Love and Popsicles

Apartment hunting is a lot like online dating. You start with essentially two lists: necessary attributes and ideal attributes. On the first list you put things you can't live without - two bedrooms and a dishwasher, say, or a college degree and blond hair. On the second list you put things that will help you decide among those that pass your initial screening process - does it get plenty of light? is it close to a park? will my friends like it? does it laugh at my jokes? As you sift through the choices online, you flag the ones that look interesting and send a brief email expressing interest and asking to arrange a meeting. Maybe you include a little about yourself in the email, a little joke maybe, to make yourself stand out from the crowd, or maybe you make do with a simple, flirtatious wink.

Then you wait, impatiently, for a response. You check your email obsessively to see who's gotten back to you - some of the ones that sound promising never respond at all, while some of the less promising ones reply immediately and want to make an appointment for this afternoon. You diligently mark down all the appointments in your calendar, being sure to note a few pieces of relevant information about each. And then you're off, scrambling all over the city from appointment to appointment, introducing yourself, trying to sound charming and desirable, asking all the right questions. You tell the same stories over and over, crack the same jokes. Before long, all the people and places you will start to blur together, and if you don't start taking notes soon you'll get them mixed up later - was this the one with the weird crack in the bathroom? was this the one with the brother in Minneapolis?

If you're the type who makes quick judgments, if you're comfortable going with your gut, then you'll quickly decide to commit to just one apartment/person as soon as it feels right, maybe even before you've visited all the ones on your list. Sometimes this will lead to great happiness, but often your enthusiasm will fade quite quickly, as soon as it becomes clear that the drawbacks - the things you hadn't considered or had willfully overlooked in the first rush of excitement - are, in fact, quite severe. Sure, it's really cute, but it's also really, really noisy. Yeah, the view is astounding, but it's a bit cramped in here, and what's with all the mirrors? But by then you're committed, and you can't wriggle out of your predicament without a lot of pain and heartache on both sides, and possibly a lawsuit.

It's far better, to my mind, to take your time with these things, to make as many appointments as possible with as wide a variety of places/people as you can find. Get an idea of what's out there by going after something that's obviously out of your league. Dip into the bottom of the barrel and see if you come up with a gem. Don't stick too closely to your lists of necessary and ideal attributes - you might be surprised at what you're willing to do without (a dishwasher, a nodding acquaintance with the nonfiction works of David Foster Wallace) when all the other stars align just perfectly.

The problem with this second approach, of course, is that it's not entirely in your hands. In both apartment hunting and dating, you have not only to worry about whether the object of your desire will desire you in return - maybe your credit's not good enough, maybe you're not tall enough, maybe you have a history of breaking windows and shoving beer bottles into walls - but you also have a very ill-defined set of time constraints to deal with. Some of the people you meet are looking to have their needs filled immediately, some are, like you, meeting a number of different people and then making their own decisions about whom to offer themselves to among the pool of applicants/suitors, some are looking to move much quicker than you are (often because they know they can't compete with the others on the market), and some are possessed of a serene confidence that if you don't want them, someone else will. This dance can be a tricky, even maddening one, especially if you're someone who likes to take your time and explore all your options before making a commitment - by the time you convince yourself that this one is the one, someone else might have snatched it up. It pays to be deliberate, but try not to be too deliberative.

Last week Kate and I went to Nashville to undertake the apartment-hunting equivalent of speed dating. We had roughly 40 hours in town and 10 appointments, all of which were made by me in the days immediately preceding our trip. We ended up seeing 14 different apartments, almost all of which would have been suitable, but only one of which was perfect. One was in a high-rise condo building with a breathtaking view all the way to Arkansas and a swimming pool on the roof, but the apartment was much too small. One was incredibly, stupidly cheap - virtually free, really - but it was pretty shabby and in a boring area. Several were perfectly fine - good area, plenty of room, all the necessary amenities - but we just weren't feeling a spark. And then, on our last appointment, with a guy who'd already shown us three other properties he owned and had decided to show us one last one that he was currently renovated, we fell in love.

The apartment was completely gutted - no floor, no kitchen, no bathroom - but we knew it'd be perfect. We just knew. It was in an old house, a tri-plex, in the 12 South neighborhood of Nashville, within walking distance of the corridor of stores and bars and coffee shops that line 12th Avenue and not far from the buzzing student areas near Vanderbilt and Belmont, across the street from a beautiful park (beyond which is a community garden), and mere steps away from a gourmet popsicle stand. That's what I said: a gourmet popsicle stand. Which we subsequently visited - I tried the blueberry chocolate chip and Kate had the cucumber chile - and declared to be just as amazing as we expected it to be, and maybe a little bit more. The house itself met all of our essential criteria. The rent is good, pets are allowed, there's plenty of parking, plenty of light, plenty of space, a basement for storage, and all the rest of it. There's also a fireplace, high ceilings, funky angles, and a great, weird front door. (I wish we'd taken pictures, but we didn't.)

So we signed a lease, we paid a deposit, and we have been assured that the renovations will be done by the first of August, or at least a few days into August. I'm optimistic that everything will be as promised, but I still feel a slight twinge of apprehension, given the current state of the place. We are, after all, putting a great deal of trust in someone we've only just met to fulfill the promises he's made to us, and we've already got a lot invested - both monetarily and emotionally - in a successful outcome.

Which also makes this a lot like dating, but with significantly higher stakes. I'm thinking, of course, of all the popsicles in my future if this thing goes all the way.

Cape Crusaders

Hello. Last week I went to Cape Cod with Kate and her parents, and the following things happened.

1) John Waters, director of Hairspray and Cecil B. DeMented and Pink Flamingos and many other strange movies that I haven't actually ever seen, bicycled past me in a navy blue suit and sneakers. This was in Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, which is famous for its artists and writers and large gay population (the three groups being by no means mutually exclusive). There was a film festival going on, and this is probably why John Waters was riding his bike through town. At least I assume it was his bike.

2) If it was his bike, he may well have purchased it from an old friend of mine who runs a few bike shops on the Cape and whom we visited one afternoon in the rain. This is Peter, whom some of you remember from our grad school days. He left the program about six years ago, and, judging from the current economic climate, this was a very wise move indeed. He now owns three bike shops, a house, a wife, and a baby named Jebediah. He was happy and warm and he gave us t-shirts. I love Peter.

3) If John Waters were to ride his bike (or someone else's bike) south out of Provincetown to North Truro, he would pass - or, if he's smart, stop by - the Susan Baker Memorial Museum. Susan Baker is an old friend of Kate's parents, and she lives in her memorial museum with her husband, Keith, and a one-eyed basset hound who sometimes wets the floors. She makes papier mache sculptures of dogs and ticks and other animals, chapbooks and book-books about dogs and ticks and childbirth and things, and paintings of European cities and Cape Cod and other places. They're really quite remarkable, the paintings, and you can see what appear to be watercolor interpretations of them here. I should also point out that Susan and Keith's son, Ellery, is currently biking with a friend from Vladivostok, Russia, to Porto, Portugal - a distance of about 10,000 miles (I'd like to see John Waters do that!). They've become quite the media sensation in Russia and are hoping to meet Vladimir Putin. You can follow their adventures here. I forgot to ask Peter if he's the one who sold them their bikes, but I think he probably is.



4) Have you ever been to a tea dance? Well I have. A tea dance, according to the bouncer standing outside the club advertising the tea dance, is a take-off on the British high tea, but instead of finger food they have, um, something else. He offered us a free peek inside - this was mid-afternoon, and the club was thumping out some glittery techno tunes into the placid P'town air - and we took him up on his offer. It was a bit disappointing, actually: no tea, no dancing, just a few clusters of people standing around on the deck overlooking the harbor. But it was a pleasant enough deck, and I'll happily go to another tea dance there if I'm ever invited.

5) There were custard rolls and sweet-potato pastries and Portuguese sweet breads and maybe one or two servings of french toast. Oh, and cinnamon rolls - one buttermilk, one regular.

6) There were also gallery openings (Kate's parents, having lived in P'town back in the 1970s, are friends with many of the artists in the area - including one woman who once shared gallery space with Norman Mailer's fourth wife!) and lovely meals and picnics on the beach and a B&B proprietor who was very, very proud of his extensive VHS (VHS!) video collection and was thrilled to have a librarian (that'd be Kate) to whom he could explain his cataloguing procedure, which relied heavily on multicolored circular stickers. Said proprietor also had a marked fondness for Abraham Lincoln, elephants, and things with ruffles.

7) Photographs were taken.

Update to previous post: Republican flies and vanishing bears

OH MY GOD. One of my flies has escaped and tried to eat President Obama! I'm so sorry, Mr. President. I should never have gone back into that utility room. I should just have left my bike and my laundry and my trash where it was. Please don't order unmanned drone strikes on my little home, President Obama. I traveled all the way to Philadelphia to vote for you! I went all the way to London for your inauguration! I'm even a vice president in your vice president's fan club! Oh god! How did this happen?

But it's not entirely my fault, see, there's this elderly couple that comes by and bickers in my basement every now and then...

---

Also, another development since last I posted: one of the bears I photographed over in Easthampton the other day has been kidnapped!

The chrome bear in front of the Eastworks building named (I'm not making this up) "Bearly There" was stolen overnight on Saturday following the unveiling of several dozen public-art bears for Easthampton's "Bearfest 2009."



If anyone has seen this bear, perhaps sticking her little chrome paw into a pot of honey or lying in wait to snatch somebody's pickinic basket, please contact the Eastampton police immediately. The alternative is simply too unbearable to contemplate. (get it?)

Here's the full story:

Lord of the Flies

Every so often, an elderly couple comes to my basement and begins bickering. Well, they're not exactly elderly - early sixties, I'd guess - and it's not exactly a basement - it's the utility room adjacent to mine that merely looks like a basement, all cobwebby and dank, although it's actually on ground level - but these are mere technicalities, and the bickering certainly is bickering.

The couple, whom I'll call Earl and Madge, are charged with removing the trash from my unit (known half-affectionately by me as The Submarine) and the three other units in my building. They back their old maroon sedan up to the building, stomp around to the back door (frequently startling me at my computer as they pass my ground-level windows or, worse, catching me at my morning exercises, mid-twirl and half-naked), and proceed to argue and accuse their way through the plastic bags of trash and recyclables that accumulate just inside the back door.

What happens to the trash after this is anyone's guess. It almost certainly gets piled into the trunk of Earl and Madge's sedan, but where they dump it, and what happens to it between the collecting and the dumping, is a mystery. If only the Valley had a Trash Museum, like the good folks of the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority have in Hartford, CT, I would have a much clearer picture of what happens to all those donut boxes, pie tins, watermelon husks, and empty bottles of Dan Akroyd wine that I carelessly toss into the appropriate receptacles.

If the Valley does build a Trash Museum, it should, like the Hartford Trash Museum, be located at a recycling plant where I could become entranced by the sight of quick-moving conveyor belts carrying plastic containers past lines of gloved and goggled men who knock things off the belt with great force and what seems like great arbitrariness. I could stare in wonder at the guy who pre-sorts the recyclables and thus has the enviable job of removing all the weird, unrecyclable items that somehow found their way into the plant - dresses, lamps, and god knows what else. When I tired of that, I could wander downstairs and take part in a low-stakes scavenger hunt in and around something called the Temple of Trash, or get one of the museum ladies to open up the compost boxes and show me a few red wigglers, little worms who are, in my experience, much more red than they are wiggly, and who really love corn cobs.

If the Valley did have a Trash Museum, it might even look something like this, but only through the lens of a low-resolution BlackBerry camera:





And then we would all go out for burritos and pie.

Sadly, however, there is no such educational facility in the immediate NoHo area, and so I am left to speculate with woeful imprecision as to what happens to my refuse after Earl and Madge have had their way with it.

Even this uncertainty would be a tolerable state of affairs compared to what has happened recently, however. For recently, within the last two weeks or so, Earl and Madge have disappeared.

I don't want to alarm anyone. This has happened at least once before, and after about three weeks and a couple of phone calls to the property management company, during which I hinted darkly at the appeal of uncollected, rotting trash for certain species of furry vermin, Earl and Madge returned, more dispirited than ever at the heaps of rubbish they had to pile into their sedan, but efficient in its removal. I remain hopeful, therefore, that their current absence will likewise prove to be temporary, but I dread what may happen in the meantime.

I got a most unwelcome glimpse of what an Earl-and-Madgeless future might look like on Saturday, which was a nice, sunny day of the kind we haven't seen in the Valley recently. Thrilled by this rare glimpse of sunshine, I raced into the utility room to retrieve my bicycle, which had only seen service twice this spring. As I swung the door open, I a thousand angry flies swarmed onto me like bees on a honeybear. Reader, I yelped. Then I lurched back, slammed the door, and made a quick scan of the immediate area to see if any stray flies had found their way into my apartment. It all looked clear.

Regrouping, I vowed that I wouldn't let a bunch of flies - no matter how numerous or demonic - deprive me of my bike ride. Sealing my lips and squinting by eyes, I swung back into the utility room, slammed the door, grabbed the bike, and swung back through the door as quickly as possible, trying to minimize the number of flies who would inevitably leak into The Submarine. I then went on a soul-soothing ride through Easthampton and took pictures of bears.




On my return, I found that at least two dozen flies had swept into my apartment with me and my bicycle, and I spent the rest of the weekend swatting flies like a maniac. No sooner would I track down one and squish it against the window than two more would begin buzzing in my light fixtures. A pleasant evening reading on the couch with Kate became a frenzied battle against a dozen buzzing flies along the entire length of the living room. I even briefly considered turning out all the lights and sitting quietly in the dark, just so I wouldn't have to hear them bumping and humming against the lamps.

I can now state with reasonable certainty that, as of this writing, the living room flies have been entirely annihilated. It hasn't been pretty, this war of extermination, and there have been times when I've done things of which I am not proud. But war is hell, my friends, and even the best among us cannot know how he will act until he finds himself right there, face-to-face with his own mortality, in the shape of two dozen tiny, crazed insects determined to nibble him to death, bite by excruciating bite.

With the return of clouds and gloomy weather today the fly problem appears to have eased. I've been able to take the trash out and do a load of laundry without inviting another swarm into my living room, but I know this is only a temporary respite. Until the cavalry arrives - in the form of two foul-tempered retirees in a maroon sedan - I will remain under siege - and I will be afraid, I will be very afraid.

Preemptive Nostalgia

Right now my head is in two places.

One of those places is Nashville, with respect to which moving plans are slowly falling into place. Kate and I are headed there in a couple of weeks to apartment hunt, and we've been getting the skinny on the best neighborhoods, etc, from my future colleagues. We're talking about what we want in an apartment, what sorts of friends we might have, where - if anywhere - we'll be able to find gay people, and whether I should contemplate doing with pie what I've been doing with french toast. We've been doing research into Nashville and Tennessee writers we might like to read; I recently bought a collection of short stories by Peter Taylor and am currently accepting further recommendations. Meanwhile, I've also been trying to figure out how to teach five hundred years of world history in one semester to a seventy-student class (the answer: teach it by focusing on seven cities whose histories encapsulate broader themes in modern history, specifically Berlin, Nanking, Luanda, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Delhi, and Mexico City), and Kate's been trying to find some sort of library-based employment (tips kindly accepted). And, of course, we've been getting ourselves all excited by watching Robert Altman's Nashville and vowing that we, too, will wear rhinestones and bouffant hairdos when we get to town, just like the folks in the movie.

But the thing about moving is that you have to leave somewhere behind before you get somewhere new. So the other place my head is is the Valley, with respect to which I'm feeling mighty nostalgic - never mind that I haven't left it yet. I always knew that my stay here would be brief, and I've done a pretty good job getting to know the place, but that's just making it all the harder to leave. Some things you just can't do anywhere else, or not just anywhere else - last Sunday's trip, with two of my favorite people, down Route 47 for some strawberry picking, followed by a visit to the Montague Bookmill (about which I've spoken before) and ice cream and cow-petting at a nearby creamery is a good example. The sun was shining, the pollen was flying, and nothing was stolen from my car during the whole time we were parked at the Bookmill, a fact unremarkable in itself except that I had accidentally left my door wide open for the almost two hours we were there (whoops). Will any of those things be possible in Nashville? Sadly, I don't think they will be.

And now I've just started reading Home Town by Tracy Kidder*, and it's making things worse. This is because it's a book about Northampton - about the people, the politics, the streets, the history, and the buildings that make up the fabric of the community, centering on the (true) story of a morally conflicted local cop named Tommy O'Connor. It's a bit dated now (most of it is set in the mid-1990s), but it captures the look of the place precisely. Observe:

Men and women, women and women, strolled arm in arm past the street musicians. Now and then Tommy would see a cellist seated on a chair outside a coffee shop, or a troupe of Bolivian panpipers on the sidewalk by the Unitarian church. ... People with that drifty academic look headed for the readings at the bookstores, and people of the avant-garde, in collarless shirts, the occasional beret, headed for the old bank building that had been recycled into an art gallery. Tommy would glance, and glance again, at the little knots of costumed youth loitering in Pulaski Park and by the Information Booth - skateboarders with their baseball caps turned backward, homeboys with baggy pants and gold chains, Goths in torn black clothes, adorned with spikey jewelry. Often, out in front of the Haymarket coffee shop, a group of Gothically attired youths sat in a circle on the sidewalk - some of Northampton's vegetarian anarchists, talking revolution and for now impeding only food traffic.

And:

No one seems in a great hurry, but many seem serious. No one dresses to say, "I'm rich." If anything, most say with their costumes, "I'm smart." Many could be blue-collar workers or perpetual graduate students, or both. Or financiers. Guessing professions on Main Street is tricky.

Reading this, I think, "Gosh, I miss Northampton!" And I realize that, even as I go about my day among the very people and streets Kidder's describing, I'm already consigning these last few weeks in Northampton to the realm of memory. It's a bit like watching something on the DVR at a slight delay - the Saturday Night Live episode you're recording is 45 minutes along, but you're still on minute 37 - or like watching a movie where the soundtrack is a split second behind the image.

Am I being a bit dramatic? Yes indeedy. But I'm being honest, too. Moving is both sad and exciting - I know this because I've done it an awful lot lately. And the weirdest time is the time just before the move, when you can see the end but can't quite get there yet. And trying to look ahead feels a bit like trying to run underwater. But what else are you gonna do?

---
* Kidder is probably best known for Mountains beyond Mountains, his biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, and The Soul of a New Machine, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the fledgling computer industry.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Sully's

This quest is really starting to take its toll.

It seemed like a harmless idea several months ago, maybe even a fun idea - to scour the Valley for great french toast and report back to you, the great big world, about what I found. Along the way I'd learn something not only about french toast (with respect to which, I may modestly assert, I'm becoming quite discerning), but also about the place I was living. It would be an excuse to peer into the many nooks and crannies into which the great, diverse masses wander in search of breakfast and coffee and conversation, a way to touch the Valley's soul. I have, it's true, been amply rewarded for my troubles. I have learned much, I have traveled widely, and I have eaten some very good french toast.

But I have also seen shit that would turn you white.

First there was my diner juggernaut, which culminated in that traumatizing visit to Kathy's. Several weeks later, I still wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about the sickly, crusty slime that I ate there. Lately, I'm even finding myself unable to take pleasure in pure, simple things - a child's laughter, a kitten drinking from a bowl of milk, a baby clinging to her mother's shoulder - without a sudden vision of Kathy's french toast flashing before my eyes (and nostrils) and reminding me of the evil of which this world is capable.

Now there's Sully's, a place I had long been dying to visit, enticed as I was by the sign on Route 9 that advertises the place as "The Home of Polish Music." "Polish music!" I thought, "This place must have great french toast! Ooh, I wonder if it's Polish french toast! Whoopee!"

Oh, gentle reader, how wrong I was.

The first thing that strikes you on entering Sully's is the distinct lack of Polish music, or, indeed, of anything that might indicate that Polish music ever has, or ever will be, performed there, much less would make its home there. The menus - blue rectangles of unlaminated construction paper dappled with stains from long-ago meals, stains so severe that they render whole sections of the menu utterly unreadable - contain not a whiff even of Polish food, other than a side of kielbasa that you can order with your meal, if you dare. There is, it's true, a photograph of a local band hanging on one wall, though there is nothing about this photograph to suggest either a) that the band is even remotely Polish, or b) that it has ever played at Sully's.

The next thing that strikes you about Sully's is how old everything is. Not good-old - like, say, Istanbul's Galata neighborhood - but bad-old, like what happened to the cheese you inadvertantly left out on the counter before you went off to Istanbul for a week. Along one wall there hang large, faded yellow banners celebrating the sporting triumphs of the Hopkins Academy soccer and softball teams between the years 1979 and 1983 (said academy, incidentally, has recently been spotted with a "For Sale" sign posted on their roadside marquee). Above the counter there hang photographs of children who are probably nearing retirement age by now. The floor is covered in ratty carpet abundantly splattered with dark stains and covered with large crumbs, some of them approaching crouton size. The menus, as already noted, are in dire need of a good disinfecting. The decor, such as it is, is a hodgepodge of knicknacks of the sort that you usually find in the "free" box after a yard sale, the centerpiece being a large bass - the fish, not the musical instrument - mounted on a plank hanging on the wall and looking for all the world like it's going to escape out the back door.



The setting, then, was less than auspicious, but still we (Kate, the poor dear, was with me) decided to make a go of it. Intrigued by a faded handwritten sign advertising potato pancakes, we ordered some, thinking that this might add a bit of Polish flavor to our breakfast. In the same spirit, I also ordered my french toast with a side of sausage, thinking that it might, in fact, be Polish sausage. Not a bit of it. The sausage was two black hockey pucks of standard breakfast sausage, and the "potato pancakes" were, in fact, hash browns molded halfheartedly into three flat, uneven discs.

And the french toast? It was certainly a notch or two above Kathy's, but that is faint praise indeed. There was no powdered sugar, the syrup was corn syrup, and overall there was little of what might be described as flavor. But that's not necessarily a bad thing - if the ambiance was anything to go by, the less flavor one encounters at Sully's, the better. It could easily have been much, much worse.



And so the search for The Perfect French Toast beats on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into my belly.

If Nashville's anything like Istanbul, we're gonna be just fine.

If you've seen the pictures, you'll know that Istanbul was gorgeous and peaceful, full of mosques and pudding shops, romantic (in the heart-going-pitter-patter sense) and Romantic (in the melancholy-ruins-of-a-lost-empire sense). If you haven't seen the pictures, I'd urge you to do so now.

When I move to Istanbul, I think I'll move to the Galata neighborhood, in the heart of what's called the New District. It's "new" in relation to the Old Town area across the bridge, where the buildings - such as the Aya Sofya (or Hagia Sofia in Greek), an Orthodox-church-turned-mosque - date back to the sixth century, the heyday of old Constantinople. The Old Town is where the big-ticket attractions are - in addition to the Aya Sofya, there's also the Ottomans' enormous Blue Mosque, the dank Byzantine underground cistern, the labyrinthine (and heavily Disneyfied) Grand Bazaar and Spice Bazaar, the sprawling Topkapı Palace, and the 16th-century Suleymaniye Mosque (largely shuttered for renovations) - and it's where most of the non-Turkish people in the city congregate, most of them, in our experience, Germans. In addition to Germans, the Old Town is full of hawkers trying to entice you into their shops and restaurants with calls of "Hello, my friend!" and "Where are from?" and "Hello yes please!" It's where old men selling fruit from rolling carts will go to great lengths to ensure that you buy 5 lira (about $3.25) worth of fruit, no matter what it is you actually ask for - ask for two bananas, and they'll throw together a bundle of five bananas, four apricots, and a handful of tasteless little green plum things to bring the total price to five lira, and before you know what happened you've bought the whole batch and a little more besides. It's where cheesy restaurants encourage you to dress up like an Ottoman (fez, silly vest, pointy shoes), puff on a water pipe, recline on a bed of decadent pillows, and watch a group of bored belly dancers. It's where you can while away an afternoon haggling theatrically with aggressively mustached men selling mass-produced jewelry and backgammon boards.


Aya Sofya


Crowds at Topkapı Palace


Ottoman kitsch in the Old Town


Five-lira fruit seller

The Old Town is where people go to find a Turkey that probably never existed. All of these things are worth experiencing, and some - such as the Aya Sofya - are simply unmissable, but one quickly discovers that the real Istanbul is to be found elsewhere.

Mind you, the New District, where Galata is, can be pretty touristy as well (more so, certainly, than the Asian side of the city, across the Bosphorus, which remained largely unexplored by us apart from an evening jaunt to a fabulous restaurant called Çiya, where we had an assortment of dishes that were stunningly delicious but whose principal ingredients were, and remain, a complete mystery). Galata is dominated by the 14th-century Galata tower, built by the Genoese when this part of Constantinople was controlled by Italian merchants. It's a decidedly Western-facing piece of architecture, one that's crawling with tourists by day but ghostly and forlorn at night.



Galata Tower

The same is true of many of the smaller buildings in the neighborhood as well, which crowd together along narrow, cobblestoned lanes that twist their way up and down the steep hill on which the tower perches. By day there are music shops and sidewalk cafes and street vendors here. Not too far away is the once-grubby-now-trendy district of Beyoğlu, with its swanky nightclubs and cafes, and the crowded Istiklal Street, which resembles a European high street with its retail chains and street performers (think Grafton Street in Dublin, Monckebergstrasse in Hamburg, or Oxford Street in London).


Istiklal Street

But at night - ah, at night Galata is deserted and still, apart from some scurrying stray cats and perhaps the odd gaggle of wandering stray Germans. The dogs, also strays, nap at the foot of the tower, where a cellist might serenade a few lonely diners. The taxis that careen through the twisty lanes have disappeared, allowing you to wander the murky streets freely, like a phantom.



Galata at night

This, then, is where I'll live when I move to Istanbul. This was actually a subject of some considerable discussion between Kate and myself, when, on a Friday ferry cruise up the Bosphorus, we spotted many lovely seaside hamlets that would also be ideal places to relocate. We concluded, however, that these would be better for suited for retirement, after it becomes difficult to navigate the hills and cobbles (and dog poop) of Galata. So: Galata now, seaside hamlet later.


The Seaside Hamlet of Rumeli Kavaği

The thing is, I'm probably not going to be moving to Istanbul soon. See, first I have to move to Nashville and put in a few years doing this professor thing, during which time I'll be able to save up enough to relocate to Galata. I figure it'll take about 2-3 years, max.

In the meantime, I expect I'll survive in Nashville just fine, provided it has the following things that Istanbul also has:

1. Pudding shops. The kind that sell real pudding, mind you. Not the meat-and-innards kind they sell in Britain, but chocolate and vanilla and something called Noah's Ark, which has nuts and raisins and orange peels and stuff. We had pudding almost every day in Istanbul, and it was the most fun I've ever had. (Though I really wish I could write that sentence without the "almost.")

2. Cheap fish sandwiches underneath the bridge where the fish is caught. Under the Galata Bridge, which connects the Old and New districts, there are restaurants grilling and selling fish, in sandwich form, that has been caught by the men crowded atop the bridge with fishing poles and empty yogurt buckets. This tradition also needs to be present in Nashville.

3. Cheap ferry journeys (ca. $1) to Asia. This one is self explanatory.

4. Whirling Dervishes. I'd be content with whirling Pentecostals in Nashville, but they need to be wearing white flowing robes. Oversized WWJD sweatshirts are not acceptable substitutes.

5. Friendly men named Mustafa who will serve you tea and tell you the story of his family's shop while he overcharges you for an antique teapot.

6. Full-service intercity buses in which an attendant comes around with coffee, tea, juice, water, and snacks, and concludes (and/or begins) the journey by dumping handfuls of dripping, lemony hand santizer into your cupped hands, so that it overflows onto your trousers.

7. At least one mosque designed by the great Ottoman architect Sinan.

8. Coffee that is somewhere between liquid and solid and tastes a bit like waking up with a hangover.

9. Shops selling and displaying baklava and Turkish Delight of every color in the rainbow.

10. Ubiquitous portraits of the founder of the republic. This person should appear not only on every single denomination of the local currency, but also on gigantic flags draped over buildings and in framed portraits in the shops and cafes. He should also look a little like a 1930s movie star.

11. A cheerful, curious, enthusiastic, sensitive, patient, and gorgeous lady to explore the city with. She should also exhibit great enthusiasm for pudding.

If Nashville has just five or six of these things, it's going to be a lovely place to live. I already know it'll have at least one. Now to do get to work researching the rest.