In celebration of my travel-crazy grandfather’s 70th birthday, my dad, sister and I joined the rest of our extended family at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport. Our first week in Turkey was glamorous: the hotels we stayed at were no less than four stars, the restaurants we ate at were hopelessly fine dining (far more so than places we could have dreamed to eat at home) and the sights we’ve seen were vividly narrated by a contagiously enthusiastic guide. It was almost as if we’ve seen all, done all, that high-end tourists could hope to do.
But we had arguably seen but a fraction of a culture, of a country and of a people. For as the Statue of Liberty and Niagara Falls does not embody the everyday lives of Americans, an hour in the Hagia Sophia and a walk among the ruins of Ephesus had not reflected the entirety of Turkey.
Of course the trip was amazing in itself, characterized by days of breathtaking scenery and historical and intellectual enrichment. So it was only after the rest of my relatives left for Korea- leaving my dad, my sister and me to stay another two days before taking a flight back to New York- that a fact I had known to be true, one that had faded to a watermark as the contents of an idyllic trip imprinted on the pages of my mind, had come to full light: we had only scratched the surface of an otherwise deep and colorful heritage.
After seeing our relatives off, we settled in at a small simple room at a local inn. Its lobby was a single room with bright white walls, mostly empty but for a few pieces of furniture. A red sofa glaringly stood out against its pale surroundings, accompanied by a small book shelf and low table that hosted a series of thick journals in which previous visitors wrote about their own experiences. We lugged our bags up a small flight of wooden stairs to our room. Pushing open a slightly worn, blue door revealed a modest room with rustic wood paneling and two small, neatly made beds. A closet stood slightly ajar next to the leftmost bed while a large window overlooking the streets lay adjacent to the right one. It was a stark yet comforting contrast to the sizable rooms and its fancy bedding that I had grown accustomed to. The reassurance of the room gave a small, yet significant, nudge, a reminder, of the faint feeling of being out of place during the past two weeks, confirming my own suspicions that I may have been walking in ill fitting shoes.
On the advice of the owner-receptionist, we made our way down a bustling main street, traversed by a trolley track and flanked by local stores, towards the waterfront. There we merged into a modest, yet intriguing marketplace. It was an enchanting experience, simply walking through the narrow pathways between various stands selling dried fruit, traditional sweets, clothing and spices, with people purchasing goods, carrying on daily conversations and bargaining (or so I imagined) for better prices. As we took a left turn, we were absorbed into a large crowd and swept away towards a boat anchored in the harbor, which drew crowds left and right. We were soon greeted by a mouthwatering aroma and an incredible sight of a canopy of colorful tarp, which stretched across an expanse of countless plastic chairs and tables, most of which were full. Within ten minutes we had purchased three of the floating restaurant's grilled mackerel sandwiches and proceeded to devour them, albeit slowly. Bones penetrated every bite and by the end of another ten minutes, had compiled three mounds of fish bones. To our amusement, and evidently to neighboring tables', no one else seemed to have the slightest difficulty in eating them. Their tables were spotless and fish picked clean, while we had amassed a mess that was admittedly embarrassing.
At the end of another twenty minutes we slowly made our way back to the inn, this time downhill from a tapering road downhill that led to the main street. We stopped nearly every three feet to play with an assortment of brightly colored Turkish spinning tops and look over the shoulders of vendors as they painted on miniature canvases and decorated mosaic glass beads.
Though this last day of travel was surely the plainest, it was the most memorable. Perhaps it was simply the interaction with locals, who advised us to try this or that and spontaneously invited themselves over in our pictures, or that I didn't feel so much like we were tourists than guests, as if I had traded in my tinted shades for a pair of metaphorical lenses. But whatever the reason, it truly does seem that there is a difference between the experiences of tour and travel, marked by an ever so slight yet definitive line that Gilbert K. Chesterton best describes: "The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see."
