Istanbul Hostel

Hosteling is great for the people that you meet.  Sitting out one night on the Hostel porch, I met quite a few, and we stayed up until 4 in the morning talking about art, politics, boyfriends, Belagiano!, music, family.  I chose to spend another night with them, a much more quiet night, and we took these pictures. 

Selim, a Turkish man who hates Syria, is kind of an adopted grandfather around the hostel.  He sits on the weekends and drinks Efes with the youngsters.  He loves to talk about belagiano, or affection and touching.  He would see couples in the street and yell, “belagiano!”, and then recount the same story—he once loved a women, forty years ago, and she went away, and he cry, cry, cry for belagiano.  He is not a man afraid to cry; we were talking about Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, apparently some of his favorites, and I let him listen to my ipod.  I played Buckets of Rain for him.  He wiped tears from his face for several minutes.  I like Selim.

Delphine is French, and very quiet spoken with a lot of intelligent things to say.  She turned me on to a few new artists. She is herself a fabric artist who makes large, monumental marionette-like dolls.  We sat each night for hours, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence, laughing about this and that.  She is quietly sarcastic, and I really enjoyed her. 

Simon is an Australian who found his jeans in a freezer in the Ukraine.  It took him 6 days to hitchhike from Belgium to Istanbul.  He is a communist with a love of Reaganomics.  He’s young and impassioned, and he reminds me of that bloke from Notting Hill, who sleeps all day and parties all night.