Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [88]
And what did Yapı ve Kredi Bankası mean, and why did every sign in the city and every bench along the shore carry those words? Before I could ask, our bus veered off the Bosphorus road to climb a steep hill that took us past a cemetery and a castle. We went through a gate and all of a sudden we were back in Princeton. Except it wasn’t Princeton. It was Robert College, on the other side of the globe. That night, and the night after, and the night after that, I cried myself to sleep.
After that I cried only on Friday nights. That was because I knew we would be getting up early the next morning to go on an all-day prowl of the old city. I’m told we took the ferry, but that’s not what I remember. What I remember are the hundreds of honking cars bearing down on us as we crossed over from the Eminönü ferry station to the Yeni Cami mosque. My parents were just as shaken by this weekly ordeal, but they were in no doubt it was worth risking death for the prizes waiting on the other side. Years later, when I had to memorize On First Reading Chapman’s Homer, I had no trouble imagining how stout Cortés and his men must have looked as they stood silent on a peak in Darien. I knew they wore the same rapt expressions as my mother and my father when they set eyes on Ayasofya or Kariye Camii or Topkapı or Sultanahmet. “Can you believe it?” they would say. “We’ve made it. We’re actually here.”
They were surprised and disappointed when my sister and I didn’t feel the same way. They were even disappointed, I think, in our baby brother. But we couldn’t see things the way they did. We had not spent half our lives reading and dreaming about these places. We had not had to scheme and plot and drive our families to distraction to get here. As far as we were concerned, the less we knew, the better. If we fell in love with the marble lions of Side and the caves of Göreme and the crusader castle of Bodrum, it was because they were there.
Wherever we went, the question we asked was “Are they going to let us play here?” And for the most part, they did. In the years that followed, we got to play in churches, mosques, museums, fountains, and ancient temples, not just in Istanbul and Anatolia, but in Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Italy, and Spain.
So I can tell you with authority that the best place for hide-and-seek is the Valley of the Kings. The best floors for running and sliding are in the Prado. And the Acropolis is the breeziest place to play house on a hot afternoon if you are stuck in Athens waiting for money. We were always running out of money in Athens, then waiting weeks for the slow-moving First National Bank of Princeton to wire new supplies to what we called the American Depress.
But even when we were rolling in money, we always stayed in seedy hotels and traveled third class, often in buses with failing brakes and on ships that listed forty-five degrees. This sent my grandparents into a panic when they got word of it and even shocked the wild party people from that charter flight who had gone on to become my parents’ dearest friends. What they didn’t see was how much fun it was to travel deck class on a ship where no one spoke your language, because when you found out how to sneak into first class and they caught you, you couldn’t understand a thing they said. They could not imagine the thrill of playing with newfound friends in the platia (main square) of a Greek village, even though your only words in Greek were “green light, red light.” They could not know how much