzag through streets taking
lots of pictures because I always forget to do that. Get food. Write this in a
cheap train station café with an adorably funny bar tender that just tried to
take my full tea off the table. Overnight to Germany in 45 minutes…
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