I got an email from Pelin Tufekci last night, a lovely young lady I met while living in Istanbul, Turkey. It is almost five years to the day that I arrived in Istanbul after a twenty-four-hour bus ride from Athens. How the heck did I end up all alone on a bus to a city I had never been to be greeted by people I didn’t know? We need to rewind about four months for that answer.
A little over a year after graduating from college, I found myself living in beautiful Santa Barbara, more depressed and unsure about my future than ever before. The long hours working the restaurant scene and late nights partying were taking a toll, and something had to change. I had to change. I got the travel bug after spending a semester in Sydney in college and knew that I still wanted to travel before I settled into a career and family. This was as good a time as ever: I had money in the bank, a dead-end job, a dead-end social life, and a dead-end relationship with a guy who couldn’t commit. I had heard glorious stories of people “finding themselves” on great journeys with nothing but a backpack and passport, and was so lost and disenchanted that I was willing to risk my safety and security if it meant getting even a glimpse into the “myself” that I was desperate to know. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I booked myself on a roundtrip flight from Los Angeles to London, departing November 4, 2003 and returning June 8, 2004. Seven months, home in time for my mom’s birthday, a delightful gift for any worried mother.
I spent the first five weeks of the trip in Spain and Portugal and then flew to Athens. Surely other posts will weave in these stories, but we must get back to Istanbul, Constantinople. After a great time in Barcelona, I had officially found my groove. This was what traveling was all about: new exciting people from across the globe, great food, culture, my own agenda, adventure. Yes, yes, yes! I had high hopes for Greece, the only notable lineage in my family tree (my last name, Macres, is the Greek word for long, given to my great grandfather when he came to the U.S. from Crete and was forced to change our name from Batestatos … hmmm … Camille Batestatos … interesting). I dreamed of island-hopping with fine young Greek men, lying on deserted beaches while being fed Gyros and drinking Ouzo, and learning of my Greek heritage.
