Arrived in Turkey, Cappadocia

So I am in Turkey now. Arrived a few days ago. Excited to be here, though feeling a bit numb after India. Smells, sounds, colors, tastes all seem a little muted. I got off the plane in Istanbul and there was no mob of small men harassing me into rickshaws; no cows; no beggars; no women in blindingly colorful saris; no one asking to take their picture with me; no one braying chai, chai, chai. It felt like some kind of trick.

So I spent two days in Istanbul. I didn’t really do too much exploring – these two days were like a buffer between India and Turkey. Time to regroup, prepare for a whole new country worth of stimulation. From what I saw, Istanbul is a beautiful city – horizons of mosques, minarets, carpets, insert orientalist image here. Actually, the city feels a lot more Western European than I had expected, though again that may be post-India-syndrome. The city is bisected by the Bosphorous river (which is apparently not a river, but a strait). The Western side of the Bosphorous is called Europe, the Eastern side Asia. My hostel was in Europe. My first day, I took the boat over to Asia to meet Aysegul – an Istanbulite – for some turkish pizza and beer. First beer I’ve had in a long time that wasn’t laced with glycerine, which is the preservative they use in India. We had a good time catching up. Aysegul devised another way to read my fortune (in Paris, it was Turkish coffee grains; this time, a strange mystical mind game that she got from Cosmo), and gave me advice about traveling in Turkey: ‘it will be impossible… don’t trust Turkish people… careful of donkey meat… dont say anything bad about Ataturk.’ I tried and failed to convince her that I wasn’t exhausted from 9 months of travel, then tried and failed to describe India.

Second day, I walked around, ate three döner kebabs in too short of a time, bought a scarf and a semi-respectable leather jacket. It’s about sixty during the day and I’ve been freezing; India has left me thin-blooded. I couldn’t muster up any patience for the tourist attractions, which all had lines snaking around the block. I’ll be back through Istanbul in a few weeks and the Hagia Sofia isn’t going anywhere. I’m reading My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, which is set in Istanbul. Pamuk’s Istanbul is a concoction of mysterious people, an intellectual, spiritual, artistic hub of the world. Granted, that was the 16th century, but it makes me excited to come back and explore the city further.

Now, I’m in Cappadocia, in central Turkey, which is where I’ll be based for a few weeks. It’s every bit as bizarre and beautiful as I expected. The landscape is something from another planet. Ranges of white rock hills in impossibly smooth, almost creamy formations. Sheer upright columns called ‘fairy chimneys’ – the result of some sort of erosion process involving basalt and tufa. Cliff faces carved with hundreds of little caves and burrows and hideaways and nooks. The whole landscape looks like a massive, terrestrial coral reef. I’ll be posting pictures soon.

So I’m here for the underground cities. Tomorrow, I’m going to see Derinkuyu, the largest, most famous city. I’ll get more into the stories behind these spaces next post.