While cab drivers are the scum of the earth, and Turkish cab drivers no exception, occasionally you meet a good one. On the way from my hostel in Beyoğlu to my friend Ayşegül’s house in Arnavutköy, my cab got stuck in one of the monstrous traffic jams for which Istanbul is notorious. The driver spoke […]
The lifeblood of a great city is its mass transit system, be that train, bus, boat—or in Istanbul, all three. While landmarks have always been a favorite target of terrorists, there is something perhaps more insidious about those who would blast apart the very veins of a society. The past four days, I heeded official […]
The souk (pronounced “shook”) is a facet of the Middle Eastern city. From these open-air markets one may purchase all the wealth of the land: fruits and teas, cloth and spices, and a limitless supply of useless crap. Tourist tchotchkes, the same asinine t-shirts one finds in every global destination (“I Don’t Need Google: My […]
The district of Istanbul that was once Constantinople, Fatih is home to innumerable cultural treasures. The Hagia Sophia, however, is the only cultural treasure I still remember from AP Global. Though the current edifice was built in 532 CE, the Hagia Sophia was the religious epicenter of the Byzantine Empire since 360 (discounting a brief […]
Who controls the guns controls the narrative, and in Turkey today, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan controls the guns. I’m in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, where two years ago protests against the Turkish President reached a fever pitch. In the US media, which searches desperately for metanarrative (often at the expense of truth), the tendency was to lump […]
It’s a familiar sensation, if different every time: stepping off a plane into a new air, breathing in the temperature, the humidity, the vegetation or the ocean salt. I spent the night in Heraklion, enjoying one of those 19-hour layovers for which Kayak is so dependable. With the euro on the downswing and the Greek […]
From the grottoes of Rosh Hanikra to the reefs of Eilat, from the Tel Aviv beaches to the canyons of Judea, I have known the sands of Israel. I am no son of this nation and I do not intend to become one, but I’ve watched the sands of Israel fall onto my grandfather’s coffin—seen […]
Just over two weeks ago, I stood at the border with Lebanon. Today I soak my feet in the Red Sea, at the opposite end of Israel. Eilat, just across the border from Aqaba in Jordan, is the quintessential beach city: crowded with tourists, loaded with tacky attractions, and hot. Like, holy shit hot. Satan’s […]
The town of Mitzpe Ramon is perched atop the precipitous Makhtesh Ramon, an erosion crater that was formed when Africa collided with Europe. The ensuing compression of continent against continent created a ripple, a folding chain of hills and valleys down what 70,000 years later would become the State of Israel. In a country so […]
The settlements of Bethlehem are around the city. The settlements of Hebron are within the city. The City of the Ancestors is home to 600 Jews and 250,000 Palestinians; these populations are separated by laws, fences, and soldiers. For hundreds of years, the Arabs and Jews of Hebron enjoyed a relatively peaceful coexistence. But in […]
