Tehran to Istanbul

Breaking news while I've been navel gazing: government seizes Turkey's largest circulation newspaper and English-language affiliate, a week after shutting down independent TV news channel IMC, all on charges of supporting terrorism: http://www.todayszaman.com/national_court-appoints-trustees-to-take-over-management-of-zaman-todays-zaman_414040.html

My flight from Tehran left at 5am, which meant leaving my uncle’s apartment at 2am. I groggily composed a blog post in my head to stay awake and remember thinking that it would turn out beautiful. I don’t know if I have forgotten too much or if my judgment at the time was impaired but now that I’m getting down to actually writing the post I don’t see what I was so dreamily excited to post.

I sat silently for most of the trip, thinking I should start a conversation to help keep the driver, who was yawning and kept adjusting an air vent from which I couldn’t detect any hot or cold air blowing, awake. I kept thinking of things to say but the awkwardness barrier of starting with my rubbish Persian kept feeling too great. I am more timid now then on previous trips because of the unfortunate combination of higher expectations (since it was, fuck, a decade ago that I started studying the language) and lower abilities, as I am lazy about maintaining languages and haven’t spent much time in Iran or Afghanistan in recent years, and when I have been in Afghanistan I have spoken English more than Persian.

We had a weird semi-interaction for some time: I would watch his eyes in the rearview mirror as they started to droop and then he would catch me and sharply lock eyes with me and I would look away. Then I would nod off momentarily and then wake up to his eyes in the rearview and he would quickly look back at the road. Every time I woke up the smell of shit—at first I thought cow manure but then wait maybe human sewage—seemed stronger, and I would look out the window and see nothing but open country and wonder why the hell they had built the airport so far outside the city. Nothing but oddly manicured dirt with little grey somethings on it that ran parallel to the road. I thought it must be some kind of agricultural thing I didn’t understand and that was where the shit smell originated but finally, about ¾ of the way there, a track of metal bars started to lie atop the grey somethings and I realized they were concrete and it was the incomplete airport-to-city metro line that I had been eyeing. That seemed a sufficiently exciting topic that I struck up a conversation and yammered in my rubbish Persian about how much had changed in the past 5 years since I’d been here. As I spoke I still had some kind of self-conscious half-asleep idea that a great blog post was going to come out of the whole drive, but it seems I was mistaken.

Oh well I am to be working as a journalist for the next 6 months and it is good that I get myself in the habit of writing something anything every day. I am also testing my sea legs: I am writing this on the ferry to the Princes’ Islands to see if I can be productive on a boat. I will look for real estate on the islands, which are 45-90 minutes ride from the city center. If I do find a place on an island, I need to make the most of the long commutes. A long commute actually might be the very best thing for my research. If I got back home quickly after a bout of participant observation, it would be tempting to do practical things, check the email, have a rest, etc. before typing out fieldnotes and then never actually get to doing so. If I have 45+ minutes to do nothing but write at the end of a work day in the city, I can vomit all my notes in the best detail while fresh in mind and before doing anything else. We’ll see.

Maybe the thing that made me happiest to be back in Istanbul, and weirdly proud of Istanbul as if it were my own, was to see how happy and healthy the street cats look here compared to Tehran. In Tehran they are all covered in grime and move jitterily from hiding spot to hiding spot like rats, ducking at every (frequent) bang and roar from automobiles and construction. According to a filmmaker friend there is big award buzz about a documentary about cats in Istanbul that will be shown at the Istanbul Film Festival. TRAILER: https://youtu.be/noTLGoskNhA My filmmaker friend seemed perplexed that anyone would voluntarily sit through 90 minutes of that.