Travel sucks

Visas, terrorists, aeroplanes, taxicabs, tour guides... Travelling just can’t get any worse these days – unless you’re a Turk.

Why would anyone put themselves through the humiliation of travel? You spend a bunch of money and time going through the degradation of visas, security checks, airlines, queuing, language barriers, constant communication breakdown, endless acquisition of tickets to go anywhere and see anything, closing/opening/meeting/departure/arrival times you’re always rushing to, mosquitoes, illness, sleeplessness, people constantly trying to rip you off with insincere gestures of friendship, and all for what? A bunch of lame photos, stupid souvenirs, and endless inane anecdotes which people will only politely feign interest in listening to, along with the vague sense afterwards that you can’t really tell if it was all your own lived experience or just an endless succession of impersonal images you could have just seen in a book or on TV.

But if you’re not from a Western country, travel is that much worse. Let’s face it, travel today is designed for white people. Everybody else has to stand in different lines at airports and form degrading long visa queues outside embassies and consulates in the attempt to try and prove they’re not terrorists, expected to produce bank statements, electricity bills, declare property and possessions, have somebody in the country of destination who can invite and vouch for them, and generally be stripped of all dignity in front of sadistic visa ogres who treat visa applicants like they’re the only thing they will ever get the chance to act superior to, thus relishing the task at hand. So unless you’re a Westerner, you’re guilty until proven not-guilty-yet. Oh, and then you have to pay a bunch of money when they give you that all-important official stamp that declares you now have the honour of going to their precious little country. And if you’re a Westerner? Usually either no visas needed, or just a quick visa that could be got at the airport. Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Rich White Currency Spender, you’re our biggest industry!

That’s not to say that we Turks often don’t deserve rigorous visa procedures. Unfortunately, for every decent Turk who travels according to the rules, there are a bunch of others who readily export our misplaced impish genius for cutting-corners-through-duplicitous-schemes over to the host country, and generally prove such a nuisance that some sort of rigid screening and filtering process becomes inevitable. And who suffers? The decent ones. So the lowest common denominator becomes the procedural starting point for the whole visa process. Add to all this the further doucheness of terrorism, which has achieved nothing except making the whole world a much more annoying place for everyone. Terrorism will never liberate Palestine or Iraq, bring about a golden age of Islamic prosperity, or even ever have more of a statistical chance of killing you than death by donkey kick. All it’s done is augur in a shitty age of worldwide inconvenience. Thanks for that, fuckos.

So what does all that add up to? It adds up to me in transit at Charles de Gaulle airport, standing in my socks at the head of a long queue of depressed people who resembled convicts, passing in and out of an incontinent trigger-happy metal detector, waiting for some Algerian guy to finish inspecting my shoes, trying to pick up coins I spilled while emptying everything from my pockets (cargo pants are no longer convenient travel attire), taking my laptop in and out of its bag, and suspiciously wiping the sweat from my brow as I stood before a mini-inquisition about why I was where I was before I was there and for what purposes (they only asked me these questions because I had a Turkish passport – everyone else was white, innocent, and fluffy, like bunnies), before boarding my plane – which, by the way, was sprayed with disinfectant by flight attendants with fake smiles when entering France from Turkey and Mexico, but not vice versa, even though it was the same airline (I won't name names, just suffice it to say that the initials of the airline in question are: AIR FRANCE)

So is there nothing salvageable from the whole travel thing? Maybe I’ve been a little harsh. After all, the first five minutes when you decide to go somewhere and the last five minutes when it’s all finally over are both pretty sweet moments. Unfortunately it’s just that large-ish middle bit that sucks. But a peppy voice inside me says: “Wait a minute, travel expands your horizons, you meet new people, gain experiences and memories that last a lifetime, you see incredible things and appreciate your own country more, while at the same time overcoming your own prejudices, and you realize that despite superficial differences, we’re all really the same, floating away on this crazy spaceship we call Mother Earth!” Wrong. That stuff is only believed by the sort of people who think travelling makes a person interesting ipso facto. It doesn’t. The similarities encountered make travel boring, because you realize that – despite a few opulent monuments – everywhere and everyone is the same, while the differences encountered make travel annoying, because you’re bummed that such trivial things should inconvenience you so much, thereby bolstering extant prejudices rather than dispelling them.

So what’s the solution? Stay put. There are a lot more interesting things that are already all around you than all the cheap and trivial surface novelties that are stumbled upon while travelling. Plus you’ll spare all of us the six megabyte mass email full of uncompressed photos of you standing next to stupid statues with a sheepish grin. It’s worth you not-travelling just for us to not-receive that.

Diplobratic Community

We’re jaded, spoilt, cynical, pampered and obnoxious, but there are also negative aspects to being a Turkish diplomat’s kid.

Most people think that the life of a diplobrat is all fun and games, as if it only involved cocktail parties, tennis and polo, summers in Bali and winters in Saint Moritz, chauffeur-driven bulletproof Chevrolets, maids and cooks and butlers, weekends partying by a swimming pool, attending the best schools money and influence can buy, and… actually, come to think of it, that’s exactly what it’s like. But did you know that such an idyllic upbringing can have adverse effects on diplobrats in the future? Just kidding. It’s the best life in the world!

Diplobrats are easy to spot in Istanbul because they’re loud and drunk and probably doing something really stupid every time you look their way. Actually there are two types in the Corps Diplobratique: the levelheaded ones who steer straight along the course prescribed them by parents with high expectations, and the ones who do a 180-degree flip to stray completely from that course by doing something irresponsibly artsy and hopelessly impractical with their lives instead.

Regardless of the path taken, the diplobrat always has one thing to fall back on: Team Daddy. This is a network of dedicated ambassadors all over the globe ready to spring into action with phone calls and mutual favors every time one of their diplobrat progeny encounters trouble getting a student visa to the U.S., or realizes their passport has expired upon having already arrived half-drunk at Mexico City airport, or suddenly finds they’re broke while filming a documentary in Berlin, or off sailing in Vanuatu. Team Daddy is ready for every ridiculous eventuality that a screwed-up diplobrat is capable of – and they’re capable of A LOT. You name it, missed flights, traffic accidents, bail, angry pimps demanding their money… Some may argue that the Team Daddy security net actually hampers the diplobrats’ maturation into full-fledged adulthood as responsible members of society, to which an official diplobratic response might go something along the lines of PFFF, CARE FACTOR?

But despite this state-sponsored tax-funded pseudo-aristocratic louche lifestyle, there’s also the problem of diplobratic crises which have to be dealt with from time to time. A life constantly spent leaving places without establishing any roots, generally devoid of any traditional or cultural anchors of identity, having everything brought to your feet and encountering almost no significant obstacles throughout one’s childhood, all takes a toll on fitting into normal society in adulthood, on relating to your own personal, social and national identity, and even on giving you some sort of reason and meaning for living when all your life you’ve experienced firsthand the relativity of values which others might hold to be absolute and sacrosanct. Therapy may be the obvious answer to overcoming this existential diplobratic crisis, but a better way does exist: alcohol abuse. Nothing helps you forget your problems like booze-driven short-term amnesia… provided you keep it up consistently over a long period of time, preferably all your life. Think of it as a diplobratic hobby. Um… where was I? Oh yeah, diplobrats.

So is there nothing endearing about these lost souls? Sure it’s hard to feel sympathy for children who have had it all, but did you know that eventually as they grow older they have to forfeit their red diplobratic passports and accept blue ones, as if they were riff raff? Try traveling on a Turkish blue passport and you’ll know what that means. Unless you go to Pakistan and Azerbaijan a lot, you’ll be spending lots of time and money dealing with officious visa trolls whose only joy in their pathetic measly lives will be to subject you to the same quotidian hell that constitutes their own pointless and unnoticed Sisyphean sojourn on Earth. Besides that, diplobrats also eventually have to get jobs themselves and make a living without any government support and with nothing to fall back on but the occasional Team Daddy intervention. Granted, employment can be postponed until well into your thirties, but sooner or later it has to happen. And as if having to work wasn’t enough, eventually, as diplobrats, we too are expected to have to save money, have a meaningful relationship, marry, breed, and – yes – even get a career. I’m sorry to use the c-word there but sometimes it’s better to face the brutal truth than to keep avoiding it. Which reminds me, it’s time for another drink.

But I don’t want you all to get the impression that diplobracy is only comprised of maturationally-challenged socially-reprobate ontologically-void culturally-estranged spiritually-vapid pleonastic strings of endless adjectival hyphenation thrown in to fill up the necessary word limit on yet another pointless article by a bitter asshole whose only pursuit in life can best be described as a sort of aimlessly creative procrastination… like, say, me. Because some diplobrats do go on to do great things. And besides, even if we don’t, at least we’re not as fucked up as dictabrats. I mean, Kim Jong-Il? Uday Hussein? Marko Milosevic? Those guys are just plain creepy. Plus they all have this nuclear weapons fetish which diplobrats tend to shy from. It’s good to know that at least the A-bomb is one thing even Team Daddy can’t provide.