A Teacher Learns a Lesson in Istanbul

I’m not a fast learner. It pains me to say that, but it’s true. I think I can admit it because I know that the issue isn’t just down to, or not exclusively down to, me being a dumbass. I grew up in a big redneck family where people kept dying in extravagant ways, and in an apocalyptic religion to boot. How does this affect one’s ability to learn new things? Well, learning is really a matter of patience. It takes time and focus, and the more focus you can apply, the less time it takes. When you are steeped in the notion that you might die at any second and if you don’t Jesus will return and destroy the world, you don’t really develop a sense that you have either time or the leisure to relax and be present. You need to be getting on with whatever you wanted to do before everything blinks out of existence forever. Then you grow up and nothing happens, and existence still exists and you’re like, “Shit, I wish I knew how to balance a checkbook.” Then you start figuring shit out the hard way, the whole time, still half suspecting that we will all be cast into a lake of fire before you learn how to use Excel. Basically, you have to learn to learn and you can’t do that until you can internalize the idea that you and/or the world will be here in an hour or so.

And I say this because I don’t want to imply that I was any smarter than Matt, the teacher from Michigan, who I’d met at a hostel in Istanbul and started palling around with as I toured the city. But I did have better instincts. For all that my upbringing around the rednecks of Southern Missouri had screwed up my sense of mortality, they had given me an excellent radar for when a sketchy motherfucker is trying to talk you into something just as sketchy as they are. Matt, being a History teacher from an upper middle class suburb of Detroit, was a slightly more trusting soul. Matt was young and single and just a few years into his profession, but he had already developed a project that he was very proud of. Every summer, he would use the months that educators get off each year to travel. Then when he returned in the fall, he would have turned the trip and all the photos he had taken while abroad into a multimedia presentation for that year’s class on whatever region he’d travelled to. Last year’s class had been treated to photo essay on Myanmar and the year before that had received one on Germany. The coming year would be getting Turkey.

Given that Matt was so well traveled and that I was a bumpkin on my second trip to anywhere outside the country, you would wonder why he didn’t see it coming, while I was the one who was like, “Yeah, you go ahead, I’ll keep watch.” But again, Ozark cousins and their Meth start-ups can really be a crash course in detecting bullshit.

Matt and I had left the hostel in the morning with a plan to hit the Basilica Cistern and then find some street food. It was a solid plan. Big must-see tourist attraction steeped in ancient history and then something greasy from a guy who was cooking dubious meat over a guttering sterno. This is how international travel is done. Plus, Matt had been in Istanbul for a couple of days before I arrived and he seemed to know the food carts that were both most tasty and least likely to cause intestinal distress, much. We were staying in the European section, down the hill from the Hagia Sofia, close to the water. In fact, there was a small café on the roof of our hostel where we could sit and drink a local beer called Efes and watch boats drift through the Bosporus. Sitting up there, watching the Eastern side of the city glow in the setting sun was where I first got to know Matt.

Matt was just a tad shorter than me and just that much wider, as well as being blonder and more open faced. He exuded eager curiosity. I have always been a little self-conscious about coming off as guarded, if not downright brooding. It’s something I think I mastered as I got older, but in my twenties, I could still seem darkly closed off whether I intended to or not. But Matt hadn’t hesitated at all. I walked into the six-bed room we would end up sharing with a pair of Australian girls, and he said, “Hi! I’m Matt.” and put out his hand and started asking me questions in a way that was all Midwest nice and not one ounce nosy or intrusive.

Two mornings later we found ourselves in a white stucco alleyway between buildings that had likely been there when the Vikings came to make their fortune guarding the Byzantine Emperors and there was a squat man with a thick salt and pepper mustache making wild hand gestures with a wad of cash. He had approached us as we made our way along the cobblestones, heading to The Cistern, saying something low and confidential as he got closer. He was saying “Cash exchange? Cash exchange?” I was not even an experienced enough traveler to know what the words “cash exchange” referred to. I just saw someone skulking in an Ozark cousin way and was like, “this guy wants us to do something dumb.” In that spirit, I was going to walk right past with a head shake. But Matt stopped and asked how much.

I stood there listening to them haggle and pieced together that this was about exchanging American money for Turkish Lira. Matt had complained to me that the exchange rate at the airport had been gouging and that he was dreading having to get more local currency, which he would need to do soon. I didn’t let on that I had no clue what constituted a reasonable rate, in Turkey or anywhere else in the big old world, and so I had nodded along and made the faces that I thought someone who had a permanently reserved seat on the Concorde would make. Now here we were with the answer to Matt’s prayers having walked right up to us on the street.

Matt liked what he was hearing, so he reached down and unzipped his money belt. That was when the guy reached out and grabbed Matt’s arm. He nodded toward the alleyway and said, “No! No! Not legal. Not Legal.” When he said, “Not legal.” I instinctively looked around to see if I had any family members nearby.

Matt looked at me and said, “Do you need to exchange any money?”

I said, “No, but I will stay where I can see you and the street and just keep an eye out.”

Matt looked like the notion that it would be a good idea for someone to be watching for the cops and keeping an eye on the person he was doing an illegal transaction with was an innovation on par with the computer chip. “Good idea!” 

In part, I was keeping an eye out for Matt, but I also didn’t want to be too near something that felt like a terrible idea. But there were two of us and we each had nearly a foot on the little mustachioed man, a man who gave off zero sense of menace or potential violence. I just had an instinct.

Here’s where the con came in. Matt told the guy how much he wanted and pulled that amount out of his money belt. The guy pulled out the corresponding amount in Turkish Lira and counted it in front of Matt. Then they made the exchange. When the Lira was in Matt’s hand and he went to look at it, the man suddenly reached out and took it back and made a gesture for Matt to put it into his money belt, putting his hand under his shirt, miming the place where Matt was wearing the belt. Then he handed the wad of bills back to Matt and when Matt didn’t immediately put it in his money belt, mustache man went through the same pantomime, taking the wad back and putting it under his shirt, only this time, more emphatically and saying over and over, “Not Legal! Not Legal!” He did this a few times, throwing in frantic glances past Matt’s shoulder as if he were sure that the police would be pulling into the alley in a SWAT van at any second. Finally, Matt put the money away with a speed that the man approved of. Then he nodded to us, shook Matt’s hand and disappeared in a side alley that branched off the side alley we were in.

The Cistern was remarkable. I recommend seeing it if you ever get the chance. I would like to go back myself, because my own memory of it is very much overshadowed by the moment when we returned to the hostel and Matt, finally feeling at home to open up his money belt and inspect his ill-gotten gains, realized that he’d been had. At some point in all the hand gestures and looking around and exclamations of “Not Legal” the mustache man had swapped the bundle of Turkish Lira for a fistful of Iranian Rials. Iranian Rials are worthless. Matt sat there staring at the crumpled bills, realizing that he was basically holding a handful of pennies, and opened and closed his mouth in stunned horror. When he was finally able to speak, it was in a mumble of shame and disbelief and what he said was that he had lost over $350. That was a lot of money for a teacher in 1999. It’s a lot of money for me, right now.

I took Matt up to the café bar and bought him an Efes and then a couple more. We sat in silence and stared out at the boats in the harbor and the fading light on the bridge. My instincts had served me better than Matt’s experience had served him, but it didn’t seem like the time to bring it up.