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Upon arrival in Istanbul
May 26
Upon arrival in Istanbul and after gathering our luggage, I said to Eno, “You must find our driver, who will be holding up a sign with our name on it”. Eno responded, “I know how to spell Little”. After passing through the Turkish customs, we entered the public greeting area where hundreds of people pressed forward to meet the arrivals. It was a sea of male Turkish faces. Surya had extracted Eno’s Swiss made, 3 wheel high-fidelity scooter out of our luggage and so Eno sailed out into the waiting crowd. “This feels just like arriving in India”, Surya said. And indeed after the spare and sanitized water-way city of Helsinki, Istanbul loomed ahead of us—chaotic, polluted and densely populated.
We failed on several tries to find any man with a “Little” sign, until Jihad, the Plato Films driver hailed me over. Plato Films, one of the top film production and commercial television producers here in Istanbul, supports the yoga center Jahangir where we teach.
From the airport, we drove along the Bospherus Sea strewn with massive oil tankers coming and going from the Black Sea. “What do you notice different about Istanbul”? I asked Eno. “The drivers drive super fast”, he said. And so we sped along the embankment, past families picnicking roadside, men fishing along the piers, past the decrepit archs and walls of the old Roman city, past large looming mosques with golden spires atop multiple grey domes, across the Golden Horn to the compact streets of Taksim and Jahangir. Once in the locale of Jahangir, the roads became steep and narrow as we climbed upward from the Bospherus. We dodged past ten year old boys playing football in the street and strolling elderly couples until we arrived at the headquarters for Plato Films and the home of our host Rebekka Hass.
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