flying to Byzantium

This afternoon, I am off to Istanbul (not Constantinople, although I really think we should all go back to referring to it as Byzantium - Romans and Turks be damned!) for a four day vacation with Ari and Meredith. I'm terribly excited, as you might be able to imagine, to be somewhere totally unfamiliar, and foreign, and almost exotic. It's a city that straddles two continents, contained within it thousands of years of history, mystery, magic, and enchantment.

My brother has spent a lot of the last year, as his role of an Asian Studies major, lecturing my family and me on the pitfalls and nuances of Orientalism and Occidentalism, warning and rebuking us for falling into ethnocentric or anachronistic sterotypes. But I just can't help it. I mean, come on! Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in Istanbul - and that's certainly a prime piece of anachronistic occidentalist literature if I've ever read one. There is something incredibly exciting in the foreign, in the exotic. I'm just concerned that we'll get there and realize Turkey is just Israel-lite.

Adam has been telling me not to smuggle opium back into Israel. My first response was, "We've already sewn the pockets into Ari's jacket, so it's a little late for that." Then I moved onto some line about having the Afula mafia put a price on my head if I don't deliver. Now he's joking that if we do that, we'll end up in a Turkish jail, which isn't a Turkish delight. To which I added, "On a moonlit night." I'm not sure if he got the They Might Be Giants reference. (On a sad, side note, I lost a rather steep bet to Meredith when she proved to me that TMBG did not in fact write Istanbul [Not Constantinople]. It's a cover. Who knew? Had you ever heard any other band perform it?)

Before I go, I leave you with a line from something that has been on the forefront of my mind these past few days, and which I encourage you to read in its entirety, Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium:

Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.