glyphobet • глыфобет • γλυφοβετ

Apparently the Obama campaign heard I was going to be in Berlin, so they scheduled a stop there just for me (and maybe for a few other Obama supporters in Deutschland). How thoughtful.

When visiting another country, the visual and typographic culture infects me. The types of lettering used, from stone names above hundred-year old buildings, to flashy billboard headlines, and the letter frequencies wildly diverging from English, conspire in my brain to generate a new typeface. Ljubljana and Breuckelen are both products of this process.

Part of the motivation for the varied destinations on this trip was to push this process in new directions. Even Greece, which I ended up skipping for various reasons, was chosen partly because they use yet another alphabet there. My typeface instigated by Chinese, Zenith, is little more than a gimmick, but it’s a good one. And then Turkey totally surprised me with a powerful, bold, high x-height, sans-serif face. Upon arriving in Hungary, I was suprised to find that the as-yet-untitled Turkish face fits here very well.

I’ll be digitizing these new faces when I get back.

Bulgaria, the first Cyrillic-using place that I’ve traveled, really threw me for a loop. After pages and pages of sketches, nothing has materialized yet, and it might never.

My fascination with Cyrillic is really a flip side of the East’s fascination with English, or even the West’s fascination with Chinese or Japanese tattoos. A different, mysterious set of symbols that can produce sounds in a person’s head, just like your alphabet can, is fascinating, at least until you learn it well enough for its operation to become unconscious.

Luckily there are more alphabets, and countries, to visit, and to learn.

A friend asked me in email, “What’s your mental state like?”

There’s not much on my mind… I am more or less living between yesterday and two or three days from now.  I don’t worry about life back home. All my belongings fit in an airplane carry-on bag. If anything sucks, I just leave the hostel or the city or the museum or the room or stop talking to the people who suck and do something else. I take pictures of things that I think look cool, and draw pictures when there’s a quiet moment.

Sometimes I meet cool people and hang out with them. Other times I’m all by myself and only speak when I stumble through a few phrases of the local language. Sometimes there’s a fantastic place to eat for cheap, other times food is yogurt and bread from the corner store.

Oh, and I eat ice cream every day.

Early this morning, on a deserted backstreet in Sofia, just after navigating an ATM in a foreign alphabet, as I was feeling particularly staggered by the sheer weirdness of the geometry of the universe, a song made very familiar to me from countless mornings at Pancake Playhouse burst out from some unknown Bulgarian basement or bedroom. At the same moment, I realized that a flyer on the back of a street sign right in front of me said “Antichrist” (Антихрист) on it in Bulgarian. Funny how many emotions, like a confluence of deep alienation, wistful nostalgia, and unexpected comprehension, don’t have proper names.

And then you get on a bus and ride hundreds of miles through sunflower fields to end up somewhere else. The feeling fades, but the realization that your repertoire of words is woefully limited lingers.

Let’s play name this country. It was founded on idealistic principles of democracy and secularism. The people in this country are supposedly religious but most of them are so only nominally — they do not practice. They are very patriotic and proud — the national flag flies everywhere. The country is large, with miles of coastline on several different bodies of water. Most long-distance transportation is by car or bus. The cultural capital is not the political capital. The climate is varied, with mountains, forests, beaches, plains, deserts, and lakes. They grow much of their own grains and produce. Unlike many countries, they have only a few neighbors, and consider themselves to be very different from them.

Some would guess the United States, but Turkey fits the bill too. In many ways Turkey felt more like home than anywhere else I’ve ever been. I miss it already.

Even though I sound like a bloody yank saying it, Turkey is fucking awesome (only Americans say “awesome”).

Now I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria. It sure as hell isn’t Turkey. They checked my passport five times at the border. I don’t know what the EU is thinking. They let in Romania and Bulgaria, and not Turkey? Hell, the EU should be trying to get its member states to be allowed to join Turkey.

Turkey is a very religious country. There have been three religious events since I arrived, and seemingly everyone around has been out to celebrate each one.  The first was a jubilant affair, with bands of men running down the streets of İstanbul into the night banging drums and taxicabs honking their horns.   

I was on an overnight bus to Cappadocia during the second. At one of the bus stops, three young men got on the bus and flipped through the channels on the bus television, and the pointedly got off the bus once they’d determined that they couldn’t watch the celebration on board. The festivities were broadcast over the radio, and when they were over, the entire bus broke into cheers and the driver honked his horn at the darkened desert road.

The third was not a happy night. The crew of the boat I was traveling on lay anchor in the small coastal town of Kaş and took all the passengers to a rooftop terrace to watch the event on television. Although there were some high points (which the townspeople celebrated with fireworks) ultimately the night ended very sadly, and the crowds gathered on the streets dissipated slowly. The crew escorted us back to our boat in near-silence and us tourists, as easily affected by sad sentiments as good, went to bed early.

The celebrations themselves are called “games,” and consist of eleven Turkish men kicking a “ball” into a net called a ”goal.” Right now, all of the countries in Europe are graciously indulging Turkey in its religious celebrations by sending “teams” of their own to compete. The faith itself is called “football” (and in the U.S. it’s sometimes called “soccer”). You might have heard of it.

Each game is a part of a larger holiday season called the “Euro Cup.” Turkey was not expected to win as many games as it did and make it this far into the holiday season. The first and second games were tied up until the very end, when the Turkish team scored with just seconds remaining. The third Turkey lost to Germany in the last moments.  

Turkey will play Russia for third place in the coming days, and I expect it to be every bit as exciting as the previous games.

Traveling is not about the places you go, the people you meet, or even the things you do.  It’s about getting out of your comfort zone and pushing your own boundaries. The world back home can act like and tether on a boat on the open ocean.

It’s very hard to let things happen as they will, while keeping a journal for friends back home. From here on out, this log will have to be more a series of communicades from the other side - keeping track of everything is too much of an anchor for me right now.

Since landing in İstanbul two and a half weeks ago, I’ve swum in two seas and walked on two continents, traveled hundreds of miles by train, bus, scooter and boat, slept in a cave, a treehouse, and a yacht, broken the law at least three times (and gotten away with it), and only gotten mildly sunburnt once.

I haven’t had much time to keep up with this travel log. Those who are really hankering to know what I’m up to can follow my Wikitravel contributions.

• Days: 18
• Cities: 7
• Countries: 5 (3 if you’re not counting SARs)
• Continents:2 (3 if you count the Arabian Peninsula)
• Time zones: 2
• Beds: 6
• Flights: 5
• Internet cafes hacked: 1
• Powerbars left: 0, yummy
• Photos: 179
  
• Photos per day: 9.667 (it was pretty rainy in Hong Kong)
• Percentage of Germans who think I’m German: 100% (Literally, this guy from Hamburg came up to me in the hostel in Hong Kong and said, out of the blue, “You are from Berlin?” He was quite confused when I told him I was from California. And no, I wasn’t wearing my Berlin shirt doing anything Berlin-related.)
• Number of hostel staff singing show tunes very loudly in Istanbul right now: at least 1