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Three weeks of touring around Turkey\'s east brought me back to Istanbul. It was almost as west as you can go before running into Bulgaria and Greece, but it felt like the true center of the nation. The domes of Ottoman mosques rose like soap bubbles off the hills, narrow streets crossed each other like tangled yarn, and a wide strait cut a line in the world between Europe and Asia. It was one world sitting atop another: students hawked anarchism and communism alongside vendors dealing out piles of Turkish Delight and baklava; one woman flashed me her tongue ring while another buried herself behind a silky, black charshaf, hiding everything but a small triangle of eyes and nose. \'\'This is the west!\'\' I thought, waiting for a bus in front of the Aya Sofia museum. The curved, honey colored-bench was surrounded by trees, wide boulevards and cafes. A well-dressed man in a black suit took the seat next to mine, spat a huge gob of phlegm into a sponge and polished his leather shoes. \'\'No, this is the east!\'\' Just 10 hours east of here, the sound of western music disappears and no one wears tank tops. Being cool means learning to chain-smoke before you turn 13. One town resembles the last one, or the next one: a dusty little camel stop that urbanized, sprawled smokestacks and skyrises for the village poor who came for work, and sits like an oasis of plaster and concrete in the Anatolian desert. The bazaars are black with the soot of metalworkers. Bits of ash float into sacks of spices: cardamum, cinnamon, nutmeg and frankencense, and light up electric blue with the sparks of welders. Outside is the highway, and beyond that an old caravanserai: once the original market and camel trading post, now a convenient spot for high schoolers to smash beer bottles against erroded brick walls. A group of five boys followed me there, panting and skipping like dogs. They were the town\'s welcoming party. \'\'What\'s your name? You have any coins? Where are you from?\'\' they heckled. I\'m from here, from Malatya. \'\'Really? You\'re from Malatya?\'\' They were very excited. Sure I am!, I said, and begin pointing. See that house? That\'s my house, and that\'s my car. That skinny dog with all the hair scratched out--that\'s my dog! And that\'s my dead cat in the gutter. We arrived at the caravanserai and 3 of the 5 produced cigarettes, stubby little butts with just a hair of tobacco dangling from the filter. They smoked them on the sly, inside one cupped hand. It was vile; they were 14 years-old and they probably picked those things off the street. They were grinning, the whole lot of them, and I didn\'t know what that meant but they kept inviting me further into the caravanserai, this dingy, dark place of smashed plates, strewn litter, and old bricks piled into abandoned nests for the long-dead merchants. This feeling of menace was as thick as the suspended dust of drying cat shit. I politely said goodbye, turned and left. I met some great people in these places too. I went to Konya, the country\'s most conservative and religiously fundamentalist city in Turkey, but a friendly carpet dealer let me know that his city also had the highest consumption rate of alcohol and pornography. I drank tea and made small talk with everyone. A shy student told me he was very sorry about the attacks on the World Trade Center one year ago. \'\'Why?" I asked suspiciously. "Did you do it?\'\' Whenever I got bored of cafes and baklava shops, I went to the mosque and waited for the call to prayer. In many places, there was little else to do. The imam\'s song spread from the minarets to the ends of the city. It trembled like an earthquake and slid the scale from low to high and back again; bellowed furiuosly in wide streets closest; elsewhere crept as an echo through far, narrow alleys. This sound moved in a wide wake and drew thin men in cotton vests and skullcaps to climb granite steps to the domed rooms. It cut the throat of the city. Barbers\' calloused fingers reached to quiet their radios; conversations came to quick interruptions; business stopped; and people sat, whether they pray or not. It happened four times every day. But the conservatism soon ate away at my patience. In Jordan I was an anomoly, an American backpacker in a country most Americans fear pronouncing. In Turkey I passed through like tumbleweed, another dusty tourist, a fresh fish for the souvenier rug dealers. I spent an average of 2 days in each place before pushing to the east, where I suspected I\'d find "the real Turkey." It was an image that seemed always to be just the next dot on the map. The harder I looked, the more mindless I became of the present. In Kahta, near Mt Nemrut, a mechanic invited me for tea in his garage. We sat on wooden benches and he asked me where I was going. The Van Golu--Lake Van area. He smiled and nodded. He\'d never been there, never been more than 100 kilometers from this town, which was really just one street--a smattering of houses made of pasty plaster walls and steel pipe-frames. Are you from Turkey? "Kurdistan. Kurdish," he said, and pointed proudly to his heart. He spoke no English and my Turkish was decent enough only to ask the time and to say over and over how beautiful his country is. But we used these cues to walk through concepts we already grasp: Turk, Kurd, Istanbul, Kahta, Tourist. He smiled, to show he wasn\'t an animal that would eat me. I gave the same smile back and watched him lift his teacup with an oily black finger. I waited until he had sipped from his cup before I touched mine. I think that was about as real as any place gets. The people you\'re looking for rarely jump out at you like a trip on Disney\'s Pirates of the Caribbean. In the Turkish desert they serve you tea and teach you about the Kurds; in Bangkok they take your money and bless their wares with your cash; in India it was one dusty kid bored of minding his shop and wanting to share a muddy chai from a clay cup. I couldn\'t take another night of travelling. I was sick of these bleached roads and dried-up towns. I came back to Istanbul and decided to stay. For the first time in too long, I met local people and made friends. After 3 nights in the tourist ghetto, I moved out and brought my things to a student\'s apartment. Kubilay was a 27 year-old graduate student who introduced me to another friend, Mert. For $4 a night, I could stay in Mert\'s pad, a single bedroom apartment that slept 6: Mert, his friend Barkin, their friends and girlfriends who couldn\'t afford their own places. The bathroom was a squat toilet--more a home for cockroach hatchlings--and a bucket shower that we filled with water from the coffee maker. I congratulated myself on this find. It was true squalor, but I felt cool for being in the center of things. Mert and Barkin were cool guys who worked me to near screaming fights over the politics of America, Israel and Palestine, but never took it so seriously that they had to throw me out. The room was always full
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