AUB and the kids' school were closed for a few days due to the Eid al-Adha. We took the opportunity to travel to Istanbul which is about 1.5 hours by plane from Beirut. Our youngest son, still confused about the nature of our recent move to Beirut, asked if we were bringing all of our bags and if I had a job waiting for me in Istanbul.
Istanbul meets expectations; it is a large urban city with good public transportation, a skyline filled with immense, beautiful mosques, and museums packed with interesting history (and much of the material culture of Lebanon, which was looted by the Ottomans). It is a city of 20 million people and the only one in the world that sits on both the European and Asian continents.
We rented an apartment in the Sutanhamet neighborhood, the old part of the city. We stayed in the Roman section. Our living room window looked out onto the Blue Mosque. This meant we were awaken at 6 AM by multiple calls to prayer from neighborhood mosques. Our youngest son has taken to improvised singing whenever he hears the call to prayer. I'm sure this is haraam, but it's entertaining for his secular parents.
If, as a "blended" transracial family, we are a curiosity in Beirut, in Istanbul we felt like an exhibit. We got many long stares. People came up to us to ask if the kids are ours. In Turkish, we were told that the kids faces aren't the same color as ours; we know this because on many occasions the speaker pointed to our faces and then to the kids' faces. The "stranger who feels compelled to touch African hair"-index is very high in Istanbul (it's about a 9 in Istanbul, 6 in Beirut, and a 5 in Albuquerque). At the Blue Mosque I had to ask people not to photograph our kids. While sitting at a bench people would walk by and snap photos of our kids. On one occasion a man asked his daughter to pose in a photo with our kids (he didn't ask us) -- I rudely explained that this was not okay. I admit that I have handsome sons, but I think something else is at work here. I noticed an African American man in the crowd at the Blue Mosque was also the subject of photographs. Our nine-year-old joked that he should wear a shirt saying, "we are not an exhibit!" Istanbul is one of the few places where we all felt "different" as a family, even as many people were extremely kind and warm.
We learned quickly that much of the kindness we received, especially in Sutanhamet, was likely to be followed-up with, "why don't you come visit my rug store. . ." Shopping the "orient" consumes many travelers to Istanbul and shop owners have made into an art the selling of rugs, blankets, and tiles. It became annoying after two days to constantly question whether kindness was merely a sales pitch.
Our itinerary consisted of the following:
Day 1: The boys had been up late the previous night so we decided to do something that required little energy; we took the double-decker, hop-on/hop-off bus tour. At night we ate a small restaurant down the street from our apartment. I can say with confidence that Turkish food is not as good as Lebanese food.
Day 2: Public ferry tour of the Bosphorus. Three hour stop at mouth of Black Sea for hike to castle and fried mussels.
Day 3: Unfortunately the grand bazaar was closed during our trip because of the Eid. We did find many open shops and went for a long walk. We also visited the Blue Mosque, which was amazing, but, in the boys estimation, equal in beauty to the "new mosque" near the Galata bridge.
Day 4: The Galata Tower, Taksim square, the Basilica Cistern, dinner at a British pub (by far our best meal in Istanbul).
The dogs stayed in Beirut with a kind colleague and seem to be doing well -- which is to say that they slept the afternoon away on our sofa.
Our Istanbul photo album can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.793836603037.2226783.11610611&type=1&l=663af72ec5.
