Roadrunner Twice

I went to NYC for a week of vacation! It was excellent. I had a fantastic time. A little bit of museum stuff, a little bit of nightlife, a whole SHITLOAD of just hiking around and soaking in the atmosphere of, I dunno, I must have hit at least fifteen neighborhoods. Ate a bunch of cool food. Had a couple of cool drinks. Met up with some old friends, and crashed on the couch with Shane and his boyfriend Dusty and their housemate Lee, who were all just unbelievably nice and gracious and generous.

It was the shit. I got back on Sunday. Hi.

To take a break from the travelogue for a while (yes, I'm still working on some posts; yes, I'm back home), let's get back to something I mentioned in passing earlier.

The jet lag had me worried, a bit. This was going to be a fairly short trip, I did not want to waste any more of it than I had to on recuperatory bullshit, and all the talk of being useless for one day per zone freaked me right out. (And I knew I was susceptible, because I got the nasty lag going east to Ireland back in '04, and it really did leave me unable to do much but play Game Boy in bed for half a week.)

Anyway, initially what I kept finding were the news reports from earlier this year about how maybe, possibly, fasting for 16 hours before landing could keep The Lag at bay. So I was going to try that, except I didn't really have a lot of hope for it, since all those stories turned out to be based on a single study that involved injecting DNA-modifying virii into the brains of mice. ("If you've got jet lag and you're a mouse, we can help.") But then I ran across this.

Ignore for a minute the vibe of the site, which is somewhere between herbal supplement huckster and horoscope generator; the instructions are fairly simple once you strip away the explanatory text, and they're actually backed by a history of human testing (pdf link). And the whole shebang was developed by a dude at the Dep't of Energy's Argonne "Look At Our Fucking Death Ray" National Laboratory, which, you can't beat that heavily-irradiated pedigree. (Also it's apparently been used by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Canadian National Swim Team, and Ronald Reagan. [?!])

The theory behind it is also kind of awesome: basically, in addition to your main bodily clock, you have a gastric clock pegged to local food availability, which seems to exist in order to forcibly override and reset the main circadian clock in extreme situations. The goal of the diet is to deliberately trigger that override at a time of your choosing without suffering too much shock in the process. Very clever. In a nutshell, you do an alternating pattern of feast days and fast days, with breakfast on the final feast day triggering the reset.

Long story short, it fucking worked, and I completely evaded the lag in both directions. Eastbound lag is supposed to be the worst kind, so I did the full version of the diet before the trip; on the backswing, I couldn't really be bothered to do it right (I was surrounded by delicious food), but the half-length version seems to have worked anyway.

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Needless to say, pulling this off is a lot easier if you can actually sleep a little bit on the plane, and I think I can recommend this ridiculous-looking shit in good conscience; it worked far better for me than it looks like it should have, and was totally worth the dough. Also, spending as much time as possible outdoors on the first day seems to be a good plan, as does obeying the rules about caffeine (only between 3 and 5 PM) and alcohol (don't do it; presumably this also goes for weed).

Right, so anyway. Let's start from the beginning. I deplaned in Istanbul, paid my $20 US for my 90 day visa, meandered through passport control, collected my bag (20% coffee and microbrews by weight), walked out of the terminal, and was met by a shout of "Nick!" and a hug that I'd been craving for, well, a while now, let's just say that.

Modulo some minor directional confusion (nothing above par for my course, except that I happened to be really hungry and towing a bag and may have pouted at katealaurel a bit), we arrived at our hotel without incident. We'd ended up at an apartment-style place with one suite per floor, in a tall narrow building in a quiet and peaceful neighborhood (well, comparatively speaking) more or less inside Beoǧlu.¹ We were later told that the area half a block downhill from us wasn't safe to go into, but I wouldn't have guessed it.

Istanbul is full of grand, abandoned old wrecks, beautiful stone or concrete or brick buildings whose age I can't even guess at that have been left to fade and go to seed. Some of them are cored-out and broken-walled and barren, like the one just out our window, and others seem mostly intact but have boarded-up doors and windows stuffed with broken lamps or mannequins. At home they'd be called blight, but they're everywhere, here, even on the busiest and glitziest thoroughfares and shopping rows.

There's also a species of wood-slat buildings that look like sculptures left by some long-departed people, of which barely any are still usable or even salvagible. Kate tells me they're a traditional Istanbul style, but are fiendishly expensive and difficult to restore, and it's more lucrative to let them rot until they can be condemned and then build something modern.

Not that I have the eye to tell the somethings modern from the somethings old, yet, and they're all crammed in shoulder to shoulder, making oddly dark canyons of the streets. (In Istanbul, you go five stories high or you go home.) The ground floors are crowded with commercial bustle, and it invades the upper floors too, sometimes as storage space, sometimes for extra seating, sometimes fitting whole other shops in there. Then there are the rooftop cafés, which I hadn't really guessed the number of until we got up on the Galata tower and looked down on them.

This town is Built Up, is what I'm getting at, and it is BIG, stretching practically from horizon to horizon. It's big and it's tall and it's older than hell, and while I wouldn't call any real city truly knowable, Istanbul has the bad grace to rub your face in it. I kind of love it for that.

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¹: For some reason, the iPad doesn't seem to have any good way to get Turkish characters, so an earlier version of this post had a bunch of em-dashes and apostrophes dangling around.

And the word is, NO JET LAG. Fuck yeah, I am a dynamo of awakeness. That's pretty much all there is to say about that. (Well, there's more, but I'm going to leave it until I have time to write about stuff that isn't exciting foreign locales.)

I'm in Istanbul on the morning of my third day here, writing this in our hotel apartment while Kate types some emails. I'm having to re-think a bit how I interact with a new city, simply because I haven't traveled in so long, but so far I think I'm absorbing an okay amount of it. We've gone to the Ayasofia, walked around the old town, sat in cafés, eaten some amazing food, seen the insides of two incredibly old and cool mosques (including the "new" mosque, which, well, that name writes its own punchline in this town, doesn't it), not-shopped at the grand bazaar and the spice market (both tourist central) as well as the pet market and the highway underpasses and really pretty much anyplace where there's enough free space on the ground to set a cigar box. (The entrepreneurial spirit, she is alive and well in Istanbul.)

I've NOT been interacting much with the Turks, which I do feel somewhat guilty about; this is also the first time I've traveled with a guide (of sorts), and I'm leaning on her, possibly too much. Still, I'm here for less than two weeks, so I'm not going to get over-ambitious re: cultural exchange.

At any rate, we've been spending a lot of time wandering the streets, dodging scooters laden with water tanks and dancing around and between families and couples and clusters of bros. The streets are crowded here, it's kind of unbelievable. I think even more so than the chain of big European cities I rushed through back in '04, though it's tough to compare across so much passed time.

More soon.

Back in my apartment, and it feels pretty good. I think this may have been the first time I've broken this place in as "home." You know, the "I've just traveled 1300 miles, and can't wait to get some sleep in my own bed" effect. Having it be the endpoint of some epic journey, instead of the midpoint.

Anyway. I did manage to make the number 2 (second-to-last run of the day, hot damn), so I didn't have to ride to downtown and then either walk ten blocks or try some funny tricks with the 18. Once I got back, I dropped my stuff, repacked the little bag, and set out as a man on a mission—it was 1:30 AM, my last real meal had been half a spinach-feta turnover and some fruit at around noon PDT, and I was going to get myself a tempeh Reuben from the Hard Times Café. (First had to deposit a check at the downtown ATMs and withdraw some cash.) I ALSO would have really appreciated a beer or two, but it was pretty much last call by the time I reached the ATM, and I didn't really want to drink before eating, so no dice. Oh well.

So yeah, I had a kickass and thoroughly Twin Cities meal, and am now about ready to pass out on my keyboard. Massive thanks to everyone for making my visit back to the PNW an amazing one.