Mornings in Turkey

The first morning back in Europe, five years after I’d packed up my bedroom in Vauban, toured Aschaffenburg and Berlin each for a second time, and flown out of Frankfurt back to Michigan for my final year of college.

No fear or apprehension, to be back in Frankfurt Flughafen. I ate a pretzel, messaged Emma (still in Ukraine) on Facebook, wandered to find my gate for the next flight—the flight to Istanbul. I’m not sure how we landed in Frankfurt; it was dark still on arrival, I think, but soon morning gave way to this thick spooky fog out the terminal windows. I alighted in Istanbul at 1pm, waited a long time for my bag, couldn’t find the sign with my name, for the taxi to my hostel in Sultanahmet. Didn’t like it one bit. Once at the hostel, a fog of sleep, a shower (maybe), an unavoidable nap. I ventured out in the evening dark to see the Hagia Sophia and find sustenance, but couldn’t shake the overly friendly young Turkish man who just wanted to practice his English with me over some tea. I went home hungry to the hostel, couldn’t sleep. After that first night, Emma and I had no reservations for anything.

On the second day, I bought us plane tickets to İzmir for that afternoon, reserved the last room at a recommended pansiyon in Selçuk, wandered the gardens of the Sultan’s palace, and took a shuttle back to Atatürk International Airport, in search of meine Emma, arriving from Odessa. When her face finally emerged from the crowd spilling out of the international terminal, I was so happy. She was wearing a striped sweater whose twin I had also packed for the trip. I hadn’t seen her in almost a year and a half.

Morning three in the Old World, morning two in Turkey, we climbed three flights of turning stone stairs to the pansyion's terrace, picked out for ourselves one of the little circle tables that ringed the bench that wrapped around three sides of the terrace, and were presented with a feast.

**
I wanted to write about mornings. Early morning, when the light’s still a little blue and the breeze is so fresh that you always get a twinge of nostalgia for something – first days of school past, the end of hot summers, waking up early in a tent or on a lake or for a peaceful journey through a city still mostly aslumber.

Reichstag

“During the Cold War, the Reichstag—its cupola wrecked, its walls bullet-pocked—was an abandoned relic in the no man’s land of central Berlin, just inside the British sector. The Wall, built in 1961, ran a few steps from the back of the building.

I start to read this profile of Angela Merkel in The New Yorker, warm in my apartment in Michigan, colored lights twinkling on my Christmas tree in the corner. I feel comfortable with the historical introduction to Berlin that begins the article, though there’s a momentary twinge of shame at this self-satisfaction. This history that I’m familiar with is so basic, bare-bones, and I fear my knowledge doesn’t go much deeper, despite the B.A. I hold in German, despite the many walking tours I’ve been led on through that city, both literal and literary.

It’s strange to me how much I warm up inside when a topic dear to me comes up. But I feel rusty on Germany, not confident on the nuances of really anything that’s German, anymore—my convictions about living there, the people, the way things work, grow fuzzier with time. I know by rote the words I used to say, but the immediacy of experience is held hostage beyond the barrier of time. I don’t feel as though I can really back up my old impressions and rusty knowledge—I don't think I have enough left of those experiences to plunge deeper, think anew.

Reading the sentence, though—the wall, built in 1961, ran a few steps from the back of the building—I remember it. I took pictures from the Reichstag, standing in what used to be West Berlin, watching people walk along a path just outside that marks where the wall once separated West from East.

I think that Berlin in icy January was probably a fitting introduction. Black and white, the weather forbidding, even if nothing else was. Historical Berlin is so many things, but first and foremost it is bombs and Nazis and Russian soldiers; the Wall, Wim Wenders’ angels in heavy overcoats in a world of quiet poetry, but no color; and spies, inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, everywhere.

Berlin was cold; my classmates complained all through the long, long walk of history our guide led us on. Nazi buildings, Checkpoint Charlie, Geisterbahnhöfe—the ghost U-Bahn stations located on lines that didn’t stop on that side of the city, because it was on the wrong side of the wall. The tour was long and not the most compelling, but I overdressed, heavy Aran sweater under a wool coat, with leggings under jeans and thick wool socks in hiking boots, so it wasn’t so bad.

I have another picture out a Reichstag window, of the cobblestoned plaza that extended so far out ahead of the building, before reaching the great park, the Tiergarten. Cold stone, ice, and little people scattered about, some with cheery red accents. I used it to symbolize the brutal length of winter, but I loved the scene all the same.

When you travel, place after place, the intoxication wears off. After six months in Europe, sights sometimes just felt like old stuff—and while before, Very Old Stuff was exciting just for the fact of its age, after relentless journeying, the spark had been diluted, deactivated. But when I stood for the second time (seven months after the group trip to Berlin, it was summer) on Bebelplatz, the square where the Nazis burned books, and I read Heine’s prescient quote from the previous century, I shivered—and I shiver a little inside every time I think of it.

“Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”
“Where they burn books, so too will they burn human beings in the end.”

It’s sort of nuts to me that I’ve been so many places, and my parents haven’t. Because I also don’t think it’s so odd that I’ve traveled as much as I have—I know many others who have too, or who will surely surpass me by far. My parents had comparable educations to mine, but unlike me, they started adult life without debt, with employed summers and cheap tuition. They may have tottered on the path to gainful employment as I did, but they also went to Europe more than once.

More than once in one decade, then never again, although it wasn’t until the next decade that they started a family.

My mom has been places I haven’t—Arizona and England, Denmark and the Virgin Islands, Minnesota and many other states, I’m sure. My dad lived in Germany a little while, like I did, and together they moved to Indianapolis, before happily returning to Michigan for the rest of forever. All three of us have been to New York City, Munich, parts of California; two of us to Montreal (none of these trips with all three of us together).

I don’t think I’m going to stop. My life is already different than my parents’, and it will remain that way. But it’s still strange that I’ve stood on the D-Day beaches, I’ve gazed at the galleries of the Hagia Sophia and taken a ferry up the Bosphorous, seen Charlemagne’s throne, and stood on the western coast of Ireland, staring out across the Atlantic toward North America—and they have done none of these things. Never seen Paris?

The Fortress of Europe

As viewed from a ferry in the Bosphorus. Built across the strait from the older Fortress of Asia. Instrumental in Mehmet II's conquest of Constantinople. I really get a kick out of the name: the Fortress of Europe.

Happy November from a person who is happy to be back on Michigan soil, after a beautiful trip to Turkey and Germany.

(More photos on Instagram, and more to come, here and there.)

Successes of 2013

New camera!

I learned to make delicious chicken pocket pies. I finally replaced my rain boots. 

I took the train to St. Louis; best decision of the year. I had gooey butter cake for breakfast; favorite moment of the year?

Louis the cat is always a success.  

Lots of friend-time (not enough), lots of burgers, lots of sangria.

Tourist icons of Chicago and Milwaukee; friends from Freiburg!

German-themed fun, Cuban-themed silliness (and more burgers). Birthdays!

A successful dinner chez les parents; an unsuccessful drive to dinner in Detroit.

 The exact bookcases we wanted, found on Craigslist; a new bathing suit!

Lake Michigan from both sides.

Cactus without cats; cactus with cats.

 We stayed in; we went out.

Our apartment was warm and cheery and boiling hot, and my hair got long.

It was a good year, and a good start to life in a new home.

Wolverine + Texas Eagle

Those are the trains I took to get from Ann Arbor to St. Louis on a Thursday at the beginning of March. I had ridden the Wolverine many times before, but only commuting to and from Detroit, never truly heading west or really going anywhere. I consider this trip my first foray into American rail travel.

I could have flown one-way to St. Louis for $90, instead of the $81 I spent on Amtrak. But to that, I would have added the AirRide bus, and thank goodness it exists now, but that's more money, another step. The train station is actually closer to my apartment than the bus station that would have taken me to metro airport. And, of course, I just wanted to take the train. If I, great train proponent that I am, don't, who will? So I left my home dark and early—before 7 a.m.—and walked down the hill to Depot Street, waited a few minutes (it's the train from Chicago that's usually late), climbed aboard, and settled in for a nap.

The grey clouds of the morning departed before Chicago. Most of the weekend was sunny and warm—a first breath of spring. Still, my boyfriend and I lamented how early in the season our trip was. If we'd headed south a week or two later, we were sure we would have been greeted by green things.

The train ride would have been much prettier if the world had been growing again. Tree branch silhouettes are lovely with fresh snow; they're striking as a strong silhouette against a blue or pink sky. Instead I watched naked trees against a white-grey sky that blended all too well with the lackluster snow melting on the ground. The trees, leafless, didn't hide the random buildings scattered in the distance. The dead fields. If they were green, the patches of trees could have approximated a forest. When we drove up I-75 to visit my grandparents in Flint, I loved to see all the trees along the side of the highway. Full and green, and then later, full and red and orange. It was nice to see them. Of course those several rows of trees along the railroad and the interstates aren't forest.

I thought about going up north, though. I dreamed of a summer trip to the Upper Peninsula. Please, can this be the year? Then I read the book Ali had shipped to me the week before. I read about the author growing up in northern Michigan. Listening as the calls of wolves became fewer and fainter. I thought about wilderness, as the train rumbled along toward Chicago.

Aaaahhhhhh.

I took an aimless walk in Chicago, then circled back toward Union Station and ate a grilled cheese by myself, with the wolf woman book. I thought a lot about milkshakes but didn't get one.

Then I headed into the old train station and settled down to read some more. 

I almost missed my train because I lost track of time and hadn't realized they checkyour ticket before boarding in a big, real station like Chicago's. At home you hop on at the last minute; the train barely stops. Anyway, I made it. Eventually, I mustered the courage to buy a bottle of water and get a glimpse of the Sightseer Lounge car. It looked pretty nice, with its panoramic windows. Sunshine. People to watch. So I spent a few hours there, with my laptop safe nearby in my AsympTote from Meg...and my other luggage in the other car, out of my sight. A little nerve-wracking, but okay.

I switched to a different book, and as the train headed south and west into the sunset, I followed Patrick Leigh Fermor south and east into the Balkans and toward Constantinople. I read about the thick, wild forest of the Carpathians while riding across flat land.

The train ended up being an hour or so late. By then, I was impatient. I wanted to be with my boyfriend, enjoying my dinner and a drink and planning our weekend of fun. But I was glad I picked the train, happy with my day of reading (and texting and instagramming and napping), happy to relax all the way to St. Louis, where I was retrieved from the train station and brought to a Bosnian restaurant serving Schnitzel and Spaetzle and Riesling, oh my. Delicious. And then we slept.

The Arch, poorly photographed from a moving train.

Im Juli = In July

If any of you out there are students of German—which some of you are—then you recognize this title. Im Juli is a film by prominent Turkish-German director Fatih Akın, probably the most positive of his that I've seen, though I've only seen four. I think the other three (Gegen die Wand, Auf der Anderen Seite, Soul Kitchen) are more powerful or just plain better, but a lot of people really like this movie, and, well, I'm writing about July. Im Juli is a road movie with a love story. The two main characters travel from Hamburg in northern Germany all the way to Istanbul. They travel by borrowed car, hitchhiking, stolen car, more hitchhiking. In July, I traveled by plane, and car, and boat. I didn't hitchhike. I didn't even get on a train.

I started the month celebrating the Fourth of July in West Michigan with Ali and Drew and Cooper, spent twelve days in Rhode Island with dear old Rachel and co, then ended the month with Ali and Drew again—first Ali came to Detroit (she got to take the train), and we went to a concert, then we drove back to Gobles and Mattawan with a puppy in tow who was on her way to a new home, which she reached via the ferry in Muskegon that crosses Lake Michigan to Wisconsin. In between these trips, I was in Ann Arbor off and on. I spent twenty of July's thirty-one days as a guest.

This backpack and I have gotten real close this summer. (And, the boots from this post.)

Rhode Island was a big commitment. There was no way I'd drive that far, by myself, in a car without air conditioning, so I had to buy a plane ticket. Once you're spending that kind of money, you want to stay a while, but not too long because you set the dates and generally stick by them. Her family had told me, again and again, that I could stay as long as I wanted. Since college started, we had only caught Rachel for days at a time except at Christmastime; then, last August, her family finally made the long-postponed move for her mother's job, so she doesn't even come back for the holidays anymore. I hadn't seen the whole family the way I used to—going over after school, staying for dinner, spending the night on weekends—in a while. I hadn't really seen them like that since sometime in high school, but even though they're in a new house in a different state, and Rachel's a college graduate while her little sister has accumulated many more sisters through her sorority, a lot was the same. We did touristy trips, went to the beach a couple times, but also just existed together.

Ali, Rachel, Maddie, and me, with Emma above us. This is actually in Ohio, in May, but it includes three of the people I stayed with in July.

The weirdest thing to think about while in Rhode Island was that I didn't actually know when I would see the whole family again after that. Rachel, I would probably see in the not-too-distant future—about a week from now, it turns out, coinciding with Emma's return from Poland—but she won't live in the woods of Rhode Island with her parents for too long. Rhode Island's not that far from Michigan, and definitely not from the rest of New England, but it's not somewhere I'm likely to go with any regularity. Staying with Ali and Drew was completely different.

On the Fourth of July, hurtling along the country roads at sixty or so trying to follow Ali from her grandparents' to Drew's place was challenging. After a couple days going back and forth during my visit at the end of the month, I knew exactly where to go, although I would forget to watch out for Drew's driveway. And even though Drew, like the rest of us, won't be where he is now for too long, I had this pleasant feeling that driving under the arching trees past the ranch houses and the fields was going to stick, because Ali and Drew intend to stay in the area. As the years go by, they'd like to move up from the five golden chickens Drew keeps at the house he lives in now to land of their own where they can grow their food and raise the children they might one day have.

I can picture the next year of my life, sort of. I've got the setting and a lot of the characters picked, at least, if not the plot. You could even say I know some of the conflicts. After next summer, though, it becomes much hazier. I live places. I make money, I hope. I have a life, eventually, but maybe not in close proximity to the people I have willed to stay close to me. Ali and I sat one evening on the raft, dangling our feet in the little lake, talking about her future, the jobs she'll have, the dinner parties she'll invite me to. Her mom and her five siblings, who have always been of utmost importance, will probably spread farther apart than she would have once liked. "But they'll visit," she said. She always insists I'll stay, or end up, in Michigan. I don't know. I hope that I'll end up living close enough to visit often. I realized that evening that this vision she's been forming of her future gives me a glimpse into mine, because I will be part of it. I don't know where I'll be getting my mail and paying my taxes, or who with, or when, but at some point, if everything works out to the bare skeleton of our dreams, Ali's home will be a fixture in my life and my children's lives. Even if they're a decade younger than her kids. Hopefully not all of them—it would be inconvenient.

By the time I finally said goodbye to Ali and headed home, it was August 2nd. The month of travel was over. Back at home with my parents, I missed living with my friends. I had tried my best for a month to be homeless, but now I want a home of my own again. And so I found one: I'm moving back to Ann Arbor mit meiner lieben Emma and those silly cats come September. Come, September! No, you can wait. I might be impatient during the next two weeks of limbo, but they're full of guests, which will be nice. And despite the stickiness and the sometimes isolation, I don't really want this summer to end.

Also, watch Im Juli. I think I'm going to for a second time.

ÖÖÖsterreich Is a Great Name

So, this time last year I was 21. And instead of just getting back from Pittsburgh a few days before my birthday—which was weeks ago, but this post took me forever to write—my brother and I returned from Austria. Yes, lovely Austria. Three days later, we went to Paris, and as those links suggest, I actually wrote about Paris at the time. Austria only got one post, in which I did not even mention that the dogs who had inspired it were frolicking in front of the Hofburg, the palace that served as the Habsburgs' primary winter residence and now houses the President of Austria, let alone that they were Viennese.

Here are but a few of our favorite Wiener. Yes. People from Wien. Vienna. Sorry. I'm talking about the dogs. Dogs are people too!

Sidenote: Emma, who is, like me, actually a cat person, also wrote about dogs recently. If 'recently' means in her last post, which was posted weeks ago, that is.

Anyway, I'm trying to remember what I liked so much about Vienna, because it was certainly a good time. Part of it was the weather. Blue skies do a lot when it's been rainy for days, even if the clouds move at a rapid pace and it gets a little chilly when they're blocking the sun. The food was good.

John and I had Sachertorte with Melange, pictured above, because that's so typically Viennese. And Melange is a certain kind of coffee, not the drug also known as "spice" in Dune. In case you were confused? No, I know, this is stupid. Sachertorte is two layers of chocolate cake with some apricot jam in the middle and then a yummy, dark chocolate icing. It comes with cream. The cream is so good. Coffee, meh. Still not a fan. But with enough chocolate, it almost starts to make sense.

This cake was better, though. It was John's best cake of Europe. And he was there for five weeks, eating cake with me, our friends in Munich, and my aunt. Especially my aunt. She suggested or produced Kaffee und Kuchen like every afternoon I was with her in Europe. Kaffee und Kuchen is high on the list of Best Things About Europe. If I had more photos of Kuchen, I would have made a Kaffee-und-Kuchen post long ago. Anyway, this cake. It's called Pandatorte, I guess because it's dark and light, and as you can see, it was mainly creamy chocolately deliciousness. I think we may have had this, and not the Sachertorte, at the Hotel Sacher or whatever, but I'm not really sure anymore. We were definitely underdressed, wherever we were.

You know what, I just want to let that piece of cake tell you everything about Vienna. Vienna is great. Vienna is tasty. We had Schnitzel. Oh man, Schnitzel. I love meat that is breaded and fried.
Other things that are good about Vienna: I like the Hofburg. We hung out in the gardens and read books—John, something for fun, me, the Aeneid auf Deutsch for this Language and Culture of the Ancient World II course I took for some reason (oh right, because there was almost no work and I was compensating for usually only studying the Greeks, because fuck the Romans). I also read Dorothy Dunnett, of course.

We went to the Schmetterlinghaus ( = butterfly house) and saw the biggest butterfly species in the world. It's scary. Ugly and scary. And right below this paragraph.

We saw Gustav Klimt's The Kiss at the Belvedere museum, and other paintings by him, and other things that I don't remember, but Klimt was cool. Then, I think I got to have Grießnockerlsuppe at the Belvedere café!! Grieß is wheat semolina, and Grießnockerl are basically dumplings made of Grieß, and then you put them in a Suppe, or really a broth, and then you are eating this tasty but rather plain soup of broth and starch and I love it, even though there are little green things floating in it. Every time I try to type 'broth' I type 'brother.' Or maybe I had Frittatensuppe or whatever that's called, which is broth with shreds of pancake in it, but I think that this was a time I got to have Grießnockerl. John wasn't impressed by it, but that's okay with me.

If this is just going to devolve into inane discussions of food that display my unsophisticated palate, I guess I'll post the following photo.

Above is Karlskirche, which is at the U-Bahn stop (Karlsplatz) John and I took, or at least switched lines at, every day as we came into the city from the hostel. It's obviously baroque and somewhat silly-looking, but unlike the Berliner Dom, which I find incredibly stupid, I kind of like it. The last evening we were in Vienna, John and I—here's the lame part—got McDonald's to go and ate along the reflecting pool. We weren't the only ones doing so, either. There were a ton of people there, and those chicken nuggets were good. Sometimes, you are tired, and hungry, and just want something easy. McDonald's is so easy.

Another thing I liked about Vienna was our hostel. We stayed at Hostel Hütteldorf, which I remember as being a Hostelling International hostel, but the website doesn't seem to say that. Either way, it was the cheapest I found, and for that, we were farther out from the city than Schloss Schönbrunn, which is the old summer palace, but not too far, and it was kind of nice to ride the U-Bahn into the city every morning. (Weirdly, the Untergrund-bahn is above ground for a while outside the city, which continues to confuse me.) The biggest downside about the hostel is that it's on a hill. That hill is horrible when you have luggage on your back, especially when you can't find the hostel, and it's still bad after long days of walking. But it is really nice to see all the green hills and the open sky when you get out of the U-Bahn station. And the view from our window was pretty. Sunset-light on churches is great.

Two more things, I think. One. Schloss Schönbrunn, Empress Maria Theresia's answer to Versailles, is lovely "Bavarian" yellow (that's how my mom identified her ideal color for our living room) and much cheerier than Versailles. The gardens are nice. The zoo is great. It's the oldest zoo in the world (having begun as the imperial menagerie!), and they have great polar bears and an awesome Rainforest House to boot. There's a lot more about the zoo in my Vienna Picasa album. And more photos in general.

Two. This is what I've been trying to verbalize for weeks, but I've failed to figure it out and so have babbled about food and nonsense for who knows how many paragraphs. I certainly can't be bothered to count them. I really liked how it felt to be in Wien—in my head, Vienna's almost always Wien. I can't quite explain how it felt anymore, but I liked it. I liked the avenues, and the smaller streets, and the sky. The buildings, of course. At the city center, there are horrible crowds sometimes, but there's still space. That's part of what I like about Berlin—after a lot of time spent in smaller places, it's nice to have a change—but the space in Wien isn't like Berlin's at all. But I like how it feels both places. When I applied to being an English teaching assistant in Austria for a year, I was excited that I would be in the vicinity of Vienna—oh, bad alliteration—and would be able to visit more than once. Alas, it was not to be.

Golden night city! It just feels so good. Yes, John's wearing a Michigan sweatshirt, but I blurred it...artfully.

After Vienna, John and I went to Salzburg, but let's just leave that story to my photo captions.