We are all Raki

Raki and sarcophabear Huggins aka Bunny and Tim
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Well it has been a few days kind readers and I have been busy doing very little besides hanging out with Raki and company having late nights in the big city.

I got back to Istanbul and  reunited with Bunny and her music afficianados tour group from the SF bay area.  Since music was the focus I tagged along with them to see some of the famous and up and coming talents of the Istanbul music scene.  There is a club called Babylon.  On one evening we saw Sehkeret Akybilet (totally wrong spelling) a chanteuse of the old school who proved by combining her voice with a modern jazz ensemble that she can adapt into other sounds to produce her classic and multi-generationally loved songs.  I actually was able to sit through a jazz saxophone solo without cringing.

A local lovely
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The next night we saw a group called the Taxim Trio.  Taxim square is a focal point of both foot and car traffic.  It is where the metro, funicular and bus lines converge and where the major pedestrian street, Istliklal starts its downward journey.  The group is a combination of  clarinetist, baglama which is a long necked oval bodied string instrument and a Kanun which is a cross between a zither and dulcimer and a harp.  All three instrumentalists were superb and fast fingered.  The music would make an incredible movie score.

The old Hydrapassa train station
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I went out afterwards with the two gay men of the group looking for this bar one of them had heard about.  We wandered around in circles and spirals in the labyrinth of Beyoglu streets for over an hour until a young fellow took pity and asked if he could help.  He recognized the address as a gay club and was delighted to show us the place taking a liking to Andrew, one of our party.  We arrived and soon I was crushed against a lot of hairy men as it was one of the most crowded club scenes I had ever been in.  Tim, the other member of our team was happy to be in a bear scene and to run into a fellow he had met in SF.  After a while I had to escape from the smoke.  All Turks smoke.  Many drink but only tea when you smoke a nargile or the hubbly-bubbly as it is called in Egypt.

No doubt where you are
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I spent days and evenings in the Beyoglu neighborhood where the club was located.  The side streets are lined with restaurants, clubs, theatres and nargile places.  Men and women play backgammon, smoke nargile and drink tea together here.  Men are so affectionate with each other here.  They walk arm in arm.  It is common to greet and depart with a quick sweep of cheek to ckeek on both sides.  Playfulness is an accepted behaviour.  This is not gay it is universal.  For example you might see a man of 60 greet a soldier friend with a kiss on the cheeks and a construction worker will walk arm in arm with his business suited friend as they head to a nargile place together.

One of the 'Haunted' houses we walked past on the island
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This is also a country where the army defends the secular government against the fundamentalist Muslim movement and the government suppresses the Armenian and Kurdish peoples disallowing the written and spoken languages and music of these people from public distribution.

Bunny and I spent our last full day here on a day trip to the Andalar or Prince's Islands.  They are a set of small nearby isles which served as the place of exiles from the Ottoman court.  The isles were also developed as the summer home escapes from busy and hot Istanbul.  We stopped at Heybedelia or Heybeli as they call it.  The place immediately charmed us with it's sunny dockside restaurants, mix of architectural styled homes running up the hills. And the pine covered tops with views out across the Marmara sea to Istanbul.  Every turn of the road brought a vista of sparkling sea or another haunted looking house of architectural interest, another beautiful wrought iron gate or the fragrance of honeysuckle.

Looking down the hill
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We hiked about, took the horse drawn carriage to the Greek Monastery, reveled in the sunny view and lunched on the freshest calamari.

A day of complete indulgence was followed by a night of the same.  But first we took an unexpected detour by boarding the wrong feribot (sometimes you just have to sound out the Turkish version) and ended up in an Asian side suburb.  Again the kindness of Turks was lavished upon us.  A fellow immediately sensing our confusion walked us to a dolmus ( Not a Greek stuffed grape leaf but a Turkish minibus) which he made sure would take us to Taxim Square.  We drove and drove through neighborhoods of very nice 7 and 8 story apartments cutting across and back and then eventually over the Bosporus bridge which is their equivalent of the Golden Gate and finally landing us where we could then spend the rest of the evening strolling, eating drinking and listening to the cacaphony of street noise and music styles flowing through the alleyways.

walking down the hill
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We smoked some nargile of mint and rose flavor.  Quite delicious.  When you get that water pipe going a vast amount of smoke is coming in and going out.  Both of us got dizzy.  We were light weights in the Turkish smoking world.

We stopped to check out a performer through a club window when the proprieter popped out inticed us in and ignored our order of Raki and tea and brought us both beers.  What to do.  We drank the beers.  Then the fellow at the next table ordered us two more.  What to do?  We drank two more.  Peed some more and got the heck out of there but not without paying for both sets of beers.

balcony and blue sky
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We got back to the Big Apple hostel and found we had the room to ourselves which was a relief as the night before we were less than enthusiastic about sharing the room with some straggly looking guy with no luggage who claimed he was French but looked like a refugee from the former Yugoslavia.   I had made sure I had locked up the passport cause he looked spooky to me.  He had managed to slip out the next morning without paying for the night.

Bunny left today for home and I leave in a few hours by train for Greece where I hope to meet up in Crete with my Swedish friend Elisabeth whom I met in Southeast Asia.