Gezi Parkı

 The next series of posts concern the events I have watched unfold on the streets in front of my apartment over the last week. While these events are inherently political, I would like to maintain an air if impartiality in the martial I write. Thus, I will report events only as I saw them or as they were reported to me by the people I have met here. I do have an opinion about what is going on, but this blog is not the forum to make that opinion public.

May 28th

I emerged from my jetlag-fog more-or less on Tuesday night and I had some time to meet my roommates. Ece is a soft-spoken Turkish girl with bouncy curly hair and a flowing robins-egg blue tattoo down her shoulder. Alex is Austrian and has been living here with Ece for almost two years now working as an architect for small projects in the city. Alex has only a passing affiliation with Turkish so the house language is somewhat firmly English. While the three of us communed with one another over beer on Tuesday night, Ece announced her plans to visit her friends in Gezi Park the following day. I was familiar with Gezi Park from my previous visits to the city. You will not find it mentioned in my blog mostly because the park itself is rather unremarkable. It sits on the far side of Taxim Square behind a chaotic bus terminal and it is packed with thick sycamore trees, a few squatty pines, and quite a few ugly unmaintained modern sculptures. When I was there last in Istanbul in 2009, I remember the park was relatively empty. A few less-financial fortunate city residents were napping on benches and a couple of old men were puttering around the cement sidewalks peddling hot tea in little paper cups. The park’s most notable feature is that it is the only smudge of green for miles around on Istanbul’s increasingly crowed cityscape. Ece and Alex informed me that the government had decided to level Gezi Park and erect some monstrosity of a shopping center in its place. Some of Ece’s friends were planning to spend Wednesday night in Gezi to protest the park’s impending demolition and Ece would be going during the day to provide company and moral support. I was invited to join, but overcome with fatigue and concerned about getting involved in a foreign political protest I politely declined. “You can borrow my gas mask!” Ece said laughing. I thought she was joking but sure enough, sitting on the bookshelf next to a painted elephant and a copy of Arabian Nights was an industrial gas mask much like the one I wore at Walters’ Gardens when I applied Telone. I stared at her in slight disbelief. “If you are in Istanbul long enough, you will catch a few whiffs of tear gas eventually” Ece stated flatly.

May 29^th

When I woke up at 3pm on Wednesday, Ece and her gas mask were gone. I set about unpacking my suitcase, exploring the neighborhood a bit and making arrangements for language class. Our house is near the far southern end of Istanbul’s famous Istiklal Ave. Back in Ottoman times, Istiklal was lined up and down with the palaces of European dignitaries sent to represent their governments to the Sublime Porte. Today it is still home to a number of major consulates, but it is mostly lined with restaurants, shops, bars and annoying men in ridiculous costumes selling pasty overpriced Turkish ice cream with a long metal pole. On the far north end Istiklal dead-ends into Taxim Square and the aforementioned cluster of trees called Gezi Park. My language school was to be about a block away from Taxim on one of Istanbul’s many windy back streets in an impressive pillared structure that must have served as luxury apartments in some bygone century. After registering for afternoon classes I returned home to find Ece and Alex relaxing with two small glasses of wine. “You should have come to the Park!” They insisted. The protest, they reported, was more like a picnic than a political demonstration. The fifty or so people present were sharing food, drinks, and playing music sitting in Gezi’s small patches of grass. “They will be there tomorrow too, you should come!”

May 30^th

Thursday was my first day of work at my internship with change.org. For those of you who do not know what change.org is you can be forgiven because on Thursday morning I really had no idea what it was either, only that I was supposed to work for them and I had no idea how I was going to find my way to their office. Change.org, as it turns out it an online petition forum that enables citizens to more easily mobilize and pressure their governments for popular change. Essentially, it is a collection of online petitions that anyone can sign electronically. It turns out that the internet is a much more efficient way of getting signatures than going door-to-door with a clipboard.

I poked my head out into the living room to find Ece looking concerned. “The police cleared out the protesters from the park last night.” According to Ece, when the merry picnicing drew to a close and the more hardened protesters crawled into their tents for the night, the police who had heretofore been standing by passively moved in and dispersed the campers at around 5 AM. A few videos had emerged online and the scene wasn’t pretty. Police had burned a few of the tents and cleared everyone out using tear gas and water cannons. Ece told me the protesters had reassembled and that she was about to walk down to Gezi so show them some support and since I was going the same direction I offered to walk her down Istiklal.

When we arrived at the park it showed no signs of the days earlier events. The police had fortified themselves behind a portable fence with in a temporary shelter unceremonially constructed at the park’s entrance. A few tents had resurrected themselves but Ece noted that the number of the people in the park had thinned out considerably. I left Ece to her friends and proceeded to work. Finding change.org’s office proved more challenging than anticipated and after walking over a major interstate and climbing up the same steep hill twice I managed to find my employers. We exchanged pleasantries and over lunch I learned that they both had been in Gezi Park the previous night getting tear gassed in the early morning. Subsequently the office would be closing early so everyone could go home and nap. “Be in around 10:00 or 11:00 tomorrow” my boss suggested. I leveled no objections to this plan and made my way home around 3:00 by way of the much more convenient metro system. I haven’t seen any of my co-workers since.  

Sleepless in Amsterdam

After a long hiatus and after much cajoling from the ladies of Montello Park Christian Reformed Church (Here’s looking at you Judy Achterhof) I am returning to the blogosphere to update you on my Istanbul adventures thus far. I have only been here a few days, most of which I spent sleeping so I have very little to report. That said this post will probably be long. I am not really sure what day it is, It’s light outside so I assume that means its day. Jet lag has wrecked the last couple days of my life. At the ripe old age of 25 I should know that by body can’t jet set around the world like its 2009 anymore. Anyway, I rolled into Washington (actually Baltimore) at some unfortunate hour of Saturday morning only to find out that the public bus that connects BWI airport to civilization doesn’t start running for two and half hours. I found myself stranded with two cranky and rotund aspiring retirees and a taxi driver who told me I was an idiot for not reading the cryptic bus schedule correctly. Returning to 712 (My D.C. residence) I set about watching numerous episodes of Parks and Recreation with my roommate and rearranging things in my suitcases. At 2pm on Sunday we left for the airport and I caught my 6pm to Amsterdam on KLM. Despite being an overnight flight, I made good use of my time watching three bad movies in succession and failing to sleep at all. By the time we landed at 7:30 AM in Amsterdam I was quite tired. However it was morning and this was my once chance to see Amsterdam. I threw my baggage in a locker and took the commuter train with a bunch of politically savvy English adolescent boys who spent the entire ride talking about how the Dutch government was trying to make being a Muslim illegal. I had no expectations for Amsterdam. I only realized that I would have a 12 hour layover in the city last week when I finally sorted my flight itinerary out of the junkmail in my inbox. The more I wandered around the leafy streets and canals of Amsterdam’s old city, the more upset I became with my great-great-grandparents for leaving. Maybe it was the fact that that I was running on two airport coffees and a Redbull, but Amsterdam seemed like a dream. It is an idyllic shady city where everyone gets around on artsy bikes and there is an overwhelming sense of calm that pervades the streets. The offices, homes, and coffee shops are all piled on top of one another in a chaos of mixed zoning that works perfectly. If paradise were a city, it would be Amsterdam in the spring. I found myself having a cheese sandwich in a park café watching the ducks circle around the willow trees for hours. I didn’t go into any museums because it seemed like such a waste to go indoors when it was so nice and beautiful outdoors. By 5pm I was returning to the airport because I was finding it hard to stay awake when I sat down. My flight to Istanbul took off at 8:20 PM, at least I think it did, I wasn’t awake for it. I missed dinner on the plane and woke up three and a half hours later to see my fellow passengers clearing their dinners away and putting up their tray tables for landing. We cruised into Ataturk airport at midnight. In baggage claim, I befriended a Turkish man named Tahsin who had endured the same sleepless Amsterdam layover and offered to help me catch the bus to Taxim. This was a fortunate turn of events in a morning that would prove to be very very unfortunate. The bus to Taxim was no longer in service and my new friend offered to split a cab with me into the city. I agreed and we took off towards the address that my internet roommate had given me. It was a bad sign when I tried to call my future roommates on the phone number they gave me and there was no response. As we neared the address I called again, still no response. After 13 missed calls we arrived at the designated address with no clear indication which rise of apartments was the one I should be looking for. It was now 2:00 AM, I was lost on the street with no place to stay and all of my luggage. I had no way to contact my roommates as my phone had no service and there was no wifi to speak of. Tahsin took pity on me and helped me find a hotel which I could afford nearby so I could set down for the night. What I could afford was “The Star Hotel” located conveniently next to a busy road and a club that plays melancholy foreign (not Turkish) music until wee hours of the morning. I am convinced they built my room around the bed because there is no physical way to explain its presence in the tiny closet I had the privilege of renting for the morning. I fell asleep at 5 AM or so. The desk woke me up with a phone call at 1:45 PM and curtly informed me in Turkish that I needed to be checked out by 2 PM lest I be their guest for another evening. Repulsed by that possibility, I quickly checked my email and thankfully found a very apologetic email from Ece, my roommate, who explained she had mixed up the dates when she expected me to arrive. Much relieved, I met Ece in the lobby 20 minutes later and we took a cab to my new Istanbul home where I would spend the next five hours unconscious in my bed with a strange cat. I awoke to find myself in what I can only describe as a little bohemian palace. Perched on the 5th floor of a quiet apartment building that is maybe 100 years old, Ece’s place has high ornate ceilings and is covered with evidence that the house is well-lived in. The floors creak, there are countless layers of paint on everything, and there are big cracks in the thick walls. None of the furniture matches but it seems to fit perfectly in this place none the less. On the bookshelf there is a massive vintage 1950’s radio next to an old-school voice recorder and a record player. The view out the window is massive and much of my waking hours thus far have been spent with my feet up on my computer watching the seagulls twirl around the minarets over the endless cityscape. Ece’s two cats also like the view and like to sleep in the sun by the window when they are not prancing around the room. Each evening this AAAND I haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet and I am out of room on this post. Figures.