A Room with a View (Istanbul, Part 4)

Photo: Hotel Les Ottomans, Istanbul

People sometimes ask the Materialist if working at CNT has changed the way she travels. The answer, she is happy to report, is yes.

The Materialist, as noted before, has always been a frugal traveler-about certain things, that is. In fact, it wasn't until the Materialist was in her late 20s that she'd ever stayed at a hotel where the rooms were more than $150 a night; for most of her life, she considered a Red Roof Inn the height of sophistication. The Materialist never saw the point of spending money on a hotel room that she could be spending on, well, material objects. So you checked into a room, you stayed a night, and then you left, right? Wasn't one room as good as another? (The Materialist can hardly believe her own stupidity.)

But the Materialist can also pinpoint the exact moment when she decided that yes, she did care about accommodations, and much more than she'd previously thought. It was almost three years ago, and the Materialist, who'd been living for a month in Andalusia, quietly having a halfhearted nervous breakdown among the almond groves, went to Madrid for a couple of nights before heading back to New York. Now, at the time, the Materialist was unemployed. This, along with the fact that she didn't yet work at CNT and must therefore be excused from not knowing any better, led her to choose Casa M., a small, family-run B&B up the street from the Prado that she found on the internet (how, the Materialist can't even remember).

The Gold Coast (Istanbul, Part 2)

On her flight from London to Istanbul, the Materialist watched with bemusement a certain type of traveler who has always remained something of a puzzle to her-the procrastinator. Travel procrastinators are the sort of people who board the plane with a thick brick of a guidebook in hand and good intentions, only to promptly fall asleep the second they sit down. An hour before touchdown, they wake, frazzle-haired and gummy-eyed, whereupon they start frantically paging through their Lonely Planet or Rough Guide, turning their last minutes into a frenzy of folding down corners and highlighting in a desperate attempt to get some sort of handle on the city in which they're about to find themselves.

The Materialist is not this kind of traveler. Nor, should it be said, are any of her colleagues at CNT, whose months-long planning and scheming before even the most minor of trips is either admirable or irritating, depending on how you see it. So, in true CNT fashion, the Materialist several months ago wandered into her colleague Kevin's office to (as she sometimes does) shoot the breeze, complain, and, most important, ask him if he had any tips about Istanbul, specifically, about the Grand Bazaar.

Kevin, whose feelings for Istanbul mirror the ones the Materialist has for Tokyo-that is, love, admiration, wonder, and not a little possessiveness-frowned. It turns out that he was working on an exhaustive piece in which he would decode the Grand Bazaar, and was worried the Materialist planned on beating him to the punch. After the Materialist assured him she had no such intentions or desires, Kevin's face cleared, and he went on to offer the Materialist all sorts of useful advice about the Bazaar in particular and Istanbul in general.

Discomfort of Others (Istanbul, Part I)

The chic new restaurant Tuus at the Sofa Hotel in Istanbul

A couple of weeks ago, while her colleagues back at CNT scrambled to make things shiny for the annual Readers' Choice Awards fete, the Materialist was off in Istanbul on holiday.

The Materialist likes to think that she learns something new each time she goes on a trip, that each visit to another place is a chance to correct the areas of learning in which the Materialist's gaps of knowledge are, as the Materialist's father enjoys saying, "wide enough to drive an 18-wheeler through"--that is, history, language, and geography.

And certainly, there are few better places to undertake this endeavor than in Istanbul, the site of hundreds, thousands, of Orientalist imaginings and fantasies since the beginning of Western civilization, by people drawn to the city for the same (perhaps wrongheaded) reasons they still are today. The Materialist, who likes being near water, marveled at the Bosphorus, at how quickly it moved, at its clean, salty scent, at the fact that some of the most contentious symbols of current geopolitics--Russian tankers carrying tons of crude oil, flatbed ships stacked high with shipping containers in merry, crayoned shades--seemed to glide along its surface, mere yards away from residences, markets, streets crowded with Istanbullus.