“Did you know that when I was a little girl, I used to have a globe next to my bed?”
I did know, because my mom had already told me this story several times, but I liked hearing it.
“No”, I lied, “how old were you?”
“Oh, young. Seven or eight.”
My mom is driving me to the airport to move back to Istanbul. It’s raining and we’re on a bridge somewhere in New Jersey, stuck in traffic. She’s mirroring my stress over catching my flight and I'm returning her sadness over my departure.
Thanks to her greyscale school portrait, I can clearly picture second-grader Marianna Steele (then Marianna Cook) the embodiment of innocence, curled up in a white nightgown, staring in wonderment at a miniature Earth.
“And?”, I prompted her.
“Every night before I could fall asleep, I had to find Turkey on the globe.”
“Wow, really?”
“I just thought Turkey was such a silly name for a country.”
“Yeah, I think every American kid thinks that. Did you know that the bird was actually named after…”
“And now my baby lives there. Isn’t that a funny coincidence?”
My mom only refers to me as her “baby” when she’s feeling particularly sentimental.
“Yeah”, I smiled, “it is.”
Almost exactly one year later, my mom came to visit me in the country with the silly name. To make life extra wonderful, she brought my Aunt Becky with her.
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| Not pictured: Double Stuf Oreos and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups |
I was so excited to show my family my favorite places in the city. So after their first Turkish breakfast, we headed to the Chora Church Museum, which is on my Istanbul top five list.
The original church was built in the 5th century, but the current structure mostly dates from the 12th. The incredible 14th century Byzantine frescoes and mosaics were covered when the church inevitably became a mosque sometime in the 16th century. Fortuitously, the plaster used to conceal the Biblical scenes actually preserved the artwork until the building was changed into a museum and opened to the public in 1958.
For the first few days of their vacation, my mom and Aunt had the ubiquitous tourist fear that if you accidentally touch a stranger, they will immediately start screaming at you in a language you can’t understand and do everything in their power to have you publicly flogged. Every time I turned around to make sure they were still with me, I’d see them several yards back with a three foot buffer zone around each of them, politely allowing the elderly and pregnant women to move ahead of them.
"Don't be afraid to push people", I yelled over my shoulder as I zigzagged through the crowd like a greased pig.
Later, we headed to the Valens Aqueduct, which was at the top of my Aunt's list. The Roman aqueduct was erected in the 4th century and maintained throughout Byzantine and Ottoman times. Today, it intersects with the busy Atatürk Boulevard.
My Aunt Becky and I have always been close and she was a big part of my childhood. She doesn’t have any children of her own, so she never really had the patience to do kiddie stuff whenever she watched my brother and me. Instead, she showed us how to do the things that she enjoyed (like tie-dying) and introduced us to cool 80s movies with swearing and boobs. After every f-word or flash of nipple, she’d say, “Crap, don’t tell your mother about this”.
April is the perfect month for flower enthusiasts to visit Istanbul. My mom and Aunt are both avid gardeners, so we packed a picnic lunch and headed to Emirgan Park for the Istanbul Tulip Festival. It was amazing!
It's said that the famous Dutch tulips actually originated in Istanbul. I read that this year there are over three million tulips in the city. Wowee! The flowerbeds were immaculate, but every so often there'd be a yellow or red flower that didn't get the memo that it was supposed to be pink.
"What's with the renegade tulips?", Aunt Becky asked.
"I don't know", I said, "Maybe the gardener who planted them found out he was going to get fired, so he mixed a few red ones in and thought to himself, 'I'll show all of you in six months!'"
"That's the most likely scenario", my mom agreed.
"Laurel, stand over there."
"Why?"
"Just do it. The flowers look really nice."
"Okay."
*Click*
"Did you have to make the peace sign?"
"Yes."
Since getting an iPhone my mom is a picture taking fiend. We were at my cousin's little-league game about a year ago and I thought her finger was going to fall off from tapping the screen so many times.
I leaned over to my Aunt Lorraine and said, "I think my mom just took more pictures of Jacob than she did during my entire childhood."
"I heard that", my mom called without looking up from her phone.
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| Sakıp Sabancı Museum |
My Aunt Becky (along with my mom) is one of the most creative people I’ve ever met. Her long list of hobbies includes dyeing, spinning, and knitting wool, bookbinding, printmaking, and beading.
“Can I help?”, I’d often ask as I hovered over her latest project.
“No”, she’d say, “but you can watch”.
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| 17th century hand-bound, hand-printed, and hand-painted Koran |
The “No” had an invisible asterisk which stood for “No, you, an 8-year-old, cannot make a complete mess of the expensive materials I’m using for a hobby that’s taken me years to get good at.” I think this was a good lesson for me as a child. It taught me that sometimes fun things are actually really challenging and take time and patience to learn.
So I’d sit and watch as her practiced hands would spin wool, thread a needle with glass beads, or gently press her cat’s inked paw onto cream colored paper.
With her interest in bookbinding, I knew she’d go crazy at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum.
My mom was pretty strict with me growing up and I always had to call the second I arrived at a friend’s house. I’m twenty-seven and I still have to give her the address and phone number of my lodgings whenever I travel. We even have a code word that if used in any context will result in her alerting Homeland Security that I’m in grave danger, while simultaneously launching her own solo rescue mission. I’m serious.
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| BEHOLD: künefe! My roommate Erkin treated us to a great meal at Kasap. |
I always rolled my eyes at her seemingly overprotective behavior until it was time for me to send her and Aunt B on their first day alone. I sat both of them down and ran through my checklist.
“Do you have your IstanbulKart?”
“Yes, Sweetie.”
“Do you have your museum passes?”
“Yes.”
“The telephone? Does it have enough battery? Is the volume turned up?”
“Yes.”
“Did you write down my address?”
“Yes, it’s somewhere in my purse.”
“Show it to me.”
My mom and Aunt Becky were only going to be three miles away and I was freaking out. I was starting to appreciate how stressed my mom must get when I go on solo international trips sans telephone.
“Do NOT talk to any rug salesmen, I mean it”, were my parting words as I left them at the ferry station.
Luckily they survived.
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| Exploring in my hood! |
I’m fascinated by what different peoples’ eyes are naturally drawn to when walking down the street. For me, it’s floral dresses, fresh zeytinli açma, and the color seafoam green. For my mom and aunt, it’s fabric, plants, and street cats. As I showed them around my neighborhood, they would point out shops or charming details that I’d passed hundreds of times without noticing. They’d frequently stop to pet kitties, admire window displays, and identify flowers.
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| My favorite street cat in my favorite jewelry store |
One of the hardest lessons I’m continually learning in adulthood is that not everyone has the same way of doing things as you...and that’s okay. When I’m traveling, I couldn’t be more of a cliché tourist, running from attraction to attraction. I wanted my family to see as much of the city as possible, so I prepared what I believed to be a light itinerary of 5-7 major attractions a day. I was baffled when one day after seeing a couple of museums, they said they were happy to head back to my place.
“We just want to spend time with you, honey”, my mom told me.
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| Not pictured: hot guy in underwear |
I mostly travel alone so “quality time with loved ones” is seldom on my itinerary. The fact that my family would rather spend some of their limited vacation just hanging out with me in my living room with no view to speak of (apart from the hot guy across the street who hangs his laundry in his boxer briefs) is pretty touching.
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| Date night with my Mama at Semolina |
While she was here, my mom gave me lots of great life advice. A lot of it was stuff she'd told me before, but I’d been too stupid to listen to. She's such an incredible mother (and friend) and I feel very lucky that she's mine.
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| The fish market near my house |
My mom and Aunt Becky had an early morning flight back to America and had to leave my apartment at 4:30AM. I wanted to accompany them to the airport, but they both insisted that I didn’t need to come.
“Well, will you at least promise to call me from a payphone when you’re past security?”
“We might not have time, honey”, my mom said.
“I’ll just go with you. It’s fine.”
“You don’t need to. What’s the worst that could happen?”, Aunt Becky asked.
A myriad of catastrophic scenarios ran through my head, most of them involving explosions.
What’s the worst that could happen?
Oh, I don’t know, the taxi driver could go kamikaze and launch the car off the Bosphorus Bridge.
You could drive over the epicenter of a 7.4 magnitude earthquake.
A massive sinkhole could suddenly swallow up the whole of the Atatürk Airport International Terminal.
A coup d'état.
An alien invasion.
WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN, YOU ASK?
“I don’t know. Like, maybe you guys would get stuck in customs at the airport.”
“We’ll be fine, Lizzie”, my mom laughed.
I let out a massive sigh identical to the one my mom has directed at me more often than my own name and led them to the cab stand near my house.
Apart from a couple cop cars and one very drunk woman complaining to someone on the phone, we were the only people on the street. The steady click-click-click of suitcase wheels on cobblestone echoed off the surrounding buildings. I’d never seen Kadıköy so still and empty. I thought I would cry when I said goodbye, but 4:30AM is such a weird time. It's stuck in a strange limbo between today and tomorrow, too late/early to process any serious emotions.
I kissed and hugged them both and waved goodbye as the taxi pulled away. The three of us had such a great week and I can't wait to see them again.
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| Sisters! |
