Living the dream

I had a dream when I was a kid. A literal, “I’m asleep” kind of dream, that is. This isn’t an inspirational post. In it, I’m swimming along the bottom of the pool, my favorite place in all of Childhood’s Kingdom, when I realize I can breathe down there. Not fully, not well, but if I calm down and do it just right, modestly, I can breathe. I remember an infusion of calm and an understanding that everything could be fantastic. Could be better than I’d known to hope for. (It wasn’t until later that I suspected I’d just rolled over and was breathing through my pillow.)

Amsterdam welcomed me my first day

This morning I’m coming up for air. After 21 days of Best of Europe tour-guiding, I’m waking up to a day without appointments, no reservations to confirm or information to convey. Not even a city to depart.

The street is polite vespas and well-dressed Parisians, nothing on my plate but baguette crumbs and the promise of more good food to come, perhaps after a stroll by the Seine? And I remember that dream. Its epiphany that I can do something I really enjoy and get the air I need while doing it. And I realize that’s what I’ve been doing for 21 days.

Swiss Alpine calm

I’ve been swimming, diving into Amsterdam’s historic harbor before turning up the Rhine to reach Austrian Alpine passes, waterfalling down Roman roads to muse about Venetian canals before making my way through old Florence to reach older Rome, just to smile and drift up into Swiss glaciers, a liquid core of calm that persists when I slide down through the vineyards of Burgundy to wash up fully rational on Seine shores.

And I’ve been breathing.

Water was an element of my boyhood joy, and travel is essential for my adult satisfaction. Sharks and me, stop moving and we suffocate. But it’s not a compulsion, not addiction, neither distraction nor delusion. It’s adoration. Adulation. Celebration of our worldwide nation and the strokes that pull us all together.

Islam is supposed to be scary? Me and
the little girl don't buy it. You?

For years I traveled. Helpless before my vagabond urges. It was right for a time, but wrong in the end. Insufficient for the long term, serving nothing but my whims. Now there’s a purpose to my travel. In a world of multimedia capitalists who profit from our fear, who compete for the spectacles that widen our eyes and shrink our horizons, I find something more worthy than mere movement when I take others with me, show them these faces of beauty left here by centuries of human struggle and millennia of natural process.

For twenty one days spread across half a dozen countries we delight in the reality of the places, rooms in our global house, and I watch the tension of the first day dissolve into the ease of the last. Day One I see apprehension when I show them the train track that will reliably bring them home, Day Twenty I drop them off in Paris’s elegant metro maze and say “See you tomorrow” and they’re off without a pause.

And in the calm, when they don’t need me at all, I can imagine them going home, feeling merely tired, to be greeted by the anxious homebound with their pinched brows who desperately inquire “You were in Europe? But weren’t you worried? Didn’t you feel unsafe?”

And in my daydream I see their calm smile, perhaps wearing the appropriate regret for the incidents of the moment, but underneath is the deep understanding that the world is something other than the misconception made up by those make-up talking heads. And my traveling companions ease back to a full library of happy moments, warm welcomes, beautiful humanity and they can shrug off the constipated clench of petty terror. Stories they know better than to buy, now.

Think they wish they'd spent more time fearful and divided?

No, they didn’t feel unsafe. They felt free. If I did my job right. And the memory of every one of their smiles resonates within me, and I feel that dream’s sense of delighted astonishment, astonished delight, and can pull in deep lungfuls of fresh air.

Maybe it’s an inspiration post after all. For me, anyway.

Europe's normalcy and hospitality are waiting, on every boulevard and back street.

Why you should go to Istanbul

Sultanahmet Camii, aka The Blue Mosque, near where I was walking

“Hello! You walk like an American” said the smiling stranger in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square. How was I walking? Having been to the city a few times, I knew where I was going but felt no hurry in the constant beauty of that incredible city. Did this relaxed confidence mark me as an American? What a terribly lovely idea.

It wasn’t the sort of association I would have expected on my first visit, when I arrived rank with trepidation as to how the locals might view my American nationality. But now it wasn’t that surprising, after those nerves had been immediately dispelled by the undeniable hospitality and irresistible kindness of the Turkish people.

It didn’t take long. I remember the students who jumped to help me on my first train ride in from Ataturk Airport, when I didn’t know to transfer at Zeytinburnu. Their eager words and laughter made me feel I was among friends already.

Baklava and cai with my
brother on a later visit

And at the hotel I remember the staff’s good humor and patience as I puzzled through “teşekkür ederim” to say thank you. It’s a phrase I needed a lot, for those who helped me navigate the sections of that incomparable city, the vendors and waiters who brought me Turkey’s delicious cuisine, and for the advice from friends I made on the ferry from Kadiköy to Beşiktaş, crossing back to Europe after a day in Asia.

The phrase was easy by the time I left Selçuk and automatic before I reached Fethiye. Then I learned its Kurdish counterpart in Diyarbakir and used it often as I wandered the beautiful present and past of Mardin and Hasankeyf, then was humbled by the help of a man in Batman. So much more than a superhero chuckle!

People love to ask a traveler where their favorite place is, and I never quite know how to answer. Though Holland and Nepal come to mind quickly, the most common answer I give is Turkey. In its ancient cities and modern comforts, natural beauty and human kindness, Turkey has something wonderful for every visitor. And none of it should be forgotten in the face of the human vileness of these terrorist attacks.

Why is Turkey the target of so much violence? Several answer for this, from modern politics to ethnic history, but one particular reason stands out, essential to remember when it comes to Turkey.

Inside the Hagia Sophia, a church that became a mosque and
is now a museum. Peace and welcome for all.

Turkey represents hope. Established by Ataturk in 1923, Turkey was born a secular nation whose political, religious, social, and economic changes modernized the country and made it a bastion of stability and freedom in a Middle East wracked by war and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

To focus: Turkey was founded as a secular nation in an Muslim region, and with balance and freedom it has thrived. That’s why it’s under attack by Daesh. Because Turkey, with its concrete demonstration of harmony between modern western culture and Islam, is a threat to those small minds who want us to think Islam is somehow at war with Christianity. It shows the lie of those sad souls who want us to think the Middle East is an opponent of the West. It laughs at those who suggest that we brothers and sisters are somehow enemies.

That’s why they’re attacking Turkey.

And that’s why we should keep visiting.

Terrorists want us to stay home and fear. Instead, I choose the many sites and pleasures of visiting Istanbul, from the markets of its Asian shore to the Golden Horn, including Sultanahmet Square where that man, after saying I walked like an American, invited me to çai with him in his carpet shop.

I know, what a cliche, the Turk inviting you to the carpet shop. It is. And it happens. And yes it’s probably a sales pitch. But it’s so much more. He knew I wasn’t going to buy anything, and invited me anyway. We sat and drank tea from tulip glasses and he beamed when I told him I’d visited and loved his hometown to the east. And when his coworker insisted on showing me some samples, including one that was $420, my newest Turkish friend found it hilarious when I told him that 420 is synonymous with marijuana in America.

We were not enemies, that man and I. Nor are America and Turkey. And we should never be enemies, the West and the Middle East. In Turkey you can visit that. You can sit at the table and watch the unity of the human spirit, as currents flow between continents on the historic streets of an incomparable city.

You can even walk like an American and make a man chuckle at pot.

I want to go back to Istanbul.

Yeni Cami, aka The New Mosque, in Istanbul. (More photos on the vagabondurges.com version)