Today started out pretty well. I was excited because it was inauguration day, something which people here reminded me about with nearly every conversation I engaged in. The first person to talk about it was Türkan Hanım, a woman who helps out with the cleaning and laundry at the research center where I’m staying. While I was having breakfast downstairs in the kitchen, she came in to get some tea and asked me if I was happy about the change. I said I was, and she said she was too. She then added that, in her opinion, George W. Bush (to translate loosely) “really sucks.”

I had gotten up early because I was going to register in the archives, which are located near Sultanahmet, about an hour away from my digs in Arnavutköy. Since I’ve been spending a lot of money lately, I decided to take public transportation, which is plentiful and cheap in Istanbul but also very crowded and often quite slow.

Back in the 90s, when I worked here as an English teacher, the only public transportation I ever took (mostly) was in the form of ferries and shared taxis. Both ferries and shared taxis are great. During the 1993-1994 academic year I lived on the European side and taught at a school on the Asian side, and thus used the ferries at least eight times a week. The ferries go past all of the great sites of Istanbul, giving you a view of Topkapı Palace, the Blue Mosque, the Aya Sofya, and all of the landmarks along the water on the European side of the city. Men come around serving tea, and when the weather is warm you can sit outside. Even though there are two bridges linking the two sides of the city, I still like taking the ferry. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and very tranquil. Two summers ago I even saw two dolphins leaping along the Bosphorus as I rode from Beşiktaş on the European side to Kadıköy.

The shared taxis go along a prescribed route from one part of town to another. People pay a fixed sum depending on where they’re getting off, and if there’s room the driver can pick up passengers along the way. In Istanbul the shared taxis are now Ford minivans which can fit eleven passengers and a driver. Up until the late 1990s, however, the dolmuşes (dolmuş means “has been filled” in Turkish, so a shared taxi is called a dolmuş because it usually only leaves once it has been filled) were classic American cars from the 1950s and 1960s (here is a Turkish blog with lots of photographs showing off all of the great old dolmuşes from the pre-minivan days). The cars were enormous vehicles which could hold twelve passengers and a driver. Two passengers would sit up front with the driver, three people sat in the second and third rows, and four would sit in the back row. A twelfth unlucky person would have to sit on a little plastic stool in the “aisle” leading to the second and third rows of the car. Whenever someone wanted to get to or from one of the back two rows, the stool-sitter would have to pick up the stool, get out of the car, let the people in and out, and then get back inside and sit on the stool again.


Classic Istanbul dolmuş

When I lived here before, I tended to take taxis rather than ride the bus. I was traveling all over the city back then, giving lessons in apartments and businesses all over town, so generally didn’t have time to waste on the bus. In any case, I just passed the cost on to my students. I was living in Teşvikiye, which is close to the parts of town where I like going at night, so taxis were a practical and relatively inexpensive option. I probably took a city bus a total of thirty times or less the whole time I lived here.

But now that I’m living in Arnavutköy, taking taxis everywhere gets pretty expensive. Since Arnavutköy is located right on the Bosphorus, the road that I take to go to Beşiktaş or Taksim is a narrow one which runs along the water. The traffic is often very heavy, which means that a lot of the time it takes almost as long to go by taxi as it does by bus. Sure, it feels like a bit of a step down from the glory days of the 90s, but I’m trying to deal. In fact, I’ve even bought an Akbil, a metal gizmo which can be used on a great variety of city-run public transportation, including buses, ferries, seabuses (high-speed hydroplane-like boats), light rail, the metro, the “nostaligic tramway,” the modern tramway, and a number of both subterranean and above-ground funiculars operating in various parts of the city. Indeed, Istanbul has an amazing array of public transportation, all of which can be used in concert thanks to the Akbil, which is refillable and small enough to fit on the edge of a keychain.


The nostaljik tramway is just one of the many
types of transportation available to Istanbul
commuters

So I took the bus from Arnavutköy to Taksim today, then an underground funicular from Taksim down to Kabataş, and from there took a tram to Eminönü, which is about a ten minute walk from the Ottoman archives in Cağaloğlu near Sultanahmet. It had been been a few years since I’d worked in the archives, so I wasn’t sure if I’d need to re-register. In any case, I’d long since thrown out my old researcher’s ID card so I knew that at the very least I’d need to bring in some small photographs of myself in order to get a new one. Fortunately, in a country like Turkey, where small photographs are required for all sorts of passes and documents, it’s pretty easy to find a place that will take photos of you and print them out right away. I started walking up the hill in Cağaloğlu, then hung a right into some back streets and kept my eyes peeled for a photography shop. When I couldn’t find one I walked into a camera store, asked where I could find a photographer, and was told to walk down the street and then go left, right, and left again and it would be on my left hand side. I followed these instructions and, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing at the end, found the guy I was looking for.

The photography shop was located in a tiny office at the top of a steel staircase located inside a passage between two streets. It was clearly a recent addition to the walk-through, and the steps leading up to it were steep and pretty shaky. The guy working there had just taken another guy’s photo, and after he took mine he went down the steps to another shop where he would print out our digital shots.

Since it would take the photographer about ten minutes to get back, I started chatting with the other customer. He asked me what I was doing in Turkey, and when I told him I was researching at the archive he asked me if I knew a friend of his, an American guy who had also researched there. It turns out I did. Our mutual acquaintance is an American graduate student whom I met in the archives in 2005. Both the guy I knew and the guy I was talking to were Mormons, and there’s apparently a Mormon church in Elmadağ, near Taksim, which is how they knew each other. After the photographer came back to give us our photographs, the other customer and I walked out into the street together, marveling at what a small city Istanbul can be. He gave me his card, which said that he worked at a publishing house specializing in literature focusing on the paranormal.

Photos in hand, I headed over to the archive. The archive has just moved from its previous location in Sultanahmet to a small building located within the grounds of the Bab-i Ali (a group of buildings which previously housed the key ministries of the Ottoman government and is now under the control of the Governor of Istanbul). Indeed, when I first moved to Istanbul in 1992, it was in this building where foreigners had to apply for their İkamet papers, or residence permits. The first—and last—time that I had ever been in this building was about two weeks after I started working as an English teach at Marmara University. I spent the entire day there, waiting in lines for several hours. Waiting in line all day was a really unpleasant experience, but it was difficult for me to feel very sorry for myself. Most of the others in line that day were refugees from Yugoslavia or the former USSR, people with bigger worries than I could even imagine.

It was great being back in the archive. Most of the staff that was working there back when I researched here in graduate school are still there, and they were really friendly in welcoming be back. My registration was still considered valid, and they made a new ID card for me right away. Indeed, if I hadn’t forgotten my old computer password (used for searching the archive’s computer catalogues), I would have been all set to go. As it was, they said I’d be given a new password within a couple of days. 

After working for a few hours, I headed back home. One of the great things about living as a researcher in Arnavutköy is that there is a ferry which goes from Eminönü to Arnavutköy at 5:50 and 6:40 in the evening (and which goes the other way at 8:10 in the morning). I wasn’t sure where exactly the ferry left from, so I headed down to the ferry port a little early because I didn’t want to be late—at rush hour, the trip from Eminönü to Arnavutköy would take well over an hour and would cost about 25$ by taxi.

It didn’t take long to find the right ferry port, though, and once I’d determined where my ferry was leaving from I still had about fifteen minutes to kill. It occurred to me that I was really hungry, so I went to a little büfe and ordered a tost and an ayran. “Tost” in Turkey means two pieces of square white bread, smashed together in a heated press with cheese and sausage slices stuck between them. Ayran is a cold yogurt drink which takes the edge off of greasy food like tost. The guys in the tost shop, just like Türkan hanım and the dudes in the photography shop, were pretty psyched that Obama was becoming president today. Mostly, they were happy that Bush is going.

The trip back to Arnavutköy was great. It took twenty-five minutes from Eminönü to Arnavutköy. Quiet and peacefully we glided past mile after mile of standstill, noisy, honking traffic, stopping in Beşiktaş and Ortaköy to pick up and drop off passengers en route. A guy came by with tea, and I ordered one, holding the little tulip-shaped glass by the rim with two fingers.

It was 6:25 when I disembarked in Arnavutköy, and I was literally bouncing with excitement. Turkish people often remark that I ‘dance’ when I walk, and I guess I was doing so a bit more than usual tonight. The research center where I stay is just a few minutes from the ferry landing, and I was looking forward to watching the inauguration. Getting off the boat I bounced past the tea man, who said to me in Turkish “dance man, dance!” as I walked by. “Hey, let’s dance!” I said back to him, and he answered “you gotta dance, buddy, time is short.”

So I danced all the way home, and then danced some more. Turkey is such a great place to be, and today of all days was an especially happy one.