AFTER-TRAVEL REFLECTION & CREATION

A week ago today I was on a flight from Istanbul to Toronto, having flown out of Tabriz (in northwestern Iran) two days earlier. In my checked bags I had a kilo of honey, some dried apricots, halvah, a selection of sweets from Yazd, sour pomegranate fruit leather (called robb in Iran), fresh pistachios, a second-hand Farsi-language cookbook, and a bundle of small kilims, as well as my well-worn clothing. My other luggage weighed next to nothing physically, but was a rich load: memories, emotions, early understandings, jam-packed notebooks, and digital photos.

I’ve been thinking about this process of travel, memory, and story. People have different ways of remembering. Mine tend to be visual: I have pictures in my mind after a trip. They’re not so much of actual events. Instead they are images generated by my thoughts about events or people or places. I would call them secondary images of events. At the same time I also have hundreds of photos, moments preserved, you could call them.

Because my memory works with past experiences, digesting and processing them in sometimes surprising ways, in the weeks right after a trip I like to keep that set of mental pictures uninfluenced by the “reality” of the photos I have taken. Once that digesting and processing is well underway, many memories have reshaped themselves as stories or vignettes that are informative or tell a small story in themselves.

When I then look at the photos I often notice the gaps between my (processed) “memories” and what I see in the details of the shots. The differences between them interest me. Sometimes they are due to the fact that I failed to notice certain elements of a scene, perhaps because I was caught up with other details, or with an emotional context that kept my focus elsewhere. Sometimes the differences are because I have subconsciously “forgotten” inconvenient, or ugly or uncomfortable details…

At the moment I am still early on in the digesting process. Stories and cross-connections, ideas about place and people, food and attitudes, are still taking shape, and will be for the next month or two. I’ll try to help that process along by doing recipe work. I find that as I draft recipes and shop and prep and cook, I often become more sure about the importance of particular details, or I get a flash of memory or insight.

This is why I am such a believer in developing and testing my recipes on my own to start with. It leaves me with a free head and imagination…so that unbidden thoughts can surface freely.

All of this probably sounds rather abstract and perhaps unreliable or fabulist to you. After all, am I not, in writing cookbooks, supposed to be transmitting information rather than invention?

Well, yes and no. I am not a journalist, digging out “the truth” in a factual literal sense. Yes I want to get the recipes right and to give them full honour and respect. But there are other truths that story-telling and imaginative reconstruction and reflection can elucidate. The aha! as I realise what anxiety or concern lay behind a comment someone made to me, may take me weeks to arrive at. But when I am able to understand the human, emotional, and social dimensions of a situation, then I think both the story-telling and the recipes gain strength and reliabilty of a deeper kind.

I hope that those of you who have had the stamina to read this far can make sense of what I am trying to say. I’ve been thinking about the connections between the “facts” on the ground, be they in Burma or Georgia or Iran, and the emotional reactions I feel or sense in a place. I admit that they are complicated.

It’s here, in the human complexities of place and perception, that I find the juiciest excitement and the largest potential for creative understanding. The trick is to not worry and to not force the pace. Sometimes at this stage right after a trip I begin to get impatient. I want to be further along in synthesizing my understanding. But things take the time they take.

And so, in the meantime, I plan to try making Tabrizi kofta, and sangak (bread baked on a bed of pebbles) and dizi, and more. I’m trusting that the same process of subconscious story-shaping that has happened before, most recently with the Burma book, will take over and allow me to create a rich and reliable set of stories and recipes in this new book of mine.

All I need is some tolerance and understanding from friends and family as I look or act a little dazed or distracted…

A BEGINNER'S VIEW OF ISTANBUL

A rather embarrassing number of weeks have passed since I last posted here. No excuses really. But I’m now in Istanbul, rather dazed by the lovely complexities of the city. And to anticipate your questions: no I have not yet been to see the Hagia Sophia (which I did see the only other time I visited Istanbul, long ago in 1982); nor any of the offerings in the Istanbul Biennal; nor much else except outdoor walking, ferry, bus, and light rail routes, and small restaurants of various kinds.

First to the transport: Where I live, in downtown Toronto, a large rich city of nearly 3 million, we have not built a subway line for a long time, and have only added a few tram/streetcar lines. In Istanbul, a large very complicated terrain loaded with historical obstacles, they’ve gone from 45 km of track to 145 or so and are headed for 400 km by 2020. Impressive. And it shows. I mean yes the traffic is snarly, but there is a dizzying number of transit options to cope with people’s need to move up and down hills and over large stretches of water. All of it can be done using a prepaid card, like the Oyster card of London or the Octopus card of HongKong, that gets scanned each time you enter a new mode of transport. It’s all much smoother-running because of the easy scanning: no tokens, no tickets…

Just to give you an idea: I am staying in an airbnb not far from Taksim Square (of May demos fame). To get to, say, the main tourist places or to the ferries, I walk up to Taksim, then take the funicular (underground cable car) down the hill to Kabatas, then get straight onto the tram, which carries me along the shore (past two or three huge cruise ships, big boxy apartment-buildings on the water) and over the new Galata bridge. From there I can walk two minutes and catch a ferry across the Sea of Marmara to Kadikoy, on the Asian side, a fifteen or twenty minute trip. And there, as I had been told before I left, is a lively market neighbourhood, fabulous walking streets and beautiful food scenes all around.

So that’s where I went yesterday nooontime (after spending the morning at the consulate of Iran, waiting, then getting instructions and forms, and then waiting again to hand everything back in; they tell me the visa will be delivered on Monday morning).

I’d been over to Kadikoy the previous day for a wander around, in company with an immersethrough friend B who happened to be in Istanbul for the first two days I was here. We rambled following our noses, choosing the most interesting looking streets, and got lost without knowing we were lost (or caring).

Some of the fish in the market – Jake Tilson looked at the photo and says they are a kind of bonito – had their gilled pulled out and kind of separated so that they looked like dark-cherry-coloured flowers, very beautiful in a massed display. There were fresh hamsi (anchovies) all silver gleaming, and other fish I know nothing about and could only admire for their beauty. And there were ripe figs, large and small, as well as pale to deeper red pomegranates, always with a few broken open to show their juicy promise. Several shops had heads of leaf lettuce arranged in rows, each topped by a small bundle of red radishes, like a small bouquet, the red an almost shocking contrast to the bright green.

In the midst of all the plenty was an enticing-looking bookshop full of books in Turkish with beautiful leather bindings. Of course we went in to look. And when we asked, Yes, down a steep flight of stairs were books in English and French and more in Turkish. I found a Virago edition of a fantastical novel by Naomi Mitchison called Travel Light in which Constantinople plays a small role. Later, as we found our way back to the ferry again, I wondered out loud if I could find my way back to the bookstore again.

That was two days ago. When we went back to Kadikoy yesterday, though all the same market loveliness was on display, we were less observant, for we were on a mission to find Musa’s restaurant Ciya. We also wanted to spot a lachmacun place called Halil that the deeply knowledgeable Robyn Eckhardt of Eating Asia had told me about. After asking a couple of people, we found ourselves on a street we recognised from the day before. First we found Halil, and then, right opposite the bookstore – aha! – was Ciya.

We feasted at Ciya (I hadn’t eaten before leaping out the door for my visa and was starving). And it was like the best kind of home cooking, with layers of flavour and care, that’s the only way I can describe it. Of course I am too unknowledgeable about Turkish cuisine to tell you in detail, but the lamb with quince was wonderful, the kibbeh was perfect, the wheat berry and cheese stuffing in the vine leaves was fresh on the tongue… I am hoping to get back there, perhaps on one of the evenings I have on my way through after Iran… (And I have promised myself a visit to Halil too.)

After the luck of my first two days in Istanbul, today was more bumpy. I looked up a resto I wanted to try, Google sent me to a strange suburban location, but so what? I thought. There's light rail to nearby. In fact, no, there's not, because it has been torn up and is being replaced with a metro line. Meantime, take a bus said the man. I did, but it was very far, and then it turned out that Google had sent me to the right street address, but in a different quarter, not the right one. I was miles from where I wanted to be. I should have phoned first, of course, to check. But it wasn't wasted time, I said to myself firmly as I stood in a crowded bus hoping I was headed the right way on the return. I got to see parts of the city I'd never have been to, and to see how hard life is for loner-distance commuters.

All of this reminds me of the not-knowingness of travel. I have spent most of my travel time recently in Burma and Thailand. And while Burma was a layered puzzle that I have only barely begun to get familiar with, I did at least have some clue by the time I’d finished work on my book.

In Turkey, and even more so in the next weeks in Iran, I am again starting from scratch, and in a more visibly complex environment. At least here, thanks to Ataturk, who moved Turkish into a western alphabet, I can read the street signs and sound out other signs to try to make sense of them (taksi, bufe, etc). But in Iran I will be as illiterate as I was in Burma at the start.

That illiteracy forces me to use other cues, to be observant of details. You might almost say it forces me back into fuller awarenes. Just as, on that first trip to Kadikoy I noticed lots of market details because I was tuning in to what was before me, while on the second, as a hostage to a map and directions and a fixed goal, I noticed very little, so the illiterate is alert to more, whereas, when reading is an option, we tend to not see much beyond the signage.

Do I revel in my ignorance and the not-knowingness of my situational illiteracy? Yes, in many ways I do. It’s humbling (never a bad thing) and I like it as a reminder of how much I usually fail to notice. I always hope I’ll stay attuned to that reminder, and keep trying to tune in, even when I am in familiar surroundings. But mindfulness is easier to talk about than it is to practise, don’t you find?

HEADING TOWARD NEW HORIZONS

Once more I’ve left a long-ish gap between posts. It’s strange the rhythm of writing and communication of ideas in general. Sometimes I feel rich with all that I want to explore in writing. Other times my concentration gets scattered by other projects. That’s what has happened this week, in part. I have been assigned one small entry in what will be a large comprehensive volume from the Oxford University Press in the US called The Oxford Companion to Sweets. Like everyone else who is involved in writing one or more entries, as I imagine it, I’m finding it slow-going, and frustrating too, for my word limit is under 1000 words, and in that I am supposed to talk about Southeast Asian sweets.

I’m not here to rant about that, just trying to let you know what I have been cluttered with. I’ve now got a good draft written. It is always interesting to be forced into taking a fresh perspective on a region or a cuisine. In writing this I’ve had to characterise the general approach to sweets and also to their evolution. Influences include of course trade, colonisation, conquest, immigration, etc. But all I can do is skim over it all, while tryig to give specifics about sweets in each of the countries. It’s a bit of a grind. And of course not paid, I mean, the pay is under $50…

So why do it? Well, I like a challenge, and I am of course learning as I think through it all and do research.

But I’ll be glad when it’s done. My deadline, the one I’m setting for myself, is the end of this week, so that the Labour Day weekend can be clear of deadlines and I can start look forward to the longhouse event put on by Molly O’Neill on September 6 to 8 in Renselaarville, and after that the kneadingconferencewest in the Skagit Valley in northern Washington state (September 12-14). It’s time to think about packing and cooler weather, and planning out the baking schedule for the Kneading Conference.

In the meantime I have been waiting to hear about my visa for a trip to Iran in October. I heard from the agency ten days ago that they expected to get word on my application by the middle of last week. And then finally two days ago I heard it was approved. Yes!! The deal is that with the visa application is approved in principle, I fly to Istanbul, hand my passport in to the Iranian consulate, and pick it up three working days later. And from there I can fly directly to Iran, a short-ish hop.

I have now booked flights to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines and have five days booked at a centrally located air bnb in Istanbul. So pleasing to have a few things sorted out.

I really hope this Iran trip can work, and not get derailed. The massive sabre-rattling that is going on in the west about Syria can only be terrifying to ordinary people trying to live their lives in Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Iran, and southern Turkey. They become statistics, or numbers, in the headlines, rather than individuals with culture, education, humanity. And of course Iran has now become a kind of unnuanced idea of threat to the US and I am sad to say to Canada too.

In the meantime, I have found advice on how to deal with clothing requirements in Iran. I need one or two manteau, a coat-length long-sleeved garment. And I need some headscarves and long pants and comfortable shoes. It all seems very manageable.

And so like any other trip or project, this one breaks down into the practical details and preparation, and vast imaginings and endless reading…  

FRESH EYES IN ISTANBUL AND BEYOND...

Once again I’m teetering on the brink of the known-to-me world. I’m in the airport in Toronto, waiting for my Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul. I’ll have an overnight and a morning and then will head back to the airport to catch a flight to Tbilisi. It all feels so exciting.

But I am out of touch. To most people these days who travel at all, Turkey and Georgia seem fairly ordinary, an extension of Europe. They skype and FB and tweet about being here or there, and none of it seems momentous or difficult.

After years of travels to Burma for my BURMA book, a place where there was no ATM machine or accessible-to-me cel phone to the outside world, and very limited internet access, I feel I’ve jumped into a new generation of travel. I’m not used to modernity in travel and feel like an old-fashioned person catapulted into a new travel generation. All this has happened in the last five or six years…

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The above was written yesterday, in Toronto. Now I’m in the lounge in Istanbul airport, sipping a very good double espresso and waiting until it’s time to head to the gate for my flight to Tiflis, as Tbilisi is known in Turkish.

Yesterday’s arrival here was a short course in the international-hub nature of Istanbul, a real wow. This is the gateway to Central Asia and also has a foot, and more, firmly in Europe. It’s an enticing combo. But to go back to the arrivals, as a Canadian I needed to get a visa. There are 37 countries listed as needing a visa, including Norway, USA, Yemen…an eclectic list. But Sweden and France get a by, and so does Brazil. It cost me $60 and is a ninety day multiple entry visa, which will allow me to come back through here on May 1.

After the visa line came the passport control, divided into Turkish and “all other countries” lines, snaking through barriers. The line moved very quickly, at a continuous walking pace, and was a snapshot of the people that stream into this country these days. There was a whole batch of Turcomen women, in long dresses, all rich blues and wine-reds with small-flower patterns and embroidered borders. They had the gold and steel teeth of the ex-USSR, and headscarves that bared the beautiful bone structure of their faces as well as their ears, all with gold earrings. Then there were Russian speakers, the women in lipstick and tight trousers or elegant skirts with patterned stockings, the men tall and imposing. Among these were scattered Europeans, mostly older prosperous looking couples from Norway, France, Germany. And then of course there were a lot of people I could only guess at.

The passport control was quick and amiable, and then the rest was easy: a taxi to my small hotel, and I was done.

The rainy streets last night were full of hurrying people, stopping in to the green-grocer for green almonds (slightly furry little green ovals) or fresh fruit (so much on display) or tomatoes, or into the butcher for a cut of meat for the night. The woman who cleans the hotel I was at took me in hand and pointed out several small fish restaurants nearby as she was on her way home from work. I picked the liveliest looking one. Grilled sea bream was my choice of main. It came with half a lemon for squeezing on. And I ordered a salad. It was large, enormous and beautiful in a glass bowl and was not tossed but left for me to toss or taste as I wished. It had everything in it: parsley, basil, dill, and tomatoes, grated carrot, cabbage of two colours, and a little shredded lettuce, as well as slices of cucumber and carrot at the side. The server drizzled on olive oil and pomegranate syrup and then as I ate I squeezed on lemon juice and added a little salt.

I like eating alone in a new place. It gives time to reflect, and to digest - pardon the pun – all those first impressions, or at least some of them. I know I’ll forget this newness as I return here on more trips into the region. Certain things, from airport layout to how taxis work, become habitual and we cease to notice them. This first beginner’s mind time is precious.

And so today in the pouring rain I walked the few blocks to look at the Sea of Marmora, grey in the dim light, and yet still magical as an idea… I don’t want to lose the sense of magic that these places steeped in myth and history - yet very much alive and modern right now - evoke in me.

I guess my version of a traveller’s prayer is, “let me never take anything for granted, and may I always have a sense of wonder”.