Istanbul: Part I

I needed to get out of Hong Kong. I needed to get out of Asia. I needed to go to a place where I wasn’t an obvious outsider, where there wasn’t someone who looked at my face and immediately thought, “What can I sell her and how much can I charge for it?” I needed to relax.

So, naturally, I decided on Istanbul.

My main purpose for choosing Istanbul was to eat. If you're a foreigner living in Hong Kong, you understand. Despite what the travel books would have you believe, Hong Kong is not a cosmopolitan culinary city. It's easier to procure two hookers and an eightball than to find the ingredients necessary to make a non-Chinese meal, and the Western-style restaurants rely on novelty rather than any real substance and they charge a fortune for it.

You know you've living in a food deadspace when you're excited about going to the airport because, goddamn, there's a Popeyes, but when you get there for your late-night flight and it’s closed, you shake an angry fist at the heavens and shout, “Popeyes!” like you’re William Shatner. Or is that just me?

After sorting through Tripadvisor reviews, my husband and I settled on Hotel Niles, a small family-owned establishment in the Beyazit neighborhood. It's on the outskirts of the main tourist district of Sultanahmet, in an area of wholesale-clothing stores and on a quiet street overrun with cats.

Even though the hotel is only a five-minute walk from the Grand Bazaar and tramline stop, there weren't too many obnoxious touts bugging tourists along the main street.

I'd read Turkish touts have an uncanny ability to guess one's nationality. Most mistook me for a local, but to the rest, apparently, je suis française.

As I walked by one of the Grand Bazaar salesguys, though, he proceeded to sing Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro.” If you’re a white woman with darker features and a, let’s say, regal nose, you’re bound to be compared to Lady Gaga or Amy Winehouse. Eventually.

When I was younger, I wanted to look more like my mom. Blue eyes, blonde hair, twee Aryan nose. Now that I’m older and more traveled, I’m grateful for the dark hair, dark eyes and larger-than-average shnozz. They’re like camouflage for an American because, to the majority of the world, women from the US are fat and blonde and have giant, fake tits.

It’s not that I’m ashamed to be from the United States. I’m not. Most of the time, I’m honest because I want foreigners to know not all Americans are ignorant assholes. Some of us are very enlightened assholes.

But any American who travels abroad enough knows that owning up to your nationalityinevitably means getting into a political discussion, and even if you agree with the person’s arguments, that’s the last thing you want to talk about on

vacation. That’s why I was Brazilian on this trip.

My husband, unfortunately, doesn’t get that. “Why should I lie?” He’s like The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon, socially and culturally oblivious. This is the guy who confessed he often confuses Ayn Rand and Maya Angelou. I know why the ca

ged bird sings about the free market.

I tried explaining to him that one, Israel just killed a bunch of Turks in a badly planned raid and the US and Israel are linked in many minds, and more importantly, if salesmen think you’re from a less-developed country, opening prices aren’t as high and there’s more room for negotiation.

Now, I hate shopping. I’d put it somewhere between eating tripe and attending a Lars von Trier film fest. My husband loves it, though – the consequence of being raised by an Italian-American mother who considered Fortunoff more sacred ground than her parish church.

So he was in heaven at the Grand Bazaar, and I was in hell because I had to do all of the bargaining, while he was actively working against my efforts. I don’t understand why you need a backgammon board so badly, but fine, I’ll try to get the price as low as possible, j

ust stop saying things to me like, “Why are you walking away? Why are you telling him we don’t have enough money and it’s our last day here? Why can’t I whip out a huge wad of cash and beg them to take every last lira?”

He got his precious backgammon set, and there it sits on a shelf, unplayed.

At a small shop selling honey and cream in Kadikoy, the shopkeeper asked where we were from and before I could answer Brazil, my husband opened his big mouth and told the truth. You could feel the chill. Thanks, Obama and Netanyahu.

I joked we'd be eating saliva-filled honey, except he was batting 0.0001 that week and forgot that honey, in this post-9/11 world of ours, has the potential to take down an aircraft. He packed it in his carry-on bag, focusing on the more logical possibility of the jar being broken in checked luggage than on it being mistaken for weaponized deliciousness.

Watching the agent pour the honey into the Security Theater Bucket of Mixed Liquids broke my heart. There are starving people in Appalachia, and here we are, wasting perfectly good food products because of the extremely unlikely event that my bal might go boom.