Stepping in the same stream twice

I was uncomfortable but I tried not to show it. After all, it was Friday night and I was with friends. We were at a bar in Taksim called Vosvos and I was drinking a diet coke -- what a partier -- and crammed into a chair that seemed too small for my frame, while Jeff and two of our friends chatted over the Turkish pop music the DJ was blasting only 10 feet away. Meanwhile, I fidgeted and wondered if anybody else was as tired as I was.

I ordered a beer -- nothing like pure carbs and calories to perk you up -- and strained to hear the conversation. Then I noticed the girl at the next table. She was young, maybe 19 or 20, wearing blue jean trousers and a white, almost transparent, long-sleeved blouse that pulled at the buttons. Her hair was short and looked as if it might have been cute and flippy at 8 am that morning but had since been flattened by rain and the events of the day. She wore no makeup, if any, and her face had a ruddy, and almost shiny, tint to it.

But it wasn't her appearance that was so striking. She didn't look any more or less pretty than any other girl at the bar. Instead, she had a way about her, a breezy radiance that seemed to be completely natural. With a sort of devilish grin, she sipped her friend's beer when he wasn't looking and took a drag off another friend's cigarette when she went to the restroom. Nobody seemed to mind. She danced by herself, her arms flowing and her smile wide and her eyes shining, like nobody was watching, which, nobody was, except me.

She mesmerized me and reminded me of someone, and at first I couldn't think of who it was. I continued to watch her as I caught snippets of the conversation at our table. It occurred to me then that the person she resembled, I thought, was me. Except not me. Not the me now, anyway. I was sitting here thinking to myself that I didn't belong in this crowd of college students and here she was grooving to her own tune.

As I was already in a nostalgic kind of mood, when Jeff's friend Onur -- or was it me? -- suggested we go for one last drink at Neva, I was keen. When I was an exchange student in Turkey in 1999-2000, the exchanges spent a lot of time at Neva (off Istiklal Caddesi, turn left at the Swatch store), mainly because the beer was only 500,000 lira, the equivalent today of 50 cents. (A now defunct publication called "Istanbullshit" wrote an article in 2000 about how Neva was the cheapest place in the city to get a beer. Now beer is 5 lira a bottle.) We listened to terrible European disco and '80s music there and wrote in each other's memory books. Sometimes we went after school and drank cokes because we just did. We danced to "Mambo No. 5" and songs by Cake and every night the last song before closing was "Closing Time" by Semisonic. For better or for worse, the bar holds a special place in my heart.

But even though we've lived in Turkey for about a year and a half now, I've only been back once, a few months after we moved here. I went in and the bartender/owner remembered me from 10 years ago. I was so flabbergasted I had tears in my eyes but didn't go back again. Places like that, that hold such special places in your memory, are hard to go back to without the same people you used to go with. One of those people being yourself.

When we approached Neva, well after midnight, "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor was blaring through the closed iron door. The sound inside was deafening. The long, rectangular space wasn't crowded but it felt small. We got beers at the bar and sat ourselves down at a round, low table. I felt like an anthropologist surveying a completely different culture. Was this the Neva I remembered? Had it always been like this?

The bar seemed to be a place for misfits, and I say that in the most compassionate way possible. It struck me as a place where anybody would be welcome, as long as you felt comfortable enough to be there. There were transgendered and gay people, lesbians and a few people who I think might have been a bit, er, slow. In other words, a place where the outcasts of Turkey were welcomed with open arms.

I felt completely out of my element.

A short, dowdy woman approached us and sat down at our table. This did not concern or sway me. Then she grabbed Jeff's bottle of beer and took a long swig. Oookay. Not cool. Then she grabbed Onur's lit cigarette and took a drag before putting it back in the ash tray. I kept one eye on my bag and with the other I looked at Jeff and tried to convey a sense of, "WHAT THE HELL?"

Then "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba ("I get knocked down, but I get up again, you ain't never gonna keep me down" .. ) came on. I don't think I have ever seen Jeff move so fast. In a flash he bounded from his chair and started jumping up and down, one fist in the air, singing along to the words. The feeling was contagious. Soon everyone was yelling "I GET KNOCKED DOWN" at the top of their lungs.

We didn't stay long, though. Our new friend seemed a bit too interested in Jeff for my taste and I couldn't really enjoy myself while trying to make sure no one stole my bag. The whole experience left me feeling like I had seen my past in a whole new light. Had the bar always been like that? Had I been so different back then that I didn't notice it, or was I that much of a misfit too?

I don't know the answers to these questions, and I don't think I want to know. I think my initial reaction after my first visit to Neva last year was the right one: that my memories of the place are so dear to me that I don't think I want to spoil them by seeing what the place is like now. Without the other exchanges and my best friend Kara, what was the point of going?

There are plenty of bars in Istanbul. I think I'll stick to frequenting some of those.