Tag: ocean

Istanbul, instruments, sights, food, dates but no dancing (November 2022)

After a short stop at another beach, I went to Istanbul. I can’t say why, but ever since I began my journey, I’ve imagined Istanbul as a kind of gateway to the East. And I’ve always imagined it as a very different city.

And different it was. Vivid, vibrant and colorful as crazy. I found a very good city home spot right next to a small park and the sea. It was a paid parking, but I ended up paying only 7€ for five nights instead of 7€ for each night. There was an old van in the parking lot that looked like it wasn’t going anywhere, and I wondered why no one was removing it. It turned out to be the tea station for this parking and the walk along the seaside next to it. I loved this practical approach.

From this parking, I explored the city. On the first two days, I visited all the music instrument stores in the district Karaköy. There were a lot of them. I had been making music with synthesizers, sequencers and onscreen instruments on my iPad for years and loved it. But for a few months I had been thinking about getting an acoustic instrument. In Varna, I bought a pad controller for finger drumming, but that didn’t feel like the real deal. I thought about all kinds of instruments: didgeridoos, handpans, cajons, flutes, keyboards… I wanted something real. After trying dozens of instruments, I bought a cajon. It’s amazing how different they sound and feel. I ended up with one that I really loved. I also bought a used and discounted 64 pad midi controller and sequencer at a music store. I thought it would be super universal and cool to use. I went to a city park and made my first beats on the Cajon and it felt alien, but natural and awesome. I tried the pad controller and immediately realized it wasn’t going to work for me. I couldn’t see any of its leds in the sunlight. So I went back to the store where I had bought it and the guy there took it back and refunded me the money without hesitation. I was very grateful to him, because that was pure goodwill on his part. After trying many midi keyboards, I bought one, tried it in the evening and found that one key wasn’t working properly. I fell in love with the Cajon even more because it was so simple. Back at the store, they exchanged the keyboard for a perfectly good one. It was really nice to talk to all the guys in the instrument stores about music and the instruments. Is there anything more diverse than music?

The next few days I went sightseeing and saw a lot of the famous stuff. It was beautiful and I learned a lot about Islam, which was very interesting. And I don’t know why, but every time I see an obelisk, I feel a strong connection with it… Maybe I had watched too much 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I liked the bazaars and how lively they were. I bought some lambskin socks and these ones are now my absolute favorite socks when it’s cold.

Since Artha and I had lived on the first beach in Bulgaria, I had a very strong connection to dates combined with nuts and small pieces of fruit. I highly recommend trying that stuff. My aboslute favorite combination: half of a large date with a salted almond and a small piece of apple! It’s the best! Istanbul was the heaven of dates and nuts! I loved it. I got some recommendations for authentic Turkish restaurants from friendly locals and tried them out as well. My absolute favorite was a little restaurant where they made these “pizza-like” things. I don’t remember the name, but they were fantastic!

I felt like going dancing and looked for a cool little club that played house music. I found one that sounded great, but when I went there at night, they wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have a woman with me. I had never had anything like that happen to me before. Actually, I was super happy that I didn’t need a woman or anyone else to go dancing anymore. That I felt happy and good when I danced alone. Although I understood their intention for such a rule, I didn’t like it. I thought that this club isn’t very welcoming for people who just don’t want to be with women. And since I wasn’t in the mood to meet someone I didn’t know in a bar or other club, I did let go of the dancing for that night.

I drove to the east of Istanbul. There I found another great city parking next to a marina, a park, and a path that went along the sea. I explored the eastern part of Istanbul, which felt very different from the touristy areas around the sights. It felt more authentic and free to me. One day I took a long run along the sea and I had never seen such a long strip of nature in a city with before on which so many people were barbecuing and having fun.

After a week I was fed up with city life. It had been nice, beautiful and interesting, but I felt like I had had enough. And there was something else. I felt lost and disoriented. But at that point there were only whirly thoughts in my head. It did make me feel unhealthy and frustrated.

Entering Turkey, first impressions and getting bugged down hard on a wild beach (October 2022)

After having a magical time in Strandzha in Bulgaria, I crossed the border to Turkey. The border crossing went without any problems and I got the first stamp in my fresh passport.

In the first city I entered, I immediately felt how different Turkey was. It seemed very lively to me. In every settlement there was something like a central area where people met, hung out and lived their social life. I very rarely eat meat or fish, but when I saw the Köfte restaurant, I couldn’t resist. I’ve loved koefte for years and the ones I got there were minimalistic and delicious.

I took a long walk around the small town and bought different foods to try, a sim card, talked to a lot of different people and got a bit of a feel for how things were going in this new country. What impressed me the most was that the Turkish people seemed to be very talkative. They weren’t afraid of language barriers and seemed very friendly, interested and hospitable.

After that, I continued my trip and went to a wild beach on the Black Sea coast. This beach reminded me a lot of the big beach near Varna where I had spent a lot of time. But to get to this beach in Turkey, Rosinante and I had to go through some muddy off-roading and very narrow passages. We even got lost, but some friendly locals helped us finding the right way. That was a lot of fun. When I reached the beach, I met a very friendly goatherd and we had a nice conversation via Google Translate.

I stayed for a few days of hanging around at the beach, bo staff training, meditating, making music and so on and during these days only the goat herder visited me again, then I continued on my way. Because it would have been be an insanely long trip to return to the road and continue from there, I decided to take the shortcut and drive along the beach. I scouted the beach first, because I didn’t want to hopelessly bug down Rosinante on this wild beach. So I dropped the pressure in her tires to about one bar and took off. Everything was going great until we approached the last little slope that would lead to the exit of the beach. All the momentum I had built up was swallowed up in a second by that little slope and Rosinante’s tires immediately started digging themselves into the sand. Looking at the situation from the outside, I knew this was going to be a tough one. The sand was super soft and Rosinante’s rear axle was already touching it. I took my time and dug very well. I placed my two large aluminum recovery boards and the two small leveling blocks to get a little more traction. I locked Rosinante’s rear differential, let her slowly crawl onto the boards, and once she was there, I let her take off and build some momentum. The little slope swallowed it all with a big appetite. After three meters, Rosinante lay down on the sand like a sleeping whale. So I dug again. And it took me some time to find the leveling blocks because they were buried deep in the sand. After the second digging, I sent Rosinante forward again. The appetite of the slope didn’t seem to be satisfied. Again, it swallowed Rosinante’s entire momentum in just a meters. So I dug again. I dug out and placed the boards and leveling blocks. I launched Rosinante. And the slope got another feast of momentum. So I dug again, dug and placed the boards and leveling blocks, launched Rosinate and… finally we reached solid ground again.

Discovering unconditional love and new friends (September 2022)

After our gorgeous days at the beach, I brought Artha back to Varna and headed north along the coastline of Bulgaria. At the Beglika festival, I got some recommendations for nice spots at the beaches and so I started exploring. Like most of the time, I had no plans but a rough direction. But this time it was different. I felt like I did not want to go so far away from Varna. I guess, at that time, I would never have gone south to Turkey and left Bulgaria.

I found a very nice beach of seashells. The whole beach was covered with seashells! I never had seen something like this before and found it interesting. In one direction was a long cliff perfect for walking and after one kilometer in the other direction a small boardwalk started. I had calm walks, some french fries and enjoyed my time there a lot.

One day a French family arrived and after getting to know each other, we spent some evenings together. We talked about life in cars, France, Germany, Bulgaria, freedom, music, and everything else. the father used to play the guitar and his wife and daughter were singing along. They gave me a little concert once and I loved it. I told them that they really should practice playing and singing the theme song of the movie “The Last Unicorn”. Mhhh. I’ll ask them if they did. They just wrote me, that they found a good old truck in France and will now start to convert it into a home and go to Marocco next year.

Making a lot of electronic music on my iPad I more and more thought about getting a real acoustic instrument. I had been thinking about that for a long time but for some weeks the feeling grew stronger. Maybe a Handpan, a flute, a keyboard, or a Didgeridoo?

During that time, I felt something had changed inside of me. Of course, everything is always changing. But, you know, sometimes it just feels like something changed and is different now. From my perspective right now as I’m writing this, I have different feelings about it than the ones I had back there at the seashell beach. Back there, I felt like something big and heavy got lifted off my shoulders. And without that heavy thing, I profoundly experienced that there is unconditional love. And with that, I mean real unconditional love. The love, one can feel for someone else without any expectations, without any doubt, without limits. Studying a lot of Buddhism, the idea/ the descriptions were very familiar to me, but it felt like I did not let this unconditional love I was always feeling for certain people because with it would come a burden. The burden of having to feel that love forever and the burden to show and deliver it constantly. It’s crazy to describe and in a way it does not make logical sense, I guess. But what is the logical sense when it comes to feelings? And especially when it comes to love?

This change inside of me opened and brightened my heart. I don’t know how that time with Artha at that lonely beach contributed to that change, but I’ll be forever deeply thankful for it to have happened. Or maybe it did not happen that time. Right now, I feel like this opening of myself for feeling and living pure love and compassion is happening all the time but at the seashell beach I just really recognized it. Experienced it.

I had profound and honest conversations with my best friends back in Germany and step by step I opened up more and more. I let go of fears about expectations and burdens and made myself vulnerable by telling them that I indeed love them.

In one of my last posts, I wrote about the time I had together with my friend Michele. In that post, I wrote that I love him. Before the opening that I’m trying to describe here, I would not have written that. I would have felt like I can’t do that because it would force me to feel and show that unconditional, limitless love forever.

The most profound conversations I had with Cori. I can’t remember that I had such honest, pure, profound, and loveful conversations in my life. We got to know and love each other back in Germany and always had a joyful, loveful, compassioned, and deep time together. Before I left Germany, we traveled a little bit together and she visited me back in Greece. That time in Greece was partly very exhausting and challenging for me. You can read about it in the older posts. Later, in July and August, I felt a distance growing between Cori and me. At the seashell beach, I experienced the love between us in a very different way. I felt how unconditional and pure it was. That it did not know any measurement of distance. Cori had experienced that for a long time like that. I just felt like I opened myself and allowed myself to feel it. To take it from her and let myself feel it for her in a pure way that does not need any explanation.