East Meets West

Devon visited the Blue Mosque with his father. // © 2009 Jesus Solana

Devon, age 18, New Jersey.
I took my favorite vacation with my father to Istanbul, Turkey. My dad received an invitation to write a report on exploring Turkey with his son, so I had the rare opportunity to experience the country through the eyes of a 10-year-old. I was incredibly excited about the trip, since the only knowledge I possessed about Turkey at that age was its vague connection with lunch meat.

The 14-hour plane ride was extremely disorienting and, as I disembarked, I felt as though I had entered another world. My father and I were met by a mustachioed cab driver who kept folding down more and more seats as he picked up more and more passengers on the way to our hotel. When we arrived, there were about 12 other people crammed inside his tiny van.

What stood out in my mind about Istanbul were the cats. I took off my shoes and wandered through the Blue Mosque and I took a ferry across the Bosphorus, but all of my pictures in Istanbul were of blurry out-of-focus cats, desperately running away from me as I tried to pet them.

On the night of the fourth day, I purchased a variety of glass “evil eyes” at the bazaar. Evil eyes are the most popular trinkets sold to tourists in Istanbul. They are circles of blue glass that protect the wearer from evil, and I was covered in them from head to toe by the end of my trip. They are all lost now, but I still have the pictures and the memories of Istanbul. It was my first brush with international travel but, hopefully, not my last.