PLOV 1 - Departure, Big Truck YES
PLOV
Good morning, friends, and welcome to PLOV--the place where I, Bernard Soubry, wake up at four-thirty and listen to selected excerpts from old episodes of The West Wing Weekly in an attempt to lull myself back to jetlag-gruyèred sleep. It's been an interesting twenty-four hours.
I'm in a hotel overlooking the main road in Topkapi, typing away with the stereophonic call to prayer in the background, twelve hours or so before my flight to Samarkand.
In Samarkand: the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Migratory Species and Wild Animals. Going there as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, this fizzing, ever-changing team of nerds who type very fast to shape extremely technical UN negotiations into daily two-page summaries.
I do not yet know very much about migratory species; I expect I'll learn a lot more in the coming days. I expect I will be writing very fast. I will be hunting people down in conference centres to get their secret opinions on protecting vulnerable animals. I will, undoubtedly, be eating many different kinds of plov.
These are all sensible reasons to go to Samarkand. The less-sensible reason is there, too. The unmentionable one. The--well, just--hand-flittering, eyes-bulging, arms-waving-around--Uzbekistan!
Oh, hi, Bernard, we notice you're a human in love with the world; what would you say to travelling to a double-landlocked country that housed some of the oldest recorded mercantile civilizations in the world, survived a Soviet hegemony, and is the site of the still-ongoing worst ecological disaster in Asia? You might get to see some people play polo with a dead goat. We'll pay for your plane ticket.
So, yes, here I am. Here we both are, reader. But none of this has happened yet.
Here is what has happened: I have said goodbye to my roommate in the airport lounge. I have drooled on a stranger as I sleep-watched Batman Begins three times from window seat 28A (sorry, friend). I have been welcomed to Istanbul many different times by many different kindly older gentlemen. After being detained by Turkish immigration and asked to flip my hair part several times for identification purposes, I gotten the message that I should probably book a haircut when I come back.
I have sat at baggage claim only to remember that I only came here with one bag. (One bag! This is either going to be amazing or profoundly regrettable.)
I have taken some lira out of an ATM only to turn around and see a truck pull an entire car-sized garbage iceberg containment unit out of the ground. And then shared a look with a little boy that hit the primordial little boy sub-frequencies of big truck YES.
I have tried to very discreetly look at my map to figure out which of the three enormous domes around me belonged to the Hagia Sophia, and felt very much ashamed.
I have transubstantiated this shame into hunger. I have shared three kinds of cooked aubergine, and two kinds of pistachio-based dessert, and one extremely good apple tea with good travel companions. And six blessedly jetlag-unaffected hours of sleep later, I have awoken with a day in a city I don't know and the promise of a whole new country by the next sunrise.
And you! You have come here of your own free will! I'm grateful--so very grateful--for the gift of your attention, and the permission and pressure that it's going to bring to this adventure. I've written two of these newsletters before, and what I've mostly noticed is that they are a guard against my own laziness--the voice in my head that says sleep in, or you're disoriented, watch Youtube videos of carpenters. No! There are people watching, and they want to hear about this place you're in. You get to do this, so part of what you give back is some form of truthful confession of the experience. It's a contract, the collective subscriber-ship of the newsletter. Thank you for signing on to it.
For my part, here's what I promise: every day, five hundred words and at least one photograph. Experience tells me that the newsletters get weirder as time goes on and sleep gets more scarce. That's OK; we welcome weirdness. We welcome tired eyes.
I'm happy to have you read these however you want. Maybe don't read them as they come in! Maybe just put them in a little folder named PLOV, or put a filter on them, and wait until you're ready to do a whole binge-read. Maybe put them on an e-reader and look at them in the bath. No matter what, I'll be here, happy to write, happy to be read.
Tomorrow, this time, I will be in Tashkent. But for now: my jet-lagged body needs to be taught that it's breakfast time. My feet are itching to find the Bosphorous. My eyes are on the lookout for garbage can icebergs, for the crosscultural generational magic of big truck, big truck YES.
Talk soon.
B
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