The main question tourists ask here in Romania is: “Who was the real Dracula?” For us the question rather is: “What do people have for breakfast and where?”
In Turkey they eat tomatoes and cucumbers, a boiled egg, feta and bread. In England they serve baked beans and scrambled egg, and in France you find croissants and chocolate breads. But we looked and looked while in Romania for two weeks now and still don’t know what to eat for breakfast and where.
Walk around in any random town other than Bucharest and, really, you will have a very hard time finding a spot to have breakfast – even bakeries are hard to find. So what do we have for breakfast? After a morning in Sighisoara looking for breakfast we stopped at a place for tea, coffee and… pizza.
Have you ever been on your own wondering in a town, a city or countryside? Imagine being lost and somebody comes up to help you out, explaining your route or maybe offering some water, tea or a ride.
Imagine this feeling. You’re lost, insecure, uncertain, maybe stressed out, not knowing if you will find your way again. Unsure maybe if you will have a place to sleep tonight, and just when it gets dark, suddenly a stranger appears and helps you out.
While traveling I depend on the help of these strangers. I hitched over five thousand kilometers, and waited for strangers to pull over and to give me a ride at least eighty times during this trip.
Equally I was also dependent on strangers for a place to sleep. I never stayed at a place where I was a customer, using money to get a bed.
But I still did the accommodation thing the ‘easy way’, through Couchsurfing and other hospitality exchange networks I was able to stay with people who offer their place and hospitality for some days and nights, sometimes for more than a week.
Knowing there are always strangers who can help gives me the feeling of never actually being lost. Knowing how to trust these strangers gives me a lot of confidence: there is always someone out there who will bring you further. In fact, the more ‘independent’ I make myself, with money and taking up the consumer-role for example, the more fragile I actually may become as I may forget how to trust strangers.
Before this trip I used to think I was more independent if I would be able to take care of myself completely. It would give me confidence not to have to go and ask anyone for anything, but to have all the resources at hand myself: my map, my food, my fuel, my car, my money.
Now I know the world works better the other way. If you know how to make yourself dependent on strangers, while traveling, you have more confidence and your needs are less.
Plus, the feeling when helped by a stranger is something you may remember for a lifetime. I still remember clearly – though ten years ago – how an Irish farmer helped me out as well as two of my buddies while hiking in the South of Ireland and a storm was about to fall over us. He helped us down the hill where later in a hostel we learned a rescue-team was looking for some other people who were lost in those same hills.
Strangers can leave a deep impact on your life. Independent of how small it may be for the one offering help or giving something, for the one in need it leaves a deep positive mark.
Children playing everywhere, families in the parks eating fish that the men just caught in the Bosphorus strait, busy markets and streets, and smoke of waterpipes all around you. Istanbul is not only a very beautiful city, but foremost a very active one with a lively outdoor culture. It breathes life in every corner you find.
You don’t have to go far to discover this, to sense the Istanbul atmosphere. Its people are very alive pretty much everywhere. Within a minute that I walk out of the door of my new place I can easily find someone smiling, a shopkeeper saying hello to me or people speaking to each other. Children look very happy all the time and sometimes don’t stop laughing; so full of life they are.
Although things are not easy for all living here, the Istanbul atmosphere enables most to enjoy their lives and that of others fully. It is an incredible place with real life happening all over, people surviving from as little they have, and a touch of magic if you look deeper.
An easily accessible place with a lot of activity and magic is the Bosporus riverside. Here you’ll find many boats, people fishing, families barbecuing and big waves playing at the shore with children who scream joyfull back at the splashes of the water.
As I went for a long walk along the Bosphorus sea I observed how people here experience an ordinary Sunday afternoon. I have seen them taking one of the dozen ferries, relaxing in a small harbor and fishing all over the shore, barbecuing their fresly caught fish, and sitting on one of the many terrasses, enjoying their waterpipes, having some fruit and playing chess or backgammon.
Though, I am taking things fairly easy here as it is such a huge place that I can easily get lost and find myself too overcrowded with input and impulses. There is enough to do and extremely a lot to explore. No need to hurry at all, Istanbul has so amazingly much to offer that it would be a waste to race through it. Let’s first breath it.
