First something that I didn't learn until I went to Cyprus. In English-language reporting about the divided island, they often make it sound like the Turkish Cypriots want to completely rename the capital Lefkoşa... sounds so alien compared to Nicosia, especially with that only-in-Turkish s-cedilla. What I didn't know is that Nicosia is actually the alien name, imposed by the Crusaders: the Greek Cypriots call the city Λευκωσία, or Lefkosía.

That brings me back to my cab ride from the center of (South) Nicosia to my hotel. It wasn't all that far, as it turned out, but I was glad I did take a cab. I did have a map that I had printed out from the hotel's website, but this is the confusing thing about Cyprus: the street signs are labeled in Greek and then a Latin transcription of the Greek name. However, many of the street names actually mean something (i.e., they aren't just somebody's last name), and the map I was holding labeled streets with the English translation (not just transcription) of those names. One of the streets on the way to the hotel, for instance, was called Heroes Street on the map. But on the street sign it was called Iroon. That would have tripped up even a linguist like me.

I checked into the (largely empty) hotel, which was run by a Greek Cypriot man and his English wife (or so I assumed-- her English was flawless. Of course, since Cyprus is a former British colony there are many Cypriots who speak perfect Queen's English, but the tip-off to me was that their teenage daughter, who was lounging about using the internet on the computer in the lobby, seemed to code-switch between Greek and English with her parents, which indicated to me that she was growing up truly bilingual, not just using English in school.) After I dropped my stuff in my room, I went back to the front desk to hand over the key (it was that kind of hotel) and announce that I was going out for a walk in the center. The English lady handed me another map and pointed out some things I might like to see, like Ledra Street, the main promenade. But first of all, she pointed at the top of the map, which was traversed by a jagged red line. "That's where the Turks invaded. You carn't go there," she asserted firmly. OK, it was a sensitive subject, then, I guess. I decided not to tell her that I had just come from there, or for that matter that I was planning on going back there that very night. I was hungry, after all, and I had a pocket full of Turkish liras that I had to spend.

I made my way back to the center, but instead of entering it through Paphos Gate, I turned left along the ancient Venetian city wall (which is really impressive seen from a satellite photo-- it is an eerily geometrically perfect sort of 10-pointed star) and headed back into the UN buffer zone. No one from the Republic of Cyprus cared that I was leaving or checked my papers, but when I reached the TRNC, I had to present my passport at a booth. The immigration guard went through a byzantine ritual of taking about 2 minutes to manually type my passport number into a computer and stamp my passport (this time on a separate piece of paper). She looked tired-- I would be too. When she handed back my passport, I asked her, "Where's the best place for me to get something to eat?"
She immediately brightened. "You want good Turkish food?"
"Yes."
She pointed through the left wall of her booth. "Just walk this way about 100 meters. There is a nice place on the right."

It was a standard, family-owned Turkish grill, but it looked nice enough. I sat down and the owner came and cheerily greeted me: "Nasılsınız!" I was able to respond appropriately, and I felt oddly at home again, since the standard greeting exchange in Turkish was the one thing I had mastered in Turkey. I ordered Iskander Kebab (a platter of spiced meat mixed with bread which I had been sold on by N. years ago: "they drench it in pure butter," he raved) and a beer. Followed by one or two more beers; my liras weren't going fast enough.

After dinner I went for a stroll around the north side of the city. There was no nightlife in the sense of real bars or restaurants, but the streets were alive. Everywhere people had set up little tables in front of their doors and were lounging in chairs: drinking coffee, playing backgammon, or just talking. Kids were playing raucously, kicking balls down the streets. I was reminded of what a friend of mine who had studied ancient Greek had told me once: that in ancient Greek, the term used for "in public" can be literally translated "in the door". And I realized that as much as Turks are made out in the "West" to be from the exotic, inscrutable "East", not least because of their being Muslim, they are probably closer to the culture of ancient Greece than "we" are, we who have been hygienically shrink-wrapped and individually packaged by millennia of Christianity and its younger offshoots, Protestantism and capitalism.

Indeed, when I returned to south Nicosia it was as if the ambient temperature had dropped a few degrees. The street lighting was much more subdued, as was the signage: if signs on buildings in the north had been glaring white fluorescent boxes with black letters, signs on fashion emporia and office buildings here were metal letters with LED lighting mounted behind them. It was around 10:30 or 11pm by now and there were very few people on the street as I walked just outside the moat encircling the city wall, looking for a bar. Finding none, I cut back across the moat into the inner city at the next bridge and followed the inside of the city wall back toward Paphos Gate, ultimately turning down Ledra Street, the main promenade of the inner city which roughly bisects it. Although there was some more life and light here, it was also pretty quiet. Ledra Street dead-ended at the UN buffer zone-- there was a Republic of Cyprus soldier with a machine gun sitting in a booth, keeping watch over the darkness to the other side, where if you listened carefully you could hear a party going on somwhere, sound system blasting Turkish pop.

"NICOSIA: EUROPE'S LAST DIVIDED CAPITAL!" a signboard on top of the wall read. If this text was trying to be tearfully dramatic, it had more of the effect of an advertising slogan on me-- I couldn't help but think how cool all of this was. I never got to see Berlin when it was still divided. "Yeah, borders, real cool," a friend of mine who grew up in East Berlin snorted at me once when I started going on about my fascination with them. My only explanation for it is because I'm American, coming from (essentially) the Midwest, where you can drive for thousands of miles without anything really changing culturally, maybe just the names of some of the fast-food chains and family restaurants and discount marts and supermarkets you see in the strip malls. The first time I got to walk across an international border, at the age of 15-- I had jumped out of the car to walk part of a bridge spanning the St. Lawrence Seaway between New York and Ontario-- it was really anti-climactic. Nothing but a metal disk bisected by a line embedded in the sidewalk, and nothing was really all that different on the other side anyway.

But here-- a border-- a real, no fucking around, militarized border in the middle of a city, with things really different on either side! The Berlin Wall had divided not just the east and west sides of a city, but East and West, two completely opposed grand narratives of how society should be organized politically and economically. Similarly, the Nicosia Green Line divides the global South and the global North (where ironically, the Turkish north of the city belongs more to the former and the Greek south of the city belongs to the latter): the two contrasting levels of development in the world, where 'development' is measured in levels of wealth, secularism, individualism. People who crossed from West to East Berlin often say that one of the biggest differences they noticed was that in the West, you would see people strolling and walking aimlessly (an activity which the French language captures with a wonderful verb: flâner); but in the East, you would only see people going from A to B, no dilly-dallying. The funny thing here was that my impression of "my" global North, coming from the global South, was at once comparably sterile and joyless.

I finally found an open bar, on a corner halfway between Ledra Street and the Hilton, and sat down to order a Keo, which seemed to be the standard pilsener of South Cyprus. The place was empty save for two women, and one of them soon came and sat down next to me. She was from Moldova, the small talk that I was not at all interested in revealed. "Would you like to drink somethink with me?" she asked. "Uh, no thanks, I have to go," I said as I downed the rest of my beer and made my move back to my hotel. It figured somehow that the only place open at this hour was that kind of place. But I could notch it up: never before in my life had I been solicited by a whore, and now in one week it had happened to me three times.

The result was that I developed a bit of a neurosis. As soon as I hit the
air I became extravagant. It wouldn't matter what the subject of
conversation happened to be, as we started back to Montparnasse in the early
morning, I'd soon turn the fire-hose on it, squelch it, in order to trot out
my perverted dreams. I liked best talking about those things which none of
us knew anything about. I had cultivated a mild sort of insanity, echolalia,
I think it's called. All the tag-ends of a night's proofing danced on the
tip of my tongue. Dalmatia -- I had held copy of an ad for that
beautiful jewelled resort. All right, Dalmatia. You take a train and
in the morning your pores are perspiring and the grapes are bursting their
skins. I could reel it off about Dalmatia from the grand boulevard to
Cardinal Mazarin's palace, further, if I chose to. I don't even know where
it is on the map, and I don't want to know ever, but at three in the morning
with all that lead in your veins and your clothes saturated with sweat and
patchouli and the clink of bracelets passing through the wringer and those
beer yams that I was braced for, little things like geography, costume,
speech, architecture don't mean a god-damn thing. Dalmatia belongs to a
certain hour of the night when those high goings are snuffed out and the
court of the Louvre seems so wonderfully ridiculous that you feel like
weeping for no reason at all, just because it's so beautifully silent, so
empty, so totally unlike the front page and the guys upstairs rolling the
dice. With that little piece of Dalmatia resting on my throbbing nerves like
a cold knife-blade I could experience the most wonderful sensations of
voyage. And the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the
globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even further lost than
a lost continent, because with the lost continents I felt some mysterious
attachment, whereas with America I felt nothing, nothing at all. Now and
then, it's true, I did think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura
of time and space, but separately, detached, as though she had blown up into
a great cloud-like form that blotted out the past. I couldn't allow myself
to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had
become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about
her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my
contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my
wretched past.

-- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

dateline: Sarajevo

As you might have seen two years ago, dear reader, at a certain point my storytelling slipped out of sync with real time-- I would write a posting one day announcing that I was in a cybercafé in Limassol, and the next day go back to telling the whole story of what happened a week earlier in Istanbul. And I am going to finish the story of that trip; even though it's now been more than 2 years I can still remember what I wanted to tell. But as it happens, at the moment I write I am traveling again-- doing over two of my favorite destinations from the last trip, Sarajevo and the Croatian coast. So how can I resist writing about that too?

This is my first real vacation since that last trip-- the first year after I got back from that trip, my first year as a law school graduate, was kind of a rough one. I was stuck in a job I didn't really like, but then again that year had some highlights too: meeting my boyfriend and getting a new apartment. I got out of the job that I didn't like and started my own immigration law practice, which was exciting and liberating but exhausting too, plus I never felt free to really get away, in case the phone would ring. But this summer I was not going to deny myself my much needed vacation!

As the night train to Munich pulled out of the station this past Monday, I felt the relaxation come over me already-- nothing more to be done to prepare for the trip and tie up loose ends with my practice, I was in motion.

One-Dimensional Land

As is my habit, I checked out the train from end to end to see what the amenities were. The last time I took the night train to Munich there had been a bar car where I could drink beer and smoke, and I did in fact have a pretty good conversation with an old guy who was freely dispensing life wisdom to me. But by now, even German Rail, one of the last holdouts in Western Europe, has banned smoking and there was no bar car either, only mini-bars manned by the conductors. I first went backwards in the train from my couchette car, past a seating car, past two sleeping cars, all the way to the end where I could look out the back window. I worked my way forward again, and at the end of one of the sleeping cars I saw two other passengers buying beers from the conductor and walking on.

"Excuse me, is this where I can buy drinks?" I asked the conductor in German.
He eyed me up warily. "You're from the part of the train going to Munich, aren't you?" he said with a Swiss accent. Was it that obvious?
"Yes."
"There's another mini-bar there."
So OK, so this was the part of the train going to Zurich, which would be split off at Frankfurt or somewhere, but I didn't think it mattered for buying a beer. I didn't actually want to buy a beer anyway, I had brought a can of my own along, but it was just about getting the proof of concept on this. I walked back forward, past my compartment and on to the next couchette car, which was still empty of passengers.

As soon as I entered it, I had to hold my ears because a piercing alarm was going off. When I made it to the far end of the car, the fat drunk who had been cartoonishly singing and shuffling back and forth in my car at the beginning of the trip was hanging his head out the open door-- vomiting?

"Are you crazy?" I shouted at him in X-ish.
He pulled his head back in, scowled at me and slurred something that sounded like, "I'm fifty years old!" before lunging at me menacingly. This was no joke-- no way was I going to tangle with an angry drunk on a moving train where there was an open door. I quickly backed away, fleeing the scene as quickly as I could as the drunk started to lumber after me. This was worse than Flatland-- the fictional two-dimensional country-- because at least in Flatland you can maneuver around someone. In this one-dimensional land, we were all just points moving on a line, and no one had to let you past. In my car I found a conductor, and in my reptilian flight mode I had no time to frame my words in German.
"There's a crazy drunk who's opened the door!" I shouted in X-ish.
"Was??"
I repeated what I said in German. "There's a... drunk there... he threatened me, the door is open."
As it happened, the train had just pulled into the station, and so I could step out onto the platform to see two other conductors overpowering the drunk and handing him over to security.

When the train started moving again, I headed forward again to complete my expedition. Three German conductors were busy disabling the alarm, which had gone off when the drunk had smashed the glass in it to unlock the door. Two of the conductors were squabbling.

"You do it! I don't have the walkie-talkie thing that you can talk to the Swiss with, and we have to let them know that everything is OK," one of them said. Apparently walking there to let them know was out of the question. International relations between the one-dimensional Germany and the one-dimensional Switzerland were not too good, it seemed.

***

I arrived in Munich the next morning, after a none-too-restful night of sleep on my couchette, spent 24 hours there with an old friend and memorialized a friend who I knew from Munich who has recently suddenly departed in a motorcycle accident in Oregon. I got up early the next morning-- the friend I was staying with had looked up the online timetable for the S-Bahn to the train station from her nearest station, but I must not have taken it seriously enough because I thought I had time to eat one more piece of bread. But when I got to the station, I had missed the S-Bahn, and the next one wasn't coming for another 13 minutes. That meant that it would have to take no more than 10 minutes to get to the train station, or I would miss my train to Zagreb, and there was only that one train during the day. Shit. I took the U-Bahn instead, running through the station where I had to switch lines and barely making it through the doors of a train on the second line. I made it to my train with 3 minutes to spare-- that was close. If I hadn't run at the transfer station, I wouldn't have made it. Why am I such an adrenaline junkie that I always have to cut it so close with things like this?

The train, run by Austrian Rail, didn't go all the way to Zagreb, as it turned out. I had to switch trains in Villach, in Carinthia. But the 5 hours there, in the plush 1st class car (it was still a cheap ticket) were absolutely stunning-- picturesque Alpine landscapes. In Villach I walked across the platform to transfer to the decidedly crappier-looking Slovenian Railways train, which went all the way to Belgrade. It was funny-- the crossing into Slovenia, about 45 minutes on, came completely unannounced. The train had just gone through yet another 10-minute-long tunnel through a mountain, and the landscape and buildings still looked like Austria on the other side. It took about 5 minutes before I noticed with a start that the sign on the side of a building was in Slovene. Something else was new from the last time I made this trip (I had taken the night train from Munich to Zagreb then)-- Slovenia is now part of the Schengen area, so there was no passport control.

I decided to check and see if Slovenia had fallen to the forces of anti-smoking terror yet. I went to the end of the train, to the gloriously crappy, beat-up dining car, completely unrefurbished from the days that it had belonged to Yugoslav Railways, where the doors still said 'PUSH' and 'PULL' in Serbian.

"Can I smoke?" I asked the barman.
"No, no smoke, only drink, what you want?"
I shrugged. "OK, a beer then."
"Beer? OK!"
I went to the back of the dining car, which had a series of linoleum counters with built-in ashtrays that certainly hadn't been disabled, and even looked like they had been used not too long ago. Huh? The barman handed me a bottle of Slovenian beer and a glass.
"You smoke--" the barman pointed at me-- "I not--" the barman covered his eyes in a 'see no evil' way. He grinned. I grinned. He closed the door between the back of the dining car where I was standing and the kitchen where he was sitting and put a doorstopper under it to keep it shut.
I rolled up a cigarette, lit it, and proceeded to fully enjoy train travel as it was meant to be, freedom on the rails as an alternative to intolerable airline security and restrictions. Halfway through my cigarette, though, the conductor came walking through the room and I sucked my breath in nervously, cupping the cigarette in my hand. He just nodded at me and walked on. Moments later, the dining car attendant opened his door and looked at me inquisitively, making a thumbs-up/thumbs-down gesture. I gave him the thumbs-up. He beamed and opened his door again, putting the doorstopper under it to keep it open this time.

Good thing my browser still remembered what my password was for livejournal! First thing I see when I log in is: Last updated 97 weeks ago

But this story has to be finished. Where were we? The day was July 19, 2007...

----

I slept well that night -- I woke up in the morning, packed my things, and left K.'s place with my luggage. (She had had to drive to Antalya to pick up something for work that morning.) Börek and coffee for breakfast, then to the jetty to catch the ferry.

In public international law class, quite a bit of attention is devoted to what makes a State. I'm going to capitalize that word to make clear I'm not talking about US states, which, in the standard scheme of things in the world, are really not true States. I once had a fresh-off-the-boat American client ask me about filing taxes in Xxxxx, and she said something like "so if I don't claim that refund, the money will revert to the... country, right?" "Oh, the money will revert to the State, all right," I said, "only here, there's just one."

A State is what Americans usually refer to as a "country", or a "nation" (a word that makes the hairs on the back of Europeans' necks stand up), or the "government": a "State" is the apparatus that has exclusive authority (or "sovereignty") over a certain geographically defined area and the people living in it (a "nation", on the other hand, is a culturally defined thing, and by no means implies having ultimate authority, just ask the Québecois or the Catalans). So a State has internal authority. Generally it is presumed to have external authority, too, to be able to send ambassadors to other States and to international organizations like the UN because it is considered to be authorized to speak for itself on the world stage. Unless nobody recognizes it. Would it still be a State, then? That would sort of be like the old conundrum of a tree falling in the forest and nobody being around to hear it. But since nothing goes unnoticed on the world stage, it would be more like a tree falling in the forest and everyone walking around it like nothing had happened.

So where I was off to was the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, one of those kind of in-between States: it has internal sovereignty, we're pretty sure, but nobody recognizes it except for Turkey. Which meant that in this case, this jetty I was on was an international terminal, at least as far as the Turks were concerned. And I had to believe it, too, since I had to get my passport checked and get an exit stamp from a Turkish immigration agent. And then in the waiting room: a duty-free shop! Or at least a duty-free counter. But it had a pretty poor selection-- certainly no single-malt Scotches and they didn't have my brand of tobacco either-- so I gave it a pass. I boarded the hydrofoil and settled into my new home for the next 3 hours. Most of which I spent above-deck, looking at the scenery: the Turkish coast. The route hugged the coast for a while before heading due south toward Cyprus. I tapped out one last email on my cell phone using the network coverage from Turkey before it dropped out. And then Cyprus began to slowly, fuzzily come into sight. For a while, when we must have been halfway, I could see both Turkey when I looked back and Cyprus when I looked ahead.

Cyprus got closer, and closer. The first thing I could make out was a giant Turkish flag, with a TRNC flag next to it. The difference? The Turkish flag is a white crescent and star on a red background, the TRNC flag is a red crescent and star on a white background. Oh yeah, in between two red stripes. Floating in the harbor of Girne (Kyrenia in Greek) were a number of Turkish warships, flying only Turkish flags. The TRNC was going to have to try harder to convince me that it was really an independent State.

The ferry moored at the terminal and I disembarked, walked to the terminal and stood in the immigration line. When it was finally my turn, I asked the border guard to stamp a separate piece of paper rather than my passport, but he was on such autopilot that he stamped my passport anyways with the TRNC entry stamp. "Oh--" he said, "so sorry," and smiled wanly as he handed back my passport. I sighed, did a quick calculation of how worthwhile it would be for me to make a scene and demand damages for the cost of getting a new passport (the only country that might try to refuse me entry with this stamp would be Greece, but Greece had already been lectured by the European Community that it can't deny entry to EU citizens just for that, and I could always just go to Greece on my identity card)... shrugged and walked on. There was another duty-free counter, but same selection as on the boat.

I stepped outside the terminal into the blazing sun, looking for a shared taxi to Nicosia. There was a 12-seat minibus going to Nicosia with a couple of passengers already sitting in it, and I smoked a cigarette while I waited for the bus to fill up, gettiing into a conversation with a middle-aged English man who was also going to Nicosia. Finally I boarded and the bus departed, climbing into the hills above Girne-- I looked back at the view of the harbor. Then the bus reached the summit and descended into the plains where Nicosia (Lefkoşa in Turkish) lay. As we neared the base, I looked back to regard the famous giant painting of the TRNC flag on one of the hills, made to be visible from the south. The bus entered Nicosia-- at almost every intersection stood the flagpoles with the Turkish flag flying next to the TRNC flag-- and finally the bus reached its final destination, the bus terminal of Lefkoşa. The English guy needed to get to the south as well, because he was going to visit his son in Paphos, and the bus driver told us just to take a taxi to the Ledra Palace border crossing. So the English guy and I split a cab and we were let off at the border gate and told to just start walking. We walked into the UN buffer zone and I looked over my shoulder at the sign saying WELCOME TO THE TURKISH REPUBLIC OF NORTHERN CYPRUS. We walked about 300 meters through the Green Zone, past crumbling, bombed-out buildings, past signs saying that photography was prohibited, past the famous Ledra Palace Hotel which is now a garrison for blue-bereted UN peacekeeping troops (the ones lounging around the entrance were from Bosnia and Hercegovina, judging from their patches) until we reached the border of the Republic of Cyprus. The English guy presented his passport and I presented my identity card from X-ia, since after all I was entering the EU and no longer had to show my passport. The Greek Cypriot border card examined my identity card, said 'X-ia! OK!' and handed it back, and we walked on past the city hall in exile of Kyrenia. Then, as we were walking past some kind of party tent with some police officers hanging out underneath it, two of them emerged and said "Stop! Customs."

I put my backpack on the table and they zipped it open and shut again. The English guy, on the other hand, was holding a plastic duty-free bag from the shop on the boat, and they took it from him and removed a carton of Benson and Hedges from it. "These cigarettes were purchased at an unauthorized port of entry into the EU," one of the police officers said, "so we have to confiscate these from you." The English guy sighed and shrugged as they wrote him some kind of a ticket. After they were done, they waved us on. "Where can we catch a bus to the South?" the English guy asked. One of the police officers looked at his watch-- it was already 6 p.m.-- and shook his head. "You probably won't be able to get a bus at this hour," he said, "but it is across the street from the Hilton hotel, just keep walking in this direction."

We walked on, through the Ledra Palace gate of the ancient city wall of Nicosia. It was here that I first saw the Greek Cypriot equivalent of the flagpoles in the North: a double flagpole made to look like a ship's mast, with the flag of the Republic of Cyprus (white, with a yellow picture of the island on it surrounded by olive branches) next to the Greek flag. I thought to myself: and here I thought it was only the TRNC that does not really make an effort to profile themselves as an independent country. Do the Greek Cypriots of the Republic of Cyprus, an internationally recognized State that is even independently a member of the EU, simply see themselves as a dependency of Greece?

At the Hilton, the English guy approached the doorman to ask about the buses. The bespectacled doorman's name badge said 'George' (probably his name was really 'Giorgios', I thought)-- but when he opened his mouth to answer a blast of old Blighty fog emerged from his mouth. It turned out he was from Manchester, and he had the air about him of the hapless English expatriate who couldn't really explain how he ended up here, as if he had gotten shipped here during the Great War or something. He told us that there were only shared taxis to the south and that it really was too late to catch one-- we would have to stay in Nicosia for the night. "Don't waste your money on this place," he lowered his voice confidentially. The English guy I was with asked him where to change some money, and George directed us to the "off-licence on the corner" where they did an under-the-counter trade in currency exchange. We thanked George and went to get cash.

Of course the liquor store didn't accept Turkish liras, so I exchanged one of my 50-euro bills. The Cypriot pound was a millstone currency like its British namesake, having an overinflated value per unit that is not of this time: I got a meager-feeling 30 pounds or so in return. Just my luck to be there only months before Cyprus was to adopt the euro. But the bills were fascinating: printed in English, Greek, and Turkish, so it was heartening to see that the Republic of Cyprus at least paid lip service to being there for all the ethnic groups of Cyprus. The English guy and I parted ways and I stepped into the first internet café I could find to try to find myself a hotel. I was just as willing to stay in the North, as well, but there did not appear to be any cost advantage--the hotels of Lefkoşa seemed to be just as expensive. The thing to do would really have been to stay in Girne, probably. I called the guest house in Limassol that I had booked to let them know I would be a day late. I asked the guy with the shaky voice on the other end if he could recommend any hotels in Nicosia. "I wouldn't have a clue. I haven't been to Nicosia in twenty years," he said. OK then.

I finally settled on a hotel in (south) Nicosia that would cost me about 40 euros. What the hell-- I thought-- it's not just the buses, I have to go to the travel agency in Nicosia too to book a ship to Egypt-- so I might as well get a good night's sleep. I booked the hotel online, got a printout of the confirmation, and caught a cab to the hotel.

Istanbul, July 16

The next day I packed my bags and bade farewell to the Chillout Galata, then spent a few hours sitting in the sun in front of the Shake'In and reading before making my way down to the departure point for the bus company, near Taksim Square. The guy at the hotel had examined my ticket and explained to me that this was just going to be a shuttle bus to take me to the actual bus station, not the bus to Alanya itself. And I would have to wait an hour at the bus station before the actual bus departed. "It's not a nice place to hang out," the guy from the hotel had warned me. I shrugged-- I had seen some pretty bad bus stations in my life. "Do they at least have beer there?" I had asked him. "I wouldn't count on it," he replied.
So I picked up two half-liter cans of beer from a convenience store off Taksim, then tried to take a short-cut to the pickup point which nearly made me miss the shuttle. But I caught it.

And when the shuttle bus got to the bus station, I realized that I hadn't even correctly imagined what a not-nice place it could be. It wasn't that it was some dilapidated, hulking, crumbling structure in the inner city with winos and junkies hanging around it. No, much worse. It was a tiny building with a parking lot just off the freeway in the outskirts of European Istanbul. I had thought that there would at least be some kind of restaurant or döner joint or something there where I could fill my stomach, but no. All there was was a tiny convenience store staffed by a middle-aged lady squinting at a blaring TV with a selection of only chips, pretzel sticks, cookies and soft drinks. Even if there had been a supermarket somewhere in the neighborhood, there was simply no pedestrian access out of this place. I bought a bag of pretzel sticks and ate half of it, rationing the rest for the trip, and grabbed one of the plastic folding chairs under the umbrella of the 'terrace' of the station to smoke a cigarette and read.

It wasn't long before the bus arrived, truly a gargantuan thing much taller than a Greyhound. I checked my backpack into the luggage compartment and went to my assigned seat. It really was like an airplane, just like K. had said-- the seat was a form-fitting pleather armchair and the interior of the bus was plush and hush (not quite as deluxe as the page linked to here would have it, there were no seatback screens and no bistro on my bus). The bus rumbled to life and hit the freeway as the sun was setting. Ten minutes later, we were crossing the suspension bridge across the Bosphorus-- my pulse quickened and I grabbed my camera. Unfortunately, I was sitting on the left side and I couldn't get a good shot of the "Welcome to Asia" sign. Asia! At long last!

The bus pulled in less than 10 minutes later at the bus station for Asian Istanbul, quite a bit bigger than the European bus station but every bit as isolated in freewayland. I went to stretch my legs, smoke and use the facilities for the 20 minutes or so that we were there, keeping tabs on my fellow passengers so that I would know when it was time to go back to the bus, since I didn't understand anything of the announcements made. I got back on the bus, and this time the seat next to me was occupied, by a not too shabby looking guy listening to his iPod. For all the comfort with which the bus had been designed, they really didn't leave much room between the seats, and a certain amount of leg contact with my neighbor was inevitable. But I could only figure that this is where the lack of prohibition on same-sex contact would come in handy for me, and after the steward came down the aisle with a cart of beverages (just like a plane!) and I had my orange juice, I put on my sleeping mask and earplugs and pulled my blanket around me to go to sleep for as much as the remaining 14 hours of traversing Anatolia as I could-- I decided that the guy next to me was my temporary boyfriend and went to sleep, maybe with some inappropriate thoughts about our bodily contact. Two hours later, around 10pm, the bus stopped and the lights came up again-- the steward announced something and everybody got up to get off the bus. I groggily followed everyone to this way station, a rest stop in the middle of nowhere owned by the bus company, and got myself a meal of köfte and rice at the cafeteria. Surmising that this rest stop would last at least half an hour, I went back to the bus to grab a can of beer and then drank it somewhat surreptitiously on the terrace of the rest stop, since they didn't sell alcohol there and I wasn't sure if this was appropriate. But no one batted an eye. Soon it was time to go again and I settled back in next to my boy and got a pretty good night's sleep for the rest of the way.

When I awoke, we were on the outskirts of Antalya. We stopped at the glass-and-steel bus station there and I nearly missed the departure after going to pee and get a cup of coffee. The bus trundled down the coastal road to Alanya for two hours, occasionally stopping to let someone off at some resort high-rise or other. At last we arrived at the last stop-- Alanya-- around 11am, and sure enough, K. was there waiting for me with a car and driver. Good to see a familiar face!

K. took me first to her apartment so that I could drop off my stuff; then we caught a bus to a stop halfway up the mountain crowned with the more than 800-year-old citadel that Alanya is famous for. This was the location of the study center owned by my alma mater in America, which K. is the director of. This summer, a Department of State-funded program was going on there for about 15 American graduate and undergraduate students-- a program in intensive Turkish. K. and I ate lunch with the students, then hiked up the mountain to see the citadel and take in the breathtaking view of the fortress wall that snaked all the way up from the bottom. All the while accompanied by K.'s legendary encyclopedic knowledge about the history of the Ottoman Empire-- no better way to see it!

After we hiked back down the mountain into town, K. took me swimming at a pristine beach behind the Alladin hotel (patiently explaining to me from her knowledge of Arabic etymology that no, that was not a misspelling: in fact, the usual Western rendering with one L and two D's is less faithful to the Arabic original), then, when I was already completely exhausted (having not slept all that well on the bus), she took me out to a fancy restaurant for mezze, charcoal-grilled kebab and lots of raki. No need for me to grab at the check at the end-- this was all part of my speaker's fee! Finally, she took me to the tourist district so that I could get a chance to see Alanya's only "gay" bar, a shocking pink neon colored establishment run by two middle-aged X-ish queens. This bar was tucked away in an alley, in the shadow of the barn-like disco monstrosities dominating the tourist district, with drunken Northern European youth staggering in and out. The bar was virtually deserted, but we sat out front drinking our beers and watching the nightlife walk past. I picked up a magazine for X-ish expats in Alanya.

Then on our way home, K. looped us down along the beach side of the tourist district, with tacky faux-Roman columns dominating the entrances to the disco barns.
"Check this out," she whispered to me as she discreetly pointed toward a platform next to a column. Three European tourist girls were dancing and gyrating on the platform. Then K. indicatively cast her gaze a bit closer to us and off to the side, where a gaggle of teenaged Turkish boys stared, agape. The chin of one of them had even dropped onto the shoulder of his friend, quite literally.

The next day I was due to speak to K's students about my work, but not until 4pm. I woke up and went down to the shopping street parallel to K's house to have a leisurely breakfast of börek and coffee. Then I went to an internet café to get my fix, and most importantly, research what my next move would be. K. had told me that there was a twice-weekly ferry from Alanya to Girne in the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus". From there I could take a shared taxi to the Turkish half of Nicosia. Would there be any problem crossing the Green Line into Cyprus proper? "No, definitely not for you, since you're European," K. had said. I decided to check this out on the internet. As reliable a source as that is-- there were varying statements about this on different travel forums. Some insisted that you could cross the Green Line, but not with luggage. But most seemed to indicate that you could cross, as long as you had a visa for Cyprus or didn't need one. Apparently Cyprus had been difficult about it for a while after the border opened in 2004, but then it got reprimanded by the European Union that it had to at least let EU citizens in under any circumstances. So it made sense to me that I wouldn't have any problems.

Plus I found a travel agency in (the southern half of) Nicosia that offered passage by sea to Egypt and Israel. Really?? I fired off an email to find out if that was true, or if that service had been suspended. In any case, there was only one way forward, and that was to Cyprus-- if I couldn't manage to get off Cyprus by sea, then I would just have to fly or figure something else out. I went to the travel agency in Alanya that sold tickets for the ferry to Girne and bought one for the next day.

My talk went quite swimmingly that afternoon, although as I had to say to K., "I like talking about my work more than I like actually doing it," a problem which I am still struggling with as I write this.

That night, my last night in Alanya, I went out on my own after K. went to bed-- I wanted to hang out at the weird "gay" bar again. K. lives on a sort of precipice right above the tourist district-- as soon as you walk out her door at night, you hear the cacophony of the discos from below. Now I am not a religious man (as you should know by now) but I do believe in Hell: and I believe that wherever it exists, it is inevitably a human creation, the "Moloch!" of Metropolis, for example.
There is something about the way 10 different sound systems blasting house music interfere with each other that I cannot describe as anything less than Satanic-- it really did sound like inhuman screams of suffering to me coming from the discos. I gulped and headed downhill into the Darkness, keeping a grip on my pure, innocent heart (which loves nothing more than the sacred sound of the guitar string and the real drum) to just get to the bar and drink a couple of beers.

It started out uneventfully-- the bar was just as dead as ever in the midst of all the chaos, the old X-ish queens sat at another table outside, and the twinky (but almost certainly straight) waiter brought me a beer. It wasn't long, though, before two boys stumbled down the alley and sat at my table. The one sitting close to me asked me if I would buy him a drink. I shook my head and tried my best to ignore him, continuing to sip my beer and smoke my cigarette.
"Ohhhh, I've had such a hard day..." he said, and through a combination of elliptical English and body language made clear that he had just been kicked out of one of the discos. No wonder, he seemed pretty drunk or fucked up on something. "How old you?"
"32," I answered.
"I'm 19," he said. Whatever he had been through, he looked pretty aged for 19. "And my friend is 17," he said, motioning to his friend. That was a bit more believable. He grabbed my beer and took a swallow. Before I could say "hey", he went on: "Are you gay?"
"Yes."
"So are you top or bottom?"
I laughed. "Both."
He didn't seem to understand this. "Top or bottom?"
"Both, sometimes I'm top and sometimes I'm bottom."
He pointed a thumb at his chest. "I'm top." Aren't they all, I thought. "I really wanna f-f-fuck you," he went on.
I shrugged. He grabbed my hand and placed it on his crotch. "My friend likes you," he said, going off on another tack. His friend nodded and while I couldn't see what his friend's hand was doing under the table, his elbow revealed that he was pumping away madly, trying to work up something for me to feel. The first boy took another swallow of my beer. I was starting to get irritated, but I kept a bemused smile on my face.
"I love you," the first boy said. At this he pulled down his cap at an angle and dipped his chin, looking at me expectantly with one eye in a rakish pose that he had learned somewhere. I was unimpressed. "Will you just give me a kiss? One little kiss?" He made a kissy-face at me. I leaned in to give him one little peck on the lips.
At this point the waiter swooped in and hissed something in Turkish at the boys. Was he telling them to leave me alone? No, it was clear from the context that it was more like, "No same-sex public display of affection in front of the bar, we could get shut down." As if the rest of the utterly filthy display wouldn't raise any eyebrows.
I was getting pretty tired of this, though. I recalled the time years ago that I took T. to a gay disco in Xxxxx where straight people aren't allowed-- I had told him to do his best not to blow his cover, and he did. When some nasty old guy took a shine to him and wouldn't take no for an answer from him, he just kept protesting "No, I can't. You see, I'm already seeing someone back in San Francisco." Which was true-- his girlfriend/fiancée. But he really did have to put up with a lot of hassle from that guy, I guess because his tactic might have implied that he would be only too glad to go home with that guy if he weren't already taken. Partly with that in mind, I decided to try a different tactic than showing only faint interest. "You know what?" I said, pulling my hand out from under the first boy's hand, which was pressing my hand against his crotch, "I don't think I feel like being a bottom tonight." I slid my hand in the direction of his ass, and he squirmed in his seat. "I look at you and that nice ass of yours and I think, I really feel like more of a top now."
He wriggled away and shook his head.
"Aw, c'mon. I bet it would be really nice to take you."
He looked a bit scared and tried to grab my hand and put it against his crotch again. I pulled my hand away.
"No, I'm not in the mood. C'mon." I started massaging my own crotch demonstratively. I winked at him exaggeratedly and chk-chk'ed.
He slid his chair back slowly, trying to keep his cool and keep looking at me with a macho suaveness. "I work at Yyyyy Café down the street... do you promise to come visit me there tomorrow? You can get breakfast."
"Sure, I will visit you."
"OK." The boy tossed his head coolly at his friend, and his friend got up too. "See you tomorrow. Maybe you change your mind."
"Nope, I doubt it-- there's only one thing I'm after now." And I made a show of craning my neck to check him out a bit from behind.
The boys finally swaggered/staggered off to find another mark. I leaned back in my chair, relieved. One more beer, then back to K's place for my last night in Turkey!

[I know, I know, post-vacation life has been too damn busy to finish this vacation blog, but I will do it! I only hope I still have some readers out there...]

In my hurry to write that last entry, I forgot to write about my mental atmosphere while I was sitting there waiting for the ferry back to the mainland of Istanbul from Heybeliada.

This was my fifth day in Turkey, that Sunday, July 15, and after a few days of being linguistically blind and deaf I had become mute, as well. Increasingly, in commercial transactions I would lapse into a jerky pantomime, pointing at what I wanted or saying the word for it ("bira, kahve"), making a namaste-gesture for "please" and dipping my head for "thanks". I think I had ordered a coffee at this beachfront café by the docks and the waiter asked me, "Sade?" I assumed that this meant "Sugar?"

My sequence of thoughts in response to this went something like: "I prefer my coffee plain." "However, most Turks take sugar in their coffee." "Maybe there's something to that." "Besides, I'm too lazy to say 'no' or otherwise have to explain my coffee preferences to this waiter."

I turned to the waiter, smiled, nodded, and held up my thumb and forefinger close together. "Just a little," I said. He raised an eyebrow, but then turned and walked away, probably shaking his head.

I now know that "sade" means "black, no sugar", which made my qualification sound pretty absurd. At any rate, the waiter brought me a lightly sugared cup of Turkish coffee and I sat sipping it, chuckling. I thought to myself that I had reached the perfect state of equilibrium with my environment-- it no longer mattered whether I really wanted my coffee black with no sugar-- that was the kind of intrepid traveler I was. Man, just imagine what a terrible time one of those Americans who is like "could I please have my eggs half-over easy, half scrambled, oh and could you put the ranch dressing on the side, not on the salad, and could I just have half a piece of whole wheat toast-- oh, and could you take the other half of the piece of toast and make fresh croutons for my salad?" would have on the trip I was taking. I was happy to take whatever was put in front of me.

But then a wave of sadness and alienation washed over me. What do I want, anyways? Do I have any such thing as a preference one way or another anymore? Am I just leading a completely passive existence?

I recognized this what this was about, not the thoughts themselves but the feeling weighing heavily on me, an old familiar feeling: culture shock. I hadn't had a real conversation with anyone in days, and I was going a bit batty. But that's what this trip was about-- I knew I wanted to push myself to a limit, to get to know myself better by taking myself out of my familiar surroundings. I flipped open my phone to look at the calendar-- yup, this was the halfway point of my vacation, so it was about right that I should be in an outer orbit by now. I leaned back and rolled the bitterness of the coffee and the culture shock on my tongue, trying to savor it for the time I had to wait for my ferry. Tomorrow, I told myself, you will know where this trip will take you. W-ia-- or...? No, it was impossible that I would be rejected for a visa for W-ia again. Wait, though, I shouldn't build up my expectations that I will get it, either, that might jinx it. OK, so I just have to expect to get rejected tomorrow, and then I will get it, just like that-- Surprise!

* * *

Well, dear reader, you know how that turned out. And now you get to hear the story of how I got rejected.

The next morning, I got up early and caught a cab to the W-ish consulate. I wasn't going to take any chances with being late. I walked into the consulate with my immaculately filled in form, goody 2-shoes Protestant that I had now swallowed my pride to declare myself to be, and got in line for the bulletproof window. In front of me I saw the only other non-Turk or non-Arab in the waiting room, handing in his application-- it was a German, with a recommendation letter from the German consulate and a worn diplomatic passport, or at least a passport indicating that he was a German federal employee-- a Dienstpass. I grinned at him.

"So, have you done this before?" I said in German.
He was taken aback to hear his native language. "How come?" he said, eyeing me somewhat suspiciously.
"This is my second time trying to apply-- they're really difficult. I was rejected last Friday for not filling in my religion."
He shrugged. "I think it will go all right for me. I have to fly to Damascus tonight."
"Well then, good luck!"
The lady behind the window handed him his claim check for his passport. "Thanks," he nodded somewhat warily and left.
I handed in my form, my passport, my photos, my 30 euros and my recommendation letter.
"So it's filled in all right this time? No problems?"
The lady took a cursory glance at my form. "No, no problems, just come back at 3."
"Don't I get a number for my passport?"
She looked at me. "No, we know who you are now."
"Oh, OK." That was either a good thing or a bad thing.

Back at the hotel, I was hopping with stress. I decided that I might as well make a Plan B, just to give myself some kind of feeling of control over my fate. The only other way to get to Israel, my ultimate destination where I had to catch my flight back to X-ia on July 29, was via Cyprus. There were ferries from Turkey to Cyprus, but according to all the sources I could find on the internet, there were no longer any ferries to Israel from Cyprus, not since a few years ago. I sighed. I would have to break the big rule of this trip ("no flying until it's time to go home"), bite the bullet, and just catch a flight to Israel from Cyprus. I browsed the websites of some airlines and did some test bookings to get a proof of concept on this, then it was time to go back to the consulate.

My German friend was there, and this time he looked relieved to see a familiar face.
"Have you heard anything yet?" I asked him.
He shook his head. "No, they told me to wait."
We sat, hands folded, looking up at the picture hanging on the wall of the leader of W-ia, who was gazing down on us with the vaguely sad expression of a shy, nerdy opthamologist who had been none-too-willingly pressed into his country's service as the figurehead of the ruling cabal when his father died. An older, faded picture of his father hung on an adjacent wall, and he wore a bit more of a confident snort on his face.
What were they saying about my application this time? I wondered. What did they know about me? Did they know that I was on my way to Israel, to the forbidden country? Did they know that I had to get a brand-new passport to erase my history, the Israeli stamps I had in my last passport? Did they know I was an American? I did have to fill in my birthplace on the form, and it was in my X-ish passport too, but fortunately without a country or state-- and I had the good fortune that the name of my birthplace, ultimately of Native American origin, could in fact plausibly sound like the name of some village in the hinterlands of X-ia if I pronounced it in an X-ish way. I had my defense ready. But the pictures of Big Daddy and Number 1 Son on the wall had me rattled, I had to admit. They looked at me like they knew it all. I now understood as an immigration lawyer what my clients go through in their immigration procedures for X-ia-- how they fret that the X-ish authorities will find out about some unfavorable slip-up in their past, how they got busted for shoplifting in Paris when they were 17 years old or whatever. And I say, never to fear, there's no way they can possibly know. But now that the tables were turned, I was willing to believe that the W-ish authorities knew everything about me.

"We're sorry, sir," a lady came out from the back into the waiting room, holding the German's form. "You did not fill in your religion on the form." She pointed at the blank entry. Didn't I warn him? "And we want you to fill in another form. Nicely, this time." It's true, his handwriting on the form was an illegible chicken scratch unbefitting of a proper Teuton.
The German sighed and filled in another form, this time putting "Roman Catholic" for his religion, and handed it over. The lady disappeared into the back and returned 5 minutes later.
"We're sorry, sir, we're not issuing any more visas today." Was I surprised?
"What?" The German sputtered. "I have a flight this evening, I need that visa today."
"What about me?" I asked.
"Right. Well, there was another problem with your form. You were supposed to fill in your family name first, then your first names." She handed me my form back.
"What? But it says here: Name and Surname. I filled them in in that order."
"Can you get me my visa today?" the German broke in.
The lady threw her hands up in the air. "The normal consul isn't here. Since last week we've had another consul, and she is being very difficult. She was angry with us that we didn't check your form better before giving it to her--" she said, addressing me, "and when she opened your passport and looked at your form, she saw that it was filled in in the wrong order. And just now when I went to ask her if she could issue you a visa," she said to the German, "she slammed the door and told me to leave her alone."
The German and I looked at each other with astonishment.
"Don't worry sir," she said to the German, "if you come and apply again tomorrow morning I am sure we can give you a visa. You, on the other hand--" she looked at me-- "I am not so sure."
It couldn't be any clearer than that. They had something on me, even if they wouldn't tell me what it was, and there was no way in hell they were going to give me a visa. I plopped down on a seat and put my head in my hands. "But I already got my bus ticket to Alanya-- I am leaving tonight." I rummaged through my bag and produced the bus ticket, hoping this would document my case. "I had been hoping to go on to W-ia from there."
"I'm sorry."
"But I really wanted to go to W-ia!" I whined.
"You should have applied at the W-ish consulate in X-ia."
"But I went there! I want to file a complaint! Your colleague there told me I could get a visa on the border!"
She shook her head. "No, you cannot get a visa on the border."
I sighed loudly. "Then no W-ia."

I left, hanging my head, and to suffocate my disappointment ate a huge pide with cheese and salami at a take-out place across the street. Plan B it would be, then.

On Sunday, July 15 I decided to get some beach time in, so I was going
to catch a ferry to the Princes' Islands (Adalar). I went to
Sirkeci, the main European train station first, because I needed to
book a sleeper train to Konya for Monday night in order to go on to
Alanya from there. But at the train station, to my amazement, they
told me that the train was all booked up-- I could go on Tuesday
night, though. Shit! I was feeling the itch to move on from Istanbul,
plus I was due to give a talk about my work in Alanya on Wednesday
afternoon and I wanted to be well-rested. K., my friend in Alanya, had
given me directions to the ticket offfices for the bus, saying that
the long distance buses in Turkey were like airplanes and weren't so
bad. Still... 14 hours by bus. I shuddered. But that was what it would
have to be.

The ferry terminal by Sirkeci, where the LP had said the ferries to
Adalar departed from, was boarded up and under construction. A
security guard posted there told me I would have to go to the docks at
Kabatas, at the other end of the light rail line. So I caught the
light rail to Kabatas-- when I got off, a lot of people who had been
on the tram and who looked like they were heading for the beach
started running, so I started running too, following them to the dock.
But we had apparently just missed the boat to Adalar-- the next one
wouldn't be for another hour and a half. So I caught an underground
funicular railway from Kabatas up to Taksim Square and went to book my
bus ticket to Alanya, then went to the Shake'In to hang out and read
before going back to Kabatas to catch the ferry.

The ferry was packed, but I found a seat on the upper deck, outside in
the burning sun, next to a really fine boy who was sitting listening
to his iPod. I imagined my Turkish gaydar was improving now, that this
dude was a representative of some vaguely alternative Turkish gay
look, with an oversized funky watch on one wrist and an armband on the
other. But then, I tend to mix up thinking someone's attractive with
thinking someone's gay, and so maybe it was just wishful thinking. The
ferry went first to a dock on the Asian side, then on south. After
about an hour, it reached the first Ada, and the biggest one:
Büyükada. From a distance, and as the ferry approached it, the sight
of this Ada was not making me enthusiastic-- the strip of beach near
the docks looked totally packed with people and umbrellas. I glanced
sideways at the Fine boy next to me and saw that he wasn't stirring to
disembark at this Ada, so I decided to wait and see where he was
going. As the ferry pulled up to the next island, and I saw that he
still wasn't making a move, I decided to go for the direct approach. I
pulled out my map of greater Istanbul and folded it to the part with
the Adalar.
"Excuse me, do you speak English?"
He looked a bit startled, then pulled the earphones out of his ears
before shaking his head. "No, no."
Being an English-speaking tourist, I pushed on, in spite of my own
enlightenment still unwilling to believe that there was anybody on
this planet under the age of 30 who could not speak at least 10 words
of English. "Which island was that?" I pointed to the map, tapping
each island, then pointing over my shoulder to the receding Ada.
He pointed to Burguzada.
"And the next one?" I pointed on ahead.
He pointed to Heybeliada.
"Is it a good one?"
He shrugged.
"Good beach?"
He shook his head with incomprehension. I gave up.
"OK, thanks."
But as the boat circled this island toward the docks, on which I had
seen some decent-looking swimming areas, he did start stirring to get
up. So he was either getting off at this island, or he was trying to
escape the crazy foreigner who had been leering at him and asking him
weird questions. Not wanting to stalk him any longer, I waited until
he was out of sight before getting up myself. I went and joined the
crowd gathering by the exit. And what did I see? Like, tons of Fine
boys! One wearing a Ramones t-shirt, another wearing eyeliner... OK,
this island must be the right one, I thought.
As soon as the boat docked and the gangplank was put out, though, I
stepped off onto the dock and looked around at the crowd that was
headed toward shore. Some parents with children in strollers, some
middle-aged couples... hey! Where did all those Fine guys go? I
whirled around, nonplused. Must have been delirium from the sun, a
mirage. Anyways, I just wanted to lie in the sun anyways-- I followed
one clutch of people carrying towels and coolers, then just went up to
the top of the hill in the center of the island and back down the
other side until the water came into view. There was a path through
the woods to my left, and I followed it, looking for a way down the
cliffs to a beach. A lot of people had just spread out their blankets
on the ground in the woods to sit down right there and gaze out at the
water or picnic. There seemed to be quite a few religious families who
were doing this, but there would be the occasional group of
beer-chugging teenagers as well. I did see a couple of beaches down
the hill-- one large commercial one with swimming pools and snack
bars; then a smaller cove that seemed rather overpopulated; one that
was apparently only for use by military personnel, judging by the
barbed wire fence, 'no photography' signs and sentries posted around
it; and one that seemed to only be accessible by boat.
I did finally find one, a steep hike down a cliff, that wasn't too
crowded. When I got to the water, though, it didn't look or smell all
that nice to swim in, despite the fact that some people were swimming
in it. I changed into my bathing suit (when I started doing this with
a towel wrapped around my waist, a middle-aged lady pointed and
shouted something at me, then pointed at a changing cabin-- I didn't
see what was so shocking about me getting naked under a towel, but I
obliged her) and lay and read for an hour or two. Then I hiked back
over the hill to the built-up area of the island.
I moseyed over to the dock to look at the schedule for the ferries,
but then also noticed that the ticket window was closed. A wave of
panic went across me-- had I missed the last boat to Istanbul? It was
only something like 7:30pm. I found someone who worked there-- "No
more boat?" I asked.
"Other landing." He pointed to the next landing up the shore and I
darted there, seeing that there was a ferry docked there and a crowd
of people waiting to board. There was one person working at the
turnstiles, frantically having to deal with people's strollers,
wheelchairs, lost tickets and questions. I tried to get her attention.
"English? Ingilizce?" I asked. She shook her head. I pointed at the
boat that looked about to depart. "Kabatas?" She didn't seem to hear
my question, as she was already dealing with some other customer.
"Kabatas?" I repeated more urgently.
She looked at me and shook her head vigorously. "NO Kabatas!" She
pointed to the schedule on the wall-- the next boat to Kabatas would
be the last of the day, around 9:15pm. I sighed. Stuck on this island
for another hour and a half, when I wanted nothing more than to go
back to the hotel, take a shower, and go out some more for my last
night in Istanbul. Oh well, better than being stuck on this island
overnight.

On the note of this story and the woman working at the ferry landing,
I have to talk about the issue of negation in Turkish, because it is
really complex and completely non-obvious. In most Indo-European
languages, negation is pretty basic: there will usually be a word that
means "not" and/or "no" that you just add into a sentence, and it
usually begins with an N, for that matter (the Scandinavian languages'
weirdo "ikke" and "inte" being some of the few exceptions). A few days
later, K. explained to me some of the ways you can negate in Turkish--
you can add the suffix "degil", which I think means "there are no,
there are none", or you can implant the infix "ma/me" (depending on
the vowels in the root) into a verb. Yes, implant. Sort of like if
instead of negating the sentence "she brings" with "she does not
bring" in English, we said "she bringmes". So anyways, after this
experience with the woman at the ferry landing, I became convinced of
one thing. Of all of the "international" words that there are that are
more or less the same in all languages or at least widely understood
(hotel, telephone, auto, cola, etc.), I think the most useful
international word is "no".

I slowly open my eyes as I lie in the hammock. Waves of heat are rising off the ground, and my head is heavy. A calico cat jumps across my field of vision, giving me a reassuring feeling of familiarity. A few meters away from me in the desert heat there stands a computer, and on the wall behind it are posters, which strangely remind me of the ones at home. Wait a minute, I am at home. I am waking up from a nap at the end of my first day back at work.

Whew... got a bit to go before I'm finished telling about Istanbul.
I'll try to catch up.

On Friday, after my first rejection from the W-ian consulate, I tried
to go to the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia, but I was in a rotten
mood from the W-ian ordeal and I only made it as far as the inner
courtyard of the Blue Mosque: it was prayer time and so I couldn't go
inside. I walked back to the tram and returned to Beyoglu to take a
nap in the hotel, then went out to read in the sun.

When I went to the Bigudi at 9, E. and B. weren't there, but all the
other familiar faces were. I hung out for half an hour while the hot
guy K. DJed, paying me lots of attention ("J.! Do you know this
track?") but then I got out of there to pound the pavement. Like the
protagonist of a Japanese movie, I am always torn between attachment
and longing [how many Japanese movies have I seen? OK, so only 2 or 3,
but I read this somewhere], between wanting to be in someplace
familiar and comfortable and wanting to be in someplace unfamiliar
where the unexpected can happen. The best is if a place can offer
both, if you can hang out with friends but still have the chance to
meet someone new. At any rate, the Bigudi was familiar by now but I
was already trapped in a clique-- and one where I very likely wasn't
going to meet any other queer guys. I started my tour of the gay bars
of Beyoglu.

First to Tek Yön. Like a lot of the places in the gturk.net
guide, it had apparently changed locations recently, but I found it,
sat at the bar, and ordered a beer while the place filled up. It was
more a disco [i.e. club] than a bar, judging from its high ceilings
and flashing lights. This was the first time that I noticed a
phenomenon that would be common to all the Istanbul discos I would go
to: that there were 'waiters'. Staff identifiable by scrolling LED
badges who would go around and take people's drink orders. I had never
thought about it before, but all the discos I had ever been to before
were self-service-- in fact, it was always part of the fun, that
people in your group would take turns going to the bar to get the
others drinks.
At any rate, I got into a conversation with the bearded bartender.
When I said I was from Xxxxxx, he nodded approvingly. "So is there
much of a scene for hairy guys there?" he asked. I narrowed my eyes--
what was he talking about? but when I looked around I got it. Ohhhhh--
that's what kind of place this was. And sure enough, almost all
the men in the joint had beards, which explained why I wasn't really
attracted to anyone there. I'm just not into the 'hairy dog' look.
(You would like this place though, B.L.!) "This is a real high-class
place," the bartender said to me then. Ooo, turn-off number two. If
people here were worried about "class" then I wasn't going to be able
to have a down-to-earth conversation with anyone. I walked around for
a bit, then returned to the bar to pay for the small bottle of Efes
beer I had drunk, holding out a 5 lira bill. 'That'll be 10 lira,' the
bartender said. TEN LIRA!?!? I thought-- that's more than 5 euro!
Jesus. I paid, feeling stung, and got the hell out of there.
Still, a bit of an odd combination for me, now that I think back on
it-- a scene where the two features are 'hairy' and 'pricey'. When I
think of gay subcultures in Western Europe and America where hair is a
prized feature, it is usually in more leathery scenes that also pride
themselves on being a bit more down to earth and less pretentious and
expensive. But the Tek Yön would seem to be a product of its
environment, and Turkey is, after all, in the middle of what
Eugenides' narrator dubs the 'Hair Belt' of the world.

Next on to Barbahçe, which was a few blocks away from Taksim
Square. An online guide had described it as an 'upper class' bar,
which already had me on edge. But I was hoping that the crowd would be
a bit cuter for me than the Tek Yön.
I got to the door of the place and started to walk in when the bouncer
stopped me and said something. "What?"
"This party costs 20 lira."
I shook my head. "No way, man. I'm from X-ia, you see..." starting to
launch into my standard excuse for being a cheapskate. To my
amazement, the bouncer swung the door open for me and motioned me to
go inside.
"Just go, it's no problem, no problem!"
Ah, when you're a foreigner, you're a lady and every night is ladies'
night. I strolled inside and checked out the place. Low ceilings, neon
lighting, stainless steel and glass. I leaned against a pillar and
checked out the guys. I was increasingly disappointed to see that the
cute striped T-shirt look I had seen all over the streets was totally
not in evidence in the gay bars I had been in so far-- more
button-down shirts, designer jeans, or if there was a T-shirt then it
was one with some name on it like Abercrombie or D&G. Not so cute for
me, that effect of hanging a giant price tag on your clothes. Maybe
the striped t-shirt look was haram for Istanbul gay guys
because it was so affordable and ubiquitous. Wherever I go in the
world, so many self-identified gay gays seem overly preoccupied with
proving that they are not peasants. I miss the Salvation Army chic of
San Francisco. Yes, I was standing there feeling quite cynical about
money and class in the gay world. I didn't even dare go to the bar to
order a drink-- what would a beer be here-- 15 lira?
To make things worse, one of the waiters got in my face at that
moment. "What are you doing?" Perhaps he didn't mean that to
sound so abrupt.
"What am I doing?" I drew on my cigarette. "Hanging out, checking out
guys." I shrugged.
"What do you want to drink, whiskey, beer, wine?"
I swatted him away as if he were a fly and shook my head-- "No, no,
I'm fine." I thought about lying and saying that I don't drink.
Five minutes later the other waiter tried to take my order as well. I
scowled at him. This whole phenomenon of having twinky waiters go
flirt with customers to make them want to order more drinks seemed to
me to be not far from the rent boy concept. For all I knew about these
waiters, for the right 'tip'...
I squeezed as much enjoyment out of my time there as I could-- dancing
(as one of the few-- the guys there seemed to be pretty shy and cling
to the wall most of the time) and trying to flirt with the one guy
there I thought was cute. The toilet in this joint was really nice--
all black marble and polished fittings, and a urinal trough filled
with blue glass marbles. It seemed that the toilet was actually a
functional social space, as well-- I saw a couple of guys just kind of
hanging out there, or taking a really looong time to wash their hands.
At the same time, I did not have the impression that people were
having sex in the stalls or anything like that-- the toilet was just a
kind of chill-out room where you could talk without shouting. One guy
who was hanging out struck up a conversation with me and asked me if I
wanted a drink. He seemed nice, but he wasn't totally my type, plus I
didn't want to get drawn into staying in that bar or having to buy him
a drink next. I smiled and declined politely, and left the bar not
long after, proud of myself for spending 0 lira for a couple of hours
of entertainment, which would hopefully make up for the Tek Yön
ripoff.

I then went back to the Bigudi, charged up with the dancing I had been
doing and ready to dance some more in a familiar environment. The
perfect combination! I stayed and danced until closing, and noticed
when I paid my bill that every night I went there, the staff was
charging me less and less for beer. Cool!

The next day I was going to 'do' the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.
I felt like a terrible person, though, because I was really only in
the mood to go sit at the Sugar Club Cafe, drink beer and read. I
motivated myself, though, by thinking about my hostess in Sarajevo,
who when I said I was on my way to Istanbul cried out "Ah! Istanbul!
Aya Sofya, Topkapi!" Come on, you have to go, I told myself. So I
went, and to compensate for my numbness to the immediate experience I
shot half a roll of film of the Hagia Sophia, so I could say I was
there. I went to the Blue Mosque again, but again I hit it at the
wrong time, just as prayer time was starting. School's out! OK, I did
my obligatory tourist thing, I could go drink beer and read.

After 1 beer at the Sugar Club Cafe, I did realize there was one other
thing I needed to do in Istanbul that would be an experience in and of
itself-- go to a hammam and be bathed. "You'll never feel so clean
again in your life," or some variation on that was always the summary
of the hammam experience as presented in the Lonely Planet or
wherever. I hesitated to go to the more touristed ones in the
Sultanahmet neighborhood that the LP recommended, though. So I went to
the one in my neighborhood, the Hamam Galatasaray. Big mistake. First
of all, it was really expensive-- 68 lira for the full service, but I
bit the bullet and decided to go there rather than shop around,
figuring I might as well. But I was quite underwhelmed by the whole
experience. First of all, I was the only customer there! It was nice
to sit in the historic (at least 400-year-old) marble steam bath hall
for 20 minutes before getting washed, but there was nothing of the
social experience. As far as the massage and the bathing-- well, it
was all right to get all my joints cracked by the masseur, and to be
scrubbed with the loofah mitt and white soap, and to chill out staring
at the goldfish pond in the main hall for 20 minutes afterwards,
but... no, it wasn't really worth it. I didn't feel all that amazingly
clean afterwards, and I feel a lot more internally cleansed after
going back and forth a few times between the Finnish sauna and the
cold dip pool at the hippie sauna in Xxxxxx. I decided to get out of
there to go eat. I had been prepared to pay at least 10% tip to the
masseur at the end of the experience, since a sign had indicated that
that was expected, so I had a 10-lira bill ready for the masseur. But
then the guy who swaddled me in towels after I had been bathed came up
to me with an outstretched hand, so I handed him 5 lira. Then the guy
who had given me my bath slippers and loincloth came up too, but all I
had left was a 50-lira bill or something, so I shrugged that I didn't
have any more and ran.

Standing outside feeling burned and taking account of things, I
resolved not to let this experience ruin my mood. It was Saturday
night, after all. And I resolved not to be so damn X-ish and to just
let myself go and not worry about money for one day-- when else would
I get the chance to party in Istanbul? That turned out to be the right
state of mind. I went and ate a deluxe dinner of amazingly delicious
lamb crêpes at Haci Abdullah, then kicked off my evening at another
bar that gturk.net hadn't listed, but which I had found on another
online Istanbul gay guide-- the Shake'in. I liked
this place all right-- it fell into the same category as the Sugar
Club Café for me: an airy, accessible bar where the fact that it was
rather non-descript was an advantage, making it relaxed and not too
cliquey. [Glass of beer: 6 lira.] The kind of bar that doesn't squeeze
people together, so it's definitely not a pick-up joint, but where
you can just lean back and check people out. When the owner heard I
was from X-ia, he pointed me to a stack of X-ish gay magazines that
someone had left behind there. That was funny-- so I spent two hours
sipping beer and reading through recent issues of the mags whose names
rhyme with Stink and Cheese, even coming across an interview with a
friend of mine in the latter.

Then I took a skip and a jump up the same alley to the GaLeBi
disco. The owner of the Shake'in had been surprised when I told him I
wanted to go there-- he said something like, "But that's the disco
where the-- feminine guys go," making a face as he said this.
To further understand this distinction he was making, I asked him if
he considered the Tek Yön to be the disco for the "masculine" guys. He
smiled and nodded. I told him I had already been there and if that was
the way it was, then I was more into the "feminine" guys. He shrugged
and accompanied me to the GaLeBi so that he could say something to the
bouncer and get me in for free. Turned out I got there just on time--
a number of drag acts went on right after I got there. That was a real
cultural experience, because all of the songs that were lip-synced
were Turkish pop and a few of the performers were quite stunning belly
dancers. For that, it was worth the somewhat expensive 8 lira for a
small bottle of beer.

Then I went to the other side of Taksim Square to the Other
Side disco, which was on the fourth floor. It was a small, dark
disco and didn't look too crowded or promising when I walked in, but I
decided to spend at least 1 bottle of beer's time there [expensive: 10
lira]. At the end of a hallway were two quite impressively designed
chill-out rooms: one all white, and one all red, including the
lighting. I settled first in the red, then in the white room and
flipped through some magazines on the table. Within five minutes,
somebody else came and sat there too. And he was totally hot-- he had
a bit of the stockiness and broad features fitting my more
unconventional taste, but even a professional homosexual would have
found him hot. He made a few seconds of penetrating eye contact with
me, then started leafing through one of the magazines.
"Do you speak English?" I asked him.
He looked at me and shook his head slowly, then quickly leafed through
the rest of the magazine, let it fall on the table and returned his
gaze to mine, then lit a cigarette. I took out my tobacco and rolled a
cigarette, but it was difficult-- my hands were shaking. "I'm J.--
from X-a," using the Turkish word.
"K.," he introduced himself as he extended a hand, then kept staring.
I was completely flushed.
"You want--" I pointed at my beer-- "drink?" I pointed at him and made
a drinking gesture.
"Enerji," he replied. "Red Bull. Enerji."
I nodded and rushed off to the bar. A glass of Red Bull was also an
extortionate 10 lira, but fuck it. I returned to the chill out room
with the glass and handed it to K. He nodded, smiled imperceptibly and
took a sip before coming around the other side of the table and
sitting next to me. Ohhhh yeah. I lightly traced my fingertips over
his hand and looked up to hold his gaze. He placed his hand on my
shoulder-- then on my back-- then--- down the back of my pants.
I threw my arm around him and we proceeded to... well... I don't know
if 'make out' is the right term, it was more just pure groping. His
mouth was strangely unyielding to my kiss, and when I tried to lift up
his t-shirt to feel up his belly, he squirmed and pushed my hand back
down. It was still hot.
He took out his phone and added an entry for me. I keyed in my name
and number, then saved it and called myself. I let him key in his name
on my phone.
"Sex?" he said, making a few gestures of specific suggestions.
I nodded vigorously. "Yes, sex. Your house?" I jerked a thumb in the
direction of the exit, and pointed at him.
He shook his head. Of course, he probably lived with his parents or
something. "Hotel?" he said.
I wondered how OK my hotel would be with me bringing someone to my
room, but it was worth a try. I nodded. "Yes. Hotel. By Tünel."
Then he said something in Turkish. I shook my head. "What?"
He repeated the word, then said, "Money."
I scowled and cocked my head, then shook it slowly. "Money?"
"Sex. Money."
"No-o-o-o. No money. Poor."
"No money? No sex?"
"Yes sex. No money." I grinned.
"No money?"
"No money." I made a gesture of wiping a table. "No money. Love!" I
crossed my wrists over my heart and extended my palms.
"No money?" He grabbed my hand and pressed it against his crotch. I
enjoyed the feel, but kept smiling and shaking my head.
"No money."
He shrugged. "No money?"
"No money."
He took out his phone and looked up my entry on it, and showed it to
me. OK. Then he selected something which I could only assume meant
"Delete" and looked at me questioningly. I shrugged. He deleted my
entry, then deleted the call to me from his call log. Then he motioned
to me to take my phone out and do the same for him. I took my phone
out and demonstratively deleted his entry and the call from him in my
call log, amused by this whole procedure.
He stood up. "No sex?"
I smiled and repeated. "No money."
He shrugged and smiled, then turned around and started to leave. He
stopped once more and turned to look at me, apparently still not
completely believing that I was unwilling to pay him for sex. I waved
goodbye. He left.
I stood up with a huge grin on my face, feeling warm all over and
giggling. I left the disco and went back down to the street with a
skip in my step. No, I was not at all disappointed, just amused, and
that was quite a hot little number we did, for what it was worth. It
was funny-- gturk.net had put a warning next to all of the bars and
discos that were notorious for rent boys, and the Other Side did not
have a warning, but I guess it could happen anywhere.

I headed to the Bigudi, wanting to spill the story of what had just
happened and how the search for a Turkish boyfriend was not too
promising. Unfortunately, E. wasn't there for me to be able to tell,
but I was able to mutely enjoy the company of the others, a beer, and
some dancing. What a night!

(dateline present, port of limassol) I really hadn't been expecting
much of a ship passage to egypt- the only person i know who went a
long distance from A to B (transatlantic, in her case) by ship was a
semi-professional sailor, and i guess i imagined soot, the smell of
diesel, incessant clanging, and a simple fold-down berth behind a
burlap curtain. nothing of the sort. my cabin could just as well be a
room at the ramada, only with no window (that would have been 45
extra and who needs it). turns out i an hitching a ride on the cruise
ship 'serenade'. since i've never done a cruise, only bus-like
ferries, this should be an interesting experience! i only wish the
iranian millionaire were here so we could make full use of my cabin.

Back to Istanbul, the Thursday before last.
I slept in late, got breakfast, and walked to the consulate of W-ia,
making my way there with one of Istanbul's more amusement park-like
forms of transit: the teleferik, or hanging cable car, across the deep
valley formed by Democracy Park. It was there where I found out that I
would not be able to get a visa at the border, and I went back to the
consulate of X-ia to find out what I would need to do to get a
recommendation letter. The rest of the afternoon I spent wandering
around the working-class neighborhood Aksaray. It was already 6, and I
was due to meet up with E. and B. at the Bigudi at 8-- they had said
we would eat, but I was hungry, so I stopped into a kebap house. What
I had intended to be a snack ended up being a full meal of spicy Adana
kebap, salad, and bread for a total of about 3 euro-- somewhat
guiltily, I made my way back to Beyoglu (the neighborhood of my
hotel), had a beer and read outside my usual afternoon hangout, the
gay Sugar Club Cafe-- an airy, open cafe situated at the end of
an alley off Istiklal that caught the wind in such as way as to
provide natural air conditioning on a hot, sunny day.

I went to the Bigudi at the appointed time, but E. and B. weren't
there. The other familiar faces greeted me (and I had at least gotten
a lesson in how to say hello -- how are you -- good, how are you? --
also good! in Turkish), but without an interpreter I was kind of on my
own. All of the tables had place settings-- ohhh, I realized-- that's
what E. had been talking about. We were going to eat there.
Oops, I was still full from my kebap. One of the staff set a full
plate down in front of me, though, and I was able to make some room
for the fixed combination of vegetarian summer salads and dolmades.
The Bigudi was starting to remind me of the MKZ with this food idea,
all the more because the place was still so casual and it seemed
almost as if the staff only worked there for the fun of it. I wasn't
alone for long, though, because one of the other customers who had
heard about me from someone else seated herself next to me and asked
me if I could speak German. The world of communication opened up
again! Her name was N., and she had grown up in Germany. The place was
much more full than the night before, and the crowd was predominately
women-- most of whom, like N., were queer. But then one of the staff
was a man, and the first time I saw him my eyes popped out of my head
and my tongue hung out of my mouth-- nicely stocky, with short, styled
bleach-blond hair, and a loose pair of pants that was nonetheless cut
just right to ride up the crack of his ample butt. When N. asked me
what type of guy I was into, I nodded my chin in that guy's direction,
and she smiled and nodded.

B. and E. did finally arrive at the Bigudi around 9:30pm, and I made a
mock show of impatience with them, even though I was having quite an
OK time already. At this point, the hot guy had started DJing, and a
traditional Turkish trio of metal clarinet, bass and drum had started
to set up in the corner. Soon, they started playing songs that
everyone knew, and some people would even get up to dance, gyrating
and twirling their hands in the Turkish style. I was fascinated with
being in the middle of all this, but it was hard all the same-- I felt
the culture shock setting in as I was surrounded by a language whose
meaning I was completely blind to in speech and writing. At least in
the Slavic Balkans I could fall back on my high school Russian enough
to decipher signs and menus and conduct commercial transactions, plus
with as little as 10% comprehension of what was going on around me I
didn't feel totally cut off. But here... the occasional burst of
interpretation in German from N. or English from E. was a drip-feed. I
especially wished I could understand what the Author was saying; she
seemed to be the center of attention with her beguiling Mona Lisa
smile and seemingly wise and witty observations. I was also intrigued
by how the Author was the spitting image of one of my co-workers, and
I kept waiting for her to start speaking X-ish accordingly.

The hot guy kept walking back and forth, and N. laughed as she saw me
tracking him. "You know, I could introduce you to him, if you
want." She said something to him as he passed and he smiled and
waved at me.
"Everything OK?" he said in X-ish.
I laughed. "You speak X-ish?" I shouted after him as he went
back to the DJ stand.
N. lowered her head and grinned somewhat guiltily. "There's
something I should tell you, by the way, and I should have told you
earlier, but I didn't want to spoil your fun."
"What is it?"
"He's into women. In fact, he's been married to one for 10 years,
that blond woman standing behind the bar."
"No way! Really?" I laughed, realizing that I was one of the
only lovers of men in the whole joint.

By 1am I had grown very tired, and I had smoked too much because of my
feeling of isolation, so I bid farewell to everyone-- I did have to
get up early to deal with the consulate business the next day. "See
you here again tomorrow night?" E. asked.
"Sure-- but 9pm this time!" I smiled.

To jump back to the present for a short posting, I've been in Limassol, the second-biggest city in Cyprus for a day and a half now. If I am not mistaken, this is the southernmost city in the European Union (not counting the Canary Islands and French Guiana and all those outliers). And indeed, this city has the feeling of being a cultural "land's end", in much the same way that places like San Francisco or Vancouver have for North America-- and I have seen so much detritus of Europe beached here, corpulent Northern Europeans and muscle cars and Jesus freaks. All the same, geographically, it seems impossible to assert that Cyprus is Europe and not Asia. It is due south of the Asian part of Turkey, after all. Just goes to show how arbitrary any division between Europe and Asia is-- who says the Bosphorus, the Urals, and the Caucasus have to be the dividing lines? One could say that it's a cultural dividing line, that the Turks, in particular, are definitively "Asian", despite having a geographical toehold in Europe (and this is an argument used frequently to claim why Turkey should not be in the EU). But at the high watermark of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and not Anatolia, were really the beating heart of the empire. Did that mean that the Balkans were culturally "Asia" then?

6 minutes left until the cybercafe closes. Life is really hard. At this point, I should have been in W-ia. I had originally planned my time in Istanbul and Alanya as being the last R&R before having to behave myself, clench my buttcheeks together for a week for the sake of an exciting police state experience. Well, so much for that. I've been sentenced to more R&R-- if I wanted to complete my trip to Israel (there, I've said it, fuck it) without flying, my only option was to take the ferry from Turkey on Thursday and camp out until the ferry to Egypt departs on Monday afternoon. So here I sit on the beach, working on my tan and reading book #5 on my trip (Norwegian Wood by Murakami). But hey, I'll get a third continent out of this trip-- Africa!!

OK, now I am in Limassol, Cyprus and I finally succeeded in finding a cybercafe that doesn't charge highway robbery prices (e.g., about 80 eurocents per 15 minutes) so I can sit back and update while my memory is still fresh.

Walking down Istiklal Avenue, the beating heart of young, European Istanbul, from my hotel, everything I had heard about it turned out to be true. People selling all manner of stuff, young hipsters mixed with headscarved women (although interestingly, most of the boyfriends or husbands of headscarved women did not wear any outward signs of piety-- could be a t-shirt and soccer shorts-- while in Sarajevo the men accompanying headscarved women usually were dressed modestly and had foot-long beards)--- all the cliches about Istanbul that I am trying to avoid (where East meets West, etc. etc. etc. blah blah blah) were confirmed. I saw a lot of good-looking guys too, sometimes two of them walking hand in hand or arm in arm-- being a dirty-minded Westerner, it's hard for me to not want to read something into it, but the fact of the matter is that there is simply no taboo on male contact in most Muslim countries. I was reminded of a certain friend of mine, a 60-year-old gay-libber of the first hour (well, I don't think he was at Stonewall, but he was at least out and about in New York at the time) who once got really mad at me for being in favor of the Palestinian cause. With his ideal of freedom being rather limited (in my opinion) to gay rights and nothing else, he was of the opinion that it was a better thing for Palestine to be run by the Israelis if the Israelis could impose more progressive ideas about homosexuality.
"If I can't walk down the street holding hands with my boyfriend," he declared, "then I don't want to go there or support them."
The answer to that is, I'm sure: go ahead. An unmarried woman and man holding hands or outwardly displaying affection in public in a conservative Muslim country, on the other hand, would probably get more problems.

Anyways, back to the nice-looking guys walking down Istiklal. It seemed that t-shirts with horizontal stripes were the look of the season, and it looked damn cute on a lot of guys. And these t-shirts, usually with some random logo, were for sale for cheap all over the place, in the bazaars and alleys off of Istiklal. Well, don't have to tell me twice-- I looked around and went along with the trend, finally finding a striped t-shirt without a logo for YTL 5 (about 2.50 euro). I used to hate 'fashion', (well, I still do, which I'll get into in a subsequent entry) but nowadays looking good has become so democratized, so easy with H&M and the places of its ilk.

I had just started reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides that day, in which the narrator, walking down the street in Berlin, comments that with globalization, it has become impossible to tell what country people are from in a big international city by looking at their clothes or shoes. Even Americans (at least the ones who are worldly enough to have a passport and travel, which is a significant point to be made) no longer stick out as much in their ethnic costume of baseball cap, t-shirt, jeans and athletic shoes as they did for me in Europe in 1994. It's not just that American fashion has become more Europeanized, it's also that European fashion has adopted and queered certain American fashion signifiers. One trend that I find vaguely amusing is that of clothes that try to copy the look of American college/athletic wear-- the screen-printed octagonal block letters and college logos. I think it's Replay (a company whose look I could describe as "Marlboro Man of Milan" or "spaghetti western") that sells the t-shirt emblazoned with "Hollidaysburg Wrestling". I wonder what my conservative Christian prison guard stepbrother-in-law in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania would think of the fact that there are at least a zillion European homos wearing this t-shirt now.

Anyways, I was on a mission walking down Istiklal, and that was to find a bar called Rocinante that I had seen listed on the gay Turkish website gturk.net that sounded like my kind of place. It had said, perhaps with a note of disapproval, that most of the people who go there "support left-wing causes or work for non-profit organizations". Cool!
Only, after winding through alley after alley after alley in the area of Istiklal where it was supposed to be, I just couldn't find it. The side streets off Istiklal are a total rabbit warren. The guy checking me into my hotel had said that there are 2,000 bars and restaurants in that neighborhood, and I was starting to see that that quite probably was no exaggeration. Plus on my map of Istanbul, most of those little streets were too tiny to be labeled. Even if I did know the name of a street I was looking for, most of the streets were really poorly signposted, or the street signs had been ripped off the wall. After two hours, I took a break by going to a cybercafe, surfing for a bit, updating my blog with the Bulgaria story and taking a good look at the map on gturk.net again, which made use of Google Maps. Then I went out to look, going in circles combing those streets and alleys for another two hours. Exhausted, I sat down somewhere to eat (kebab in a dish au gratin, delicious) and went back to my hotel to nap for an hour, then got up, looked at the map again, tried to copy it down onto a piece of paper as best I could, and headed out again. I was not going to be beaten! I can't remember how it happened, but after maybe another hour of walking around, in a moment of clarity possibly brought on by my being about to give up completely, I was walking down an alley I had walked down 5 times before and it appeared to me on the wall inside the doorway of an apartment building: "Cafe Rocinante: 2. kat [floor]" Aha! I looked up and saw the fluorescent sign hanging off the balcony there on the second floor. That's it! I ran up the stairs of what turned out to be an apartment building of bars (who'd a thunk?), where there was a rock club on the 1st floor above ground and something else on the 3rd floor, and entered the Rocinante.

It looked like a nice mellow place-- and the crowd was 90% women. That did not surprise me-- most gay men's politics do not extend beyond the end of their own erections. But I sidled up to the bartender and ordered a beer. She shook her head slowly-- "no English," she said. I pointed at the floor and said, "Am I in the right place? Homo? Lesbo? Left-wing?" I pumped a fist into the air demonstratively. At this she smiled broadly and nodded vigorously, then tapped me a half-liter of beer. "Ays,e" [I'm not on a Turkish keyboard anymore, that's an s with a cedilla] she introduced herself, and I reciprocated before going to sit down.

There were only two boys in my age range in the joint, sitting on the balcony, and they were pretty fine. One of them got up to go to the toilet and I sat trying to make eye contact with the other, but he only sat pensively drinking his beer and looking out into the street. Oh well. I rolled a cig and leaned back to sip on my beer. At that point one of the women at the table next to me looked at me and said something. "What?" I said.
She came over and pointed at my tobacco and asked me something else in Turkish. "Cigarette? Papers? Do you want one?"
Her companion started laughing and came over to interpret. "Sorry, we thought you were Turkish. Do you want to come sit with us?"
I joined them, E. (the one who could speak English) and B. (the one who couldn't) and we had a great time, talking and joking about relationships and dating-- we all seemed to share a taste for people who are, shall we say, difficult to bag. "If she says yes, yes, I say no, no! And if she says no, no, I say yes, yes!" B. said quite succinctly.
At one point E. and B. determined that we had to go someplace else and dance. "We're going to find you a Turkish boyfriend, and then you have to stay!" they were saying. They wanted to go to a place in the neighborhood called Bigudi, but when we got there, it was something else now-- some kind of reggae club. There were directions to the new location posted outside the door, but we went walking and of course, couldn't find it. So we came back and the doorman of the new club called someone from the old club for us, who came and picked us up. B. and this woman walked on ahead chatting, arms linked. "She's probably making a new girlfriend, she's so social," E. shook her head.

We got to the Bigudi Bi, which was on the second floor above another club called Desibell (on Mis Sokak, for anyone who wants to know), and there wasn't much going on. Only about 4 or 5 people, all of whom seemed to work there and still be setting up the place. I wasn't sure if E. or B. already knew any of them, but if they hadn't, it was as if we were all friends within 5 minutes. E. was the only one who could speak English, though, so I didn't pick up on much. Only that one of the people present seemed to be a semi-famous author, who described her work as fantasy, sort of science fiction (I wish I had caught her name). I asked her if her work was autobiographical, and she laughed. "Everyone asks me that, and it's not true. People ask my girlfriend all the time if she is one of the women I write about. It's really just fiction." I also got the feeling that she was a pretty big author, because she said at one point, "You hear of Orhan Pamuk?"
I nodded-- I had heard of him, at least, since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
"He's my competition." She threw back her head and laughed.

When it was time to go home, around 3am, E. was sure to tell me that they were all going to be there again the next night and that I should come. "We come at 8 o'clock, you too?" I nodded. "OK, see you then!"

I haven't had any tıme to substantıally update my blog, sınce every mınute I have been able to spend on a computer here ın Alanya, on the Medıterranean coast of Turkey, was used to try to fıgure out my next move. And now I have fıgured ıt out! In 20 mınutes I am catchıng a ferry to Cyprus, or at least the Turkısh Republıc of Northern Cyprus, the pseudo-state propped up by Turkey and unrecognızed by any other state ın the world. So although I am stıll bummed that I couldn't go to a full-on axıs of evıl state, at least I can go to a sort of junıor parıah state. From there I wıll proceed through the Green Lıne (UN buffer zone) ınto Cyprus, where I wıll stay for a few days before contınuıng on... the Southeast Passage to my goal!

W-ia won't have me.

No tıme to wrıte the whole story, but ıt's tıme to actıvate Plan B!!

Rather than tell all my İstanbul storıes ın chronologıcal order, I wıll tell one fırst that has been gnawıng at me all weekend. Let's call the next country I am goıng to W-ıa. More than a month ago, I had gone to the W-ısh consulate ın X-ıa to apply for a vısa. It was one of the strangest dıplomatıc representatıons I had seen ın my lıfe-- nothıng but a bıg room wıth a couple of guys sıttıng around smokıng, wıth only the oblıgatory pıcture of the leader of W-ıa gazıng out from the wall and a couple of plastıc flags on the desk. When I saıd I wanted to apply for a tourıst vısa, the 'consul' or whatever he was grabbed a form and asked me fırst of all ıf I had already booked a hotel ın W-ıa. I saıd no-- dıd I have to? No, he saıd, only ıf I wanted to get a tourıst vısa from the consulate there. He saıd not to worry about ıt, that I would just be able to get a vısa on the border. Really? I had heard that that was nearly ımpossıble. No, ıt's no problem, he saıd, and ıt would only cost me 30 euros there, whıle at the consulate ıt would cost 75. Oh-- OK, then, and I left shakıng my head. But I dıd hear a story before I left of another X-ısh person gettıng a vısa on the border-- ıt took 8 hours of waıtıng, to be sure, but he got ıt.

But once I was ın İstanbul, I thought ıt mıght be a good ıdea to double-check thıs wıth the consulate of W-ıa there. On Thursday, I found ıt on a map and made my way there, walkıng most of the way but takıng a teleferik (hangıng cable car) across the valley of Democracy Park, whıch afforded a spectacular vıew of the Bosphorus. Found the consulate and rang, then asked.
Get your vısa on the border? No way! the lady saıd. You have to get a letter of recommendatıon from the X-ısh consulate and brıng ıt here tomorrow mornıng between 9 and 11 wıth two photos, 30 euros and your passport, then pıck up your passport agaın wıth vısa at 3. Oh! Good thıng I checked thıs out, because the next day would be Frıday, and Monday I was leavıng İstanbul.

I went back toward my hotel, stoppıng at the nearby X-ısh consulate on my way, whıch was housed ın a sumptuous palace. The entrance for mere mortals, however, was an unassumıng-lookıng metal door on a dıngy sıde alley. There were only a few sıgns ın Turkısh about openıng hours for vısas, nothıng ın X-ısh or Englısh about consular servıces. I rang, and a securıty guard opened the door. He dıdn't speak X-ısh, though, so when I explaıned what I needed ın Englısh he grabbed a cordless phone, made a call, saıd somethıng ın Turkısh and handed me the phone.
'Come between 9 and 11 tomorrow and you can get a recommendatıon letter,', the lady on the phone saıd. 'The cost ıs 48 lıra.'

OK, then. I made a relatıvely early nıght of ıt on Thursday nıght and got up brıght and early on Frıday. I was admıtted to thıs basement holdıng pen of the X-ısh consulate, where there were about 20 Turks wıth numbers and forms to apply for vısas. There were no numbers for consular servıces, though, so I stuck to the wall, wonderıng ıf I had been forgotten after about 15 mınutes. It was strıkıng that there were no X-ısh personnel ın thıs room-- all Turkısh, the X-ers seemed to manage to keep the alıens at arm's length wherever they were. I dıdn't envy the people who had to go through thıs procedure-- as an ımmıgratıon lawyer I now got to see what they had to go through on the home country end. One blond woman was speakıng Turkısh to her chıldren and husband, and they were summoned upstaırs, only to return 5 mınutes later. 'T.j.j.j.,' the woman muttered ın the most typıcally X-ısh expressıon of frustratıon that there ıs. Fınally the securıty guard told me ıt was my turn to go upstaırs and seat myself at a bulletproof wındow. My X-ısh dıplomatıc representatıve appeared behınd the wındow and took my passport, then returned 1 mınute later wıth the letter and took my 48 lıra. 48 lıra (23 euros) for an automatıcally generated laser-prınted letter? T.j.j.j.

But I booked over to the W-ısh consulate, gettıng there just ın tıme at 10:45. I was gıven an Englısh-language form and told to fıll ıt ın. Most of ıt was pretty basıc. But then I got to the questıon: 'Relıgıon'. Now thıs was only the second tıme ın my lıfe that I had been asked that questıon on a form. The fırst tıme was when I applıed to the Jesuıt unıversıty where I dıd my undergraduate studıes, and my mother, ever-sufferıng wıth the fact that her son was a heathen who had dropped out of Sunday school at the age of 8, furrowed her brow and cajoled me ınto fıllıng ın 'Presbyterıan'-- 'C'mon, ıt won't look good to them otherwıse.' Well, I don't know ıf ıt would have made a dıfference ın my gettıng ın, but that dıd ensure me of four years of junk maıl ın my campus maılbox from the Campus Protestant Mınıstry encouragıng me to come 'joın the communıty'. So thıs tıme around, I was goıng to be resolute ın my convıctıons-- I fılled ın 'none'. I submıtted my applıcatıon and other materıals, got a number tag for my passport, and left marvelıng how easy that was. I went and had breakfast, then drank a few beers whıle I waıted for 3 to roll around.

I was goıng to go back to the consulate, pıck up my passport and vısa, and then walk down the hıll and catch a ferry to Asıa to take a look at the contınent where I would be spendıng the rest of my trıp. But W-ıa had other plans for me. I got to the consulate at 3:15, rang the bell and handed over my number. One mınute later the door opened. 'Sır, can you come wıth me? There was a problem wıth your applıcatıon.' Shıt, what could ıt be? Dıd they suspect that I was goıng to Y-ıa?
The lady laıd my applıcatıon form on the table. 'You dıdn't fıll ın your relıgıon. We can't accept that. You'll have to fıll ın a new form.' WHAT? I thought. A mılıtantly secular Arab republıc cares what my RELIGION ıs? (At thıs poınt, dear readers, the veıl of secrecy ıs almost transparent, I know, but at least any web spıders scannıng thıs postıng won't easıly pıck up where I am talkıng about.) 'Yes, of course,' I stammered, 'I'll fıll ıt ın thıs tıme, I'm P-protestant.' (The word 'Chrıstıan' stıll too laden to pass my lıps.)
I fılled ın another form exactly the same, wıth the addıtıon, and handed ıt over. 'OK, I'll be rıght back wıth your vısa,' the lady saıd. I leafed through a tourıst brochure as I waıted. She returned 3 mınutes later.
'I'm sorry, we're not ıssuıng any more vısas today,' she saıd. 'You can come back on Monday and pıck up your passport wıth the vısa.'
'You'll keep my passport untıl Monday? But I was goıng to leave İstanbul on Monday!'
'Yes, I understand, you're a tourıst.'
'Well, I suppose I can come, I'm not leavıng untıl the evenıng-- I'll just be busy wıth checkıng out of my hotel.'
'Just come by at 11 and you can pıck ıt up.'
The thought of usıng my alarm clock one more tıme durıng my vacatıon was a bıt too much for me to handle. 'How about 3? Can I come then?'
'Let me see,' and she dısappeared agaın ınto the back offıces. Only to return ın 1 mınute wıth my passport, photos, 30 euros, and recommendatıon letter. 'I'm sorry, you'll just have to apply agaın on Monday mornıng.' She handed me another blank form.
'Oh no! It's really OK, you can keep my passport untıl Monday!'
'I'm afraıd not-- besıdes, I was just told that you fılled ın the form wrong agaın.' She poınted to my error, and flıpped open my passport. 'You have two names. You only fılled ın one. I'm sorry, ıt's not ın my hands.'
Oh, fuck, I had forgotten to fıll ın my mıddle name thıs tıme.
'OK,' I grımaced. 'I'll come back on Monday. 11 am?'
'Yes. 11 am. Insh'allah.' she added.
Somehow ıt warmed me to hear that and I smıled. 'Yes, ınsh'allah, I wıll be here on Monday mornıng.'
But when I left the consulate, I felt stung. I decıded not to take the ferry to Asıa that afternoon-- Asıa wasn't ready for me yet. Not to mentıon that I was wonderıng ıf they were goıng to look for a new reason to reject me. It wıll really mess up my plans ıf I get rejected. But tomorrow mornıng, I wıll try agaın. And one way or another, by Tuesday afternoon I wıll be lyıng on the beach ın Alanya.

Ah, fınally some tıme to post.
I am typıng on a Turkısh keyboard on my hotel's computer, a Wındows machıne on whıch the only other avaılable keymap ıs Spanısh, not a keymap where the locatıon of punctuatıon ıs famılıar to me by touch, so I sımply decıded to gıve ın, use the Turkısh keymap and not even make an effort to make my lıttle fınger go unnaturally out of ıts way to type i (say 'ee') ınstead of ı (say 'uh').

It was not the best nıght of sleep on the traın to İstanbul. I had stayed up a bıt too late drınkıng beer and readıng, only goıng to sleep at mıdnıght-- two hours later I was awoken by the brıght lıghts of the fırst traın statıon ın Turkey, a border processıng statıon that for the rest dıd not appear to be connected to any sort of nearby town. A lıne of ımmıgrants from another traın snaked out of the statıon buıldıng onto the platform; I rushed to dress and put my shoes on, but the doors of our traın were stıll locked-- we had to waıt untıl everyone from thıs other traın (from Belgrade and Vıenna before that, from the looks of thıngs) was processed. The Turkısh flag flapped above the statıon. I went to the hallway to see what was goıng on on the other sıde, where the other traın was parked. A frustrated Englısh woman flaıled her arms as she trıed to explaın to two Turkısh border agents: 'I TOLD you, I WANT to show you my PARSEPORT but ıt's on the TRAIN and the traın ıs LOCKED.' I returned to my cabın and munched on the chocolate cookıes I had bought from the traın statıon kıosk ın Sofıa untıl ıt was our tıme. I was one of the fırst ın lıne from my traın, but when I made ıt to the wındow of the ımmıgratıon agents they flıpped through the pages of my passport and handed ıt back, shruggıng. 'Vısa vısa!' Arrgh-- I had to go to a poorly-lıt wındow ın another buıldıng down the platform to buy a vısa stamp for 10 euros (as to why thıs hadn't been obvıous to me, apparently cıtızens of some EU countrıes, lıke the Danes and Germans standıng ın front of me ın the ımmıgratıon lıne, don't need a vısa), then return to waıt ın the ımmıgratıon lıne agaın. All the same, ıt wasn't terrıble, and I was able to go to the duty-free shop down the platform after I was done to buy a 5-pack of my favorıte rollıng tobacco.

Back on the traın, I could have gone back to sleep, but, uh... I was caught short. Somethıng about the last nıght's dınner ın Sofıa hadn't sat quıte rıght wıth me, and I had to go. But I couldn't. That ıs, I wasn't allowed to. The traın was stıll stopped ın the statıon, after all, and the sıgn on the toılet door saıd that ıt was forbıdden to use ıt when the traın was standıng ın the statıon. There ıs a good reason for that rule, as I mıght have to explaın to some of my Amerıcan readers who are unfamılıar wıth the way most traın toılets work: they sımply dump the contents of the bowl onto the tracks. And as much as I mıght have been tempted to leave my regards to the border processıng statıon, at that moment there were, ın fact, workers from Turkısh Raılways on the track, ınspectıng the wheels of all of the cars.

At any rate, ıt was good that I stayed awake, because now a Turkısh border agent knocked on my door-- he was goıng through the traın ensurıng that everyone dıd have hıs or her vısa and entry stamp. Now the traın would be movıng soon, I could do my busıness and go to sleep. Except then, apparently, the border agent makıng hıs way through the traın flushed out two Englısh passengers who had been asleep or oblıvıous to the whole ımmıgratıon procedure that by now had been goıng on for two hours. And as I had, they had to fıgure out the procedure on theır own-- most of the Turkısh agents stood around on the platform lookıng bored, and one slowly sauntered back ınto the ımmıgratıon offıce and flıpped on the swıtch-- the fluorescent tubes slowly z-z-zapped and flıckered to lıfe. One of the Englısh boys had only a pınk emergency passport, whıch seemed to necessıtate fıve mınutes of explaınıng and negotıatıon wıth the ımmıgratıon agent and a few phone calls on the part of the ımmıgratıon agent. And agaın the vısa? No vısa? Whıch meant they had to walk down the platform to the other wındow. After half an hour, ıt was all taken care of. At 5am, after three hours of beıng stopped, the traın lurched to lıfe, and I took care of my need before sleepıng agaın for about four hours.

My arrıval ın İstanbul went quıte well-- wıthout much dıffıculty, I was able to fınd the post offıce by the maın traın statıon on the European sıde of the cıty. I had forgotten to brıng the boxes of antıbıotıcs I had gotten from the tropıcal medıcıne clınıc (ın case of a case of severe food poısonıng later on down the lıne), and so I had had my housesıtter send them to thıs post offıce poste restante. To my utter amazement, thıs actually worked, and the package was there for me. I bought a map of İstanbul and found my way to the hotel that I had found onlıne and emaıled to book the day before-- the Chıllout Galata, 16 euros a nıght for a prıvate room. Would ıt turn out to be too good to be true? I took a tram from the statıon to the other sıde of the Golden Horn, then an underground funıcular traın to the top of the hıll, then two short blocks downhıll. The brıghtly paınted entrance of the ho(s)tel gave me hope. When I rang the bell, I was admıtted to a lobby fılled wıth overstuffed pıllows and low coffee tables. And alterna-globalıst posters on the wall.
'We are sorry, but we do not have a sıngle room avaılable,' the guy behınd the maın desk told me, wıth hıs shaved head and Lenın-esque goatee.
I frowned and moved to grab my bag. I was not goıng to sleep ın a dorm bed ıf I could help ıt.
'We only have double rooms left, so we wıll gıve you one at the sıngle prıce.' He smıled. I smıled.
'Do I have to pay now?'
'Don't worry about ıt untıl you check out.' He handed me the key, and I went up to the thırd floor to my room. Wow! Very basıcally appoınted, just two boxsprıngs wıth mattresses on the floor and a wardrobe, but roomy, brıghtly paınted, wıth one of the numerous stencıls decoratıng the hotel sprayed on the wall-- and a balcony! I unpacked, returned to the lobby wıth a bıg smıle, made use of the free ınternet, and headed out to explore nearby İstiklal Street.

Thumbs up to the Chillout Galata (and I can say that havıng spent four nıghts here so far)-- ıt's not for everyone, but ıf you've ever stayed at my house, you can defınıtely handle ıt ;-)

(many more entrıes to come catchıng up on the past few days...)

I was woken up around 4am for more passport formalities on the train: first a swaggering Serbian border agent named Stankovic, according to his name badge, grabbing and stamping and grunting; then a mellow Bulgarian agent who took my red passport, flipped it open to take a cursory look at the face page, and handed it back with a 'merci'. Ah, back in the E.E.E.U, boy, back in my home empire (European Commission president Barroso said this week that the EU is more an 'empire' than a state), where I didn't have to get my passport stamped. (It must be noted, however, that the procedure was probably a little more involved for non-EU citizens than it even had been in Serbia: the Bulgarian agent's partner had a passport scanner unwieldily attached to his belt loop and connected to some kind of wireless device; keeping an electronic record of outsiders' entry was no doubt a requirement for the EU's admittedly Big-Brotherish Schengen Information System.) A couple more hours of shuteye, then arrival in Sofia at 7am after waking up a half hour earlier and seeing some scenes of grinding poverty in the Bulgarian countryside: people living in tin shacks in fields that were simultaneously in use as a grazing meadow for sheep and a landfill.

I caught a tram from the station toward a hostel I had found online that looked nice for 7 euros a night: the Art Hostel. But when I got there, they were booked up. I walked back toward the tram stop and found another hostel in less than 5 minutes on the same street: I rang the buzzer.
'Do you have a room?'
'Please! Please!'
'No?'
'Please! Please to come up!' And the gate buzzed open.
It would have to do-- a dorm bed for 10 euros, plus free breakfast and internet, which was nothing to sneeze at considering how much I had already spent on internet cafes. My hostess, a middle aged lady with bottle-blond hair, handed me a map and a free city guide. I flipped it open to a page listing 'Escort Services'; one page before that was 'Nightlife: Gay' with about 6 or 7 bars and clubs listed. The text of the guide gushed that Bulgaria was a tolerant society toward homosexuality; 'hmmm,' I thought, and recalled that the English word 'buggery' is derived from 'Bulgarian' (don't believe me? look it up!). I had to admit, while I have sometimes been derisive of people I know who are hesitant to go to countries that are not considered 'gay-friendly' (like, can't you put your identity on hold for a little bit for the sake of an experience?), I was definitely looking forward to going to any old gay bar after more than a week in the Balkan closet. When T. went to Bulgaria 13 years ago, it sounded to me like the utter end of the world-- but now I had a bit of a feeling of being back in civilization.

But first: it was hot, and I wanted to go swimming! I found some listings for public pools on the internet and found one of them on my map-- it was at the outer end of a vast city park. I walked through the neighborhood my hostel was in, definitely the 'hip' neighborhood with a ridiculous overabundance of big-label clothes and shoe stores for standard prices, and found the park that bordered on it. Got lost for about an hour on the wooded paths of the park before finally making it to the end. 'Where's the swimming pool? Bazen?' I asked a passer-by, and he pointed. I squinted at the place 100 meters away-- sounded awfully quiet for a swimming pool on a hot summer afternoon-- and approached it. There were only a couple of construction workers sitting on folding chairs outside the entrance-- they explained to me somehow that the pool was closed for rebuilding for the summer. I took out my map and asked them to point me to another one. The one shook his head-- my map was too small-- but he told me to take a taxi and go about 3km off the map to 'Djalabad', that that was a good place to swim. The name indeed sounded like an exotic oasis in the desert, and I thanked him and went to the main road to flag down a taxi. When I said 'Djalabad' the driver had no idea what I was asking about, but then I just said 'bazen', 'swimming pool', because I really didn't care which one he took me to.

Well, it turned out that my heat-addled brain had heard the name of the pool wrong-- it was the Dianabad, outside the Hotel Diana. And it looked really nice-- a big arena, basically, with two big pools surrounded by astroturf and deck chairs, entry only 4 lev (2 euro). It was a great way to spend the afternoon, swimming and munching on some kind of chicken on a stick from the snack bar and lying under an umbrella reading. I caught a bus back to the center and showered (strangely, the swimming pool had had no shower) at the hostel so that I would be on time to meet two friends of my Macedonian friend's for dinner. But when I got out of the shower and picked up my phone, I saw a text message from them: 'OK, we're there-- I'm wearing a green shirt' and thought SHIT! That's right, she had told me in an email to me a week before that Bulgaria was in a different time zone, one hour ahead, so I was standing there dripping, thinking it was 7:15pm, when it was really 8:15 and I was already 15 minutes late. I called to apologize and rushed to the cafe.

We had a really nice time-- after we sat in a sidewalk cafe, they took me to a Lebanese/Greek restaurant. They had just moved from Sarajevo, and they found Sarajevo quite overpriced compared to Sofia, where they could eat out twice a day. Sure enough, the total bill at that rather deluxe restaurant, including a bottle of wine, was only 5 or 6 euros each. We parted ways, they to go home, and me to go check out some of the bars, and they wished me well.

I settled in at the Vital Cafe, an outdoor cafe nestled in a covered market, and ordered a beer-- sat and smoked and took in the scenery. There were a few cute guys there, but the two cutest of them were together (of course), billing and cooing the whole time. Further up at their table were a couple of drag queens and a couple of dykes. After 20 minutes, one of the drag queens winked at me exaggeratedly, and lifted a glass and said something to me. I walked up to her. 'Anglijski?'
'Oh, cheers, darling, where are you from?'
'X-ia.'
'Oh, X-ia! My last boyfriend was from there.'
I sat and talked with her and her friends-- it turned out on closer inspection that she and the other drag queen were actually trans (MTF)-- relating my stories of meeting closeted people in my travels and sharing my relief to be in a queer bar again.
After a while, Cecile (note that I am not anonymizing her name) leaned over to me conspiratorially and laid her hand on my thigh. 'We're going to get some stuff-- some white stuff-- before we go out clubbing. Want some?'
It was already 1am, and I was pretty tired-- that wasn't exactly what I had in mind. On the other hand... it was like in the cartoons with an angel on one of my shoulders and a devil on the other one, only since I wasn't raised Catholic, but rather Calvinist-atheist, my thought process looked more like 'Do I have to work tomorrow? Do I have any responsibilities tomorrow? No.' Plus I had just started reading Last Exit to Brooklyn earlier that day at the pool, and I figured I might as well go for some cocaine debauchery with a couple of crazy Bulgarian trannies.
'Sure, how much?'
'Well,' she whispered, leaning in close, '30 leva should do it, since I'm going to get a gram for 60. But be quiet about it to the others, let's just keep some for ourselves, OK?'
'OK.' And I forked over 30 leva (15 euro).
My tablemates chattered on for about another hour, Cecile's phone ringing at one point and her leaving the bar to go outside for a few minutes, probably to get the delivery, I figured. Then she came back and she and the other tranny had a heated discussion about silicone vs. saline implants in Bulgarian, which I was able to pick up on.
'So you don't like silicone?' I asked.
'No,' Cecile declared, 'They take away all the feeling in your nipples,' she said, brushing my nipples, 'and for me those are my biggest-- erotous?-- zone.'
'Ah, erogenous zone.'
'Yes, erogenous zone.'
At one point the two trannies and one of the dykes went to the toilet and came back 10 minutes later.
'So can I do some of that stuff, too?' I whispered to Cecile.
'Oh, no, I figured we would save it for when we are at the club.'
'Oh-- I thought-- just now---'
'Oh, you thought we were doing it in the toilet?' She laughed and tossed her hair. 'Oh, no, we were just putting on more-- lipstick.' She sneezed.

After a bit, the time came that the bar was closing and we were the last people there. The waiter said something to Cecile and went back to the bar.
'Oh, J., you have to go to the waiter, he doesn't speak such good English. You have to go pay at the cash register.'
I went in and paid my bill-- 34 leva, then turned to head back to the table before doing a double-take. Hey, wait a minute, I thought, I'm not in Serbia or Croatia anymore, 34 is 17 euros and that's a lot of money for four beers. I rushed back to the waiter. '34 leva? How's that for four beers? How much does a beer cost?'
'5 leva. But then it was 14 leva for Cecile's vodka-tonic, you know, it was Absolut.'
'But wait, I wasn't buying her a drink-- I was just paying for my own. Give me back 14 leva and ask her to pay.'
The waiter shrugged. 'Ask her to pay you.'
I rushed back to the table. 'Cecile, I think there was a misunderstanding. I never agreed to buy you a drink. And that was a very expensive drink.'
'Oh, but it's no problem.'
'Yes it is a problem, I'm poor!'
'No you're not.'
'Yes I am, I'm staying in a hostel! Come on, just give me 14 leva.'
She looked dejected. 'But I don't have, I only have 4. Come on, let's go to the club.'
I scowled. 'This isn't very cool, Cecile.'
'Don't worry about it baby.' And then the other tranny and one of the dykes chimed in, 'Yes, it's no problem, come on, we go to the club, most underground club in Sofia.'
I sighed. 'OK, let's go, but you're buying drinks.'
We hailed a cab outside and Cecile opened the front passenger door for me.
'Oh no, you sit there, you're paying for the cab, after all,' I said.
Cecile let out an exasperated sigh and sat in the front seat. 'Brilliantin,' she said to the cab driver.
We got there in 5 minutes and went upstairs. It really was quite a fancy club, all polished stainless steel and glass and a crowd going crazy dancing to music that actually wasn't all that pretentious. But my mood had already soured. Cecile made some kind of arrangement with one of the employees at the bar and we were able to seat ourselves at a round table in the front-- soon a round of drinks arrived.
'You're paying for these drinks, right?' I said to Cecile as I sipped on a whisky on the rocks.
She scowled at me. 'I pay for the table!'
I wasn't sure if she meant that she was paying for us to be allowed to sit at that table, or if she meant she was paying for a round for the table. I tried to be conciliatory and smiled at her. 'Look, I'm sorry, you just know I'm X-ish, that's all, I like to know where my money is going.'
'Ach, don't worry about it!' she said, pinching my cheek.
'So... are we going to go do some of that stuff now?'
'Just wait! We wait, so that we can all do it together.' She went back to talking with the other tranny excitedly.
This was the moment when I definitely knew I had been ripped off. I settled back in my chair, smiled, and tried to figure out my next move. Should I go for a confrontation, and demand that Cecile give me back my money? But then I was probably already on the hook for the drinks somehow. Another round of drinks arrived, which strengthened this impression. No, better to just give them the slip. Fuck it, cut my losses and go-- I wanted to go sleep anyways. I gazed at the door of the toilet, which was next to the exit. One of the dykes was sitting in such a way that she was usually looking at that direction. Could I go pee and then slip out without her noticing? My chances were 50-50, I figured-- I would just have to be fast about it and grab one of the cabs waiting outside as quickly as possible. I slowly sipped down the rest of my drink, hoping it was something top-shelf and expensive. 'I'm going to pee,' I said to Cecile, but she didn't seem to notice. I grabbed my bag and went to the toilet, but it was full-- I would have to wait outside the door. But while I stood there waiting, I saw that my tablemates were leaned toward each other gabbing and not looking my way at all. Go! I hustled down the stairs to the exit and tried to walk up to one of the cabs as nonchalantly as possible.
'Garibaldi Square, please.'
'Garibaldi? 5 leva.'
'OK.' I got in and realized what a sucker the cab driver had seen me for, because it was only 3 blocks to Garibaldi Square-- a 1 or 2-lev trip. Whatever. I got out and returned to my hostel, the adrenaline still going, got in my bed and breathed a sigh of relief before going to sleep. 23 euros, though-- shit.

The next day I woke up on less sleep than I would have liked, but at least I wasn't really hungover-- certainly not as messed up as I would have been if I had been out all night doing coke. I went to the station to buy a ticket for the night train to Istanbul-- 50 euros-- and decided to go swimming again, this time to another pool on my list, farther out in the suburbs. I took a tram to the center and a mini-bus from there.

The suburbs, as it turned out, were really the projects-- a drearier-than-dreary neighborhood of concrete housing blocks. The driver took me to the bazen, though, when I asked. It was nowhere near as nice as the Dianabad-- Lulin Beach (in English) was the name of it-- a circle of three trapezoidal pools surrounded by astroturf and somewhat broken-down deck chairs. But once I got in the water and swam around a bit, then settled back onto a deck chair to read, smoke, and drink a beer from the snack bar, I felt quite relaxed. I looked at the housing blocks towering over the pool and felt a certain longing-- I could see myself living there and going to this pool every day. I really can be happy with so little. And this was my kind of place-- if other people like to go to natural destinations that have yet been undiscovered by tourists, like A. going hiking in the backwoods of Romania and spending the night in a tick-infested abandoned cabin-- this was my kind of exotic destination, the social wilderness of the outer suburbs of Sofia.

The bus arrived around 1 or 1:30pm, so a 7 - 7.5 hour trip from Sarajevo. Not bad at all, although in the last two hours of the trip I was treated to more erratic bus driver behavior: first turning the radio on for everyone on the bus (Serbian speed folk), which meant the end of my nap, and then in one town, creeping along the main street and stopping whenever he saw someone with watermelons for sale on the side of the road, opening the door and shouting something to the person selling them before driving on. Since the person selling watermelons was usually an attractive young woman with some ripe melons of her own, I at first thought that he was hitting on each one. But then after four stops, he actually turned off the bus and got out for one. I was trying to make this scenario make sense: had he been contracted to pick up a load of melons and transport them to Belgrade, and had he been stopping to ask each watermelon saleslady if she was the one he was supposed to be picking up the load from? The driver picked up a melon, knocked on it, and nodded, then proceeded with the saleslady to the gargantuan scale in her backyard to weigh it and pay for it. Yes, to my utter disbelief, he had wasted about 15 minutes of his passengers' time to buy ONE MELON. But it wasn't as if I had to be anywhere.

I try never to go from a first impression of a city received at the bus station or train station. It was not a good one that I received of Belgrade. The heat was sweltering-- geographically we were no longer in the mountains, but on a plain, so there was no more mountain breeze to act as air conditioning. First things first-- buy my night train ticket to Sofia. First I tried withdrawing money from each of the two ATMs in the train station-- no dice, they only accepted Visa/Mastercard and not plain old Cirrus. Then I went to each of the exchange booths and tried to cash a traveler's check. Traveler's check? Both of the exchange booth tellers shook their heads. I sighed and took out one of my precious 50-euro bills that I had been saving for cash emergencies later on down the line and changed it into Serbian dinars, then went to buy my ticket. It was a bit more expensive than I had expected-- just over 50 euros for a single sleeper cabin, but I rationalized it as 30 euros of transportation and a good night's sleep, for which my target price during this trip is 20 euros. And I could not count on a good night's sleep if I had to share a compartment. I sighed and pulled out the last of my 50-euro bills, and threw some dinars on top to make up the whole fare. My train would depart at 9pm.

I stored my backpack at the station and headed for the center. I wanted to go to the Museum of Yugoslav History, since I was more fascinated with Yugoslavia than ever. While exchanging money, and earlier that day on the bus, spending 45 minutes at the BiH/Serbian border (25 minutes for the BiH border agents to collect our passports and give us exit stamps, another 20 for the Serbian border agents to collect our passports and give us entry stamps), I couldn't help but be amazed at the inanity of it all. For almost 50 years, six countries (not counting Vojvodina and Kosovo as their own countries) had been in a federal union with one currency and open borders between them. Then the nationalistic wars came and the borders were thrown up among the countries, eager to exercise their precious sovereignty by subjecting travelers to a byzantine ritual of passport stamping that is no longer of this time. Meanwhile, all of those countries are chomping at the bit to give up some amount of sovereignty to join the EU with its open borders and single currency-- Slovenia already has. If only cooler heads had prevailed seventeen years ago.

Well. The Serbs didn't waste any time after Montenegro became independent last year, thereby burying the Yugoslav project for good. The Museum of Yugoslav history was now the Museum of Serbian History, and it was closed for rebuilding. I sauntered around and settled on a terrace across from the Hotel Moscow on a grand boulevard that once upon a time must have been pretty impressive when Yugoslavia was the most glamorous socialist country, but now looked pretty tatty. I ordered a beer (I tried to ask for only 0.33 liters, but the waiter snorted something that sounded like "pussy" and brought me a half liter of beer instead-- when the price difference was between 0.80 euros and 1 euro, I couldn't complain). I watched the passers-by and tried to discern a look in their eyes that would give me insight into the murderous inferiority complex that is the Serbian soul. I had been no small bit unsettled to see people selling heroic biographies of Ratko Mladic outside the bus station, but here everyone looked fairly innocuous. The only thing that stood out was the occasional kid wearing a SRBIJE t-shirt in dripping Glagolitic Cyrillic. I still felt a bit freaked out by things like this.

Maybe it was my background thoughts influencing the impression, but perhaps the most endearing thing about the Bosniaks for me had been their historical 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' attitude, which really seemed like the key to cultural survival. That the Serbs still couldn't live down the Turkish invasion X centuries ago seems more of a flaw to me. And now they were paying the price, if no longer a total pariah state, certainly a somewhat ostracized state in the world community, with its weird soft currency.

After finishing my beer, I decided to take the bus to Ada, an island in the Danube that was the city beach-- what better way to kill an afternoon than swimming! And that was a good thing to do, lying on a pebble beach for two hours and reading. But when I got back to the bus stop, it was already 7:15pm, and I saw a flaw in my plan-- there was a huge crowd of people waiting for the bus back to the center and it was a Sunday-- would enough buses come to take everyone! Miraculously, that turned out not to be a problem: three buses showed up at once and I rushed to the front to board one. So at 7:40 I was back in the center, one hour and twenty minutes to get something to Eat. And I refused to get pizza, since all I had had was bread and cheese on the bus all day, I had to Eat. I made it to the most traditional Serbian tavern listed in the Lonely Planet, the '?' (question mark) at 7:55pm. Ordered and got my food at 8:10. The clock was ticking. I scarfed down my Serbian beans with sausage, salad, and potatoes and was done at 8:25pm. I thought I had time to smoke a cigarette, but-- shit! I had forgotten my tobacco at the boulevard cafe! And it didn't look like there was any rolling tobacco for sale in Serbia, either. I could have just bought a pack of cigarettes for the train, but I couldn't resist: I found my way back through the winding streets of the center of Belgrade to the boulevard cafe, and, miracle of miracles, one of the waiters had set my pouch of tobacco aside. It was 8:35-- back to the station, buying two cans of cold beer from a kiosk on the way. Picked up my bag at 8:45, and went to an exchange booth to turn my leftover dinars back into euros. Settled into my cabin at 8:55pm, five minutes before departure.

Now that's the kind of seat-of-my-pants traveling that I had been needing. And I slept like a baby on the train.

by yesterday, my third full day in sarajevo, the rot had already begun
to set in. all this easy living was not good for me, as i realized
after breakfast when i overdid it by having a gigantic ice cream
sundae. i wandered around all afternoon and drank some beers, but my
heart wasn't in it anymore. fortunately i had already bought my ticket
to belgrade, so i had some movement to look forward to. and here i am
on the bus, contentedly gazing out the window again.