🌍 Travel: What Istanbul Actually Cost Us — A Month on the 16th Floor
The companion to everything I've written about Turkiye (Turkey). Where one post was the philosophy, this is the texture: the city from above, the work, and the exit that almost didn't happen.
Kadıköy, Istanbul. May 2026. The 16th floor, where I watched the city move and planned my way out of it.
If you've read The System Doesn't Want You Free, you already know what Istanbul did to me on the inside — the customs trap, the silent host, the lawyer with tangerines in his messages, the whole machinery of a city that fought my exit. That post was the philosophy.
This one is the texture. The lived month. Where we actually were, what the days felt like, and how the hardest chapter of three hard months put into practice what I decided long ago to never put up with again. What we call in the US a “man child.” Stay tuned for the next one I met in Phu Quoc. Don’t worry. Phu Quoc was nothing like Turkiye and I had such a lovely month there despite the attempted sabotage by envious ignoramus during my last week there. Phu Quoc was exactly what I needed and I had a wonderful time and made some new foreigner and local acquaintances. I only met one man-child woman-hater that was blatantly disrespectful at the last hotel I stayed at but I was so zen, I didn’t care. I did say they’re everywhere, didn’t I?
I will also be sharing in that post what I learned about the culture around women over their mid-30s that I noticed and asked about.
Kadıköy, and the Altitude of the 16th Floor
We arrived in Kadıköy — the Asian side of Istanbul — in an apartment on the 16th floor, and the altitude changed something in me.
After three months at ground level in small closed towns, being that high above a massive city did something to my nervous system. Istanbul's noise was real and constant, but from sixteen floors up it became a kind of distant weather. I started waking at six in the morning again — my early phase, the one that returns when my soul is trying to recalibrate — and I'd sit and watch the city move from a height, part of it and above it at once.
There was a desire in that altitude to disappear from the system, to be physically lifted out of the noise the way the apartment lifted me off the street. Sixteen floors up, you can watch the whole game and not be touched by it. For a month, that's what I did.
A park about 15 minutes away from our Airbnb my son and I took a taxi to because we desperately needed to be in a green space.
The Month That Was Mostly Work
Istanbul, for all its weight, was mostly a work month — and a productive one.
Jovan and I had the rhythm by then. He'd landed his first client weeks earlier in Kalkan; in Istanbul that became momentum. As I write this he's at five clients with a Discord launch coming. We worked. I cooked. We did the unglamorous, sustaining, ordinary-life things the nomad fantasy never shows you, in a high apartment over one of the largest cities on earth.
And the whole time, underneath the routine, I was solving the problem of how to leave and get back to my favorite continent: Asia.
We went out a few times but only once to the touristic part in the Asian side, near the ferries. I wasn’t impressed. Hot, crowded, old, worn out place, unhappy people. It was a very strange place. And the food everyone talks about? Where was it? I didn’t find it. I refused to go to the expensive places. Especially if I had to keep dealing with the unwelcoming faces. There was one place that was a little escape culinarily-speaking in the Asian side. It’s called Charla. They had decent quality and decent pricing. But it was a taxi ride away. The taxi fare itself probably cost the same as a meal. They were in the app but the app more than doubles the prices of the food targeting foreigners who use it the most. It’s shameful. Pure thievery. They’re not smart enough to know they would make more money if they weren’t robbing people this way. I ordered more from a nearby place called Crispy Asian which was just ok food. I ordered more groceries than meals and cooked simple meals for the rest of the time. I finally found healthy products from a Farm Cooperative. That saved me from having to keep taking a taxi to Macrocenter, which is also targeting foreigners (which means Europeans because that’s who they think are the only people who travel besides the occasional American). Excellent quality and fair local prices. If it wasn’t for that I would have jumpled out the 16th floor.
The Exit That Almost Didn't Happen
I've told the full story of the customs trap elsewhere, so I won't repeat all of it. But the texture of those final weeks was this: every system I needed in order to leave Turkey legally and safely seemed designed to slow me down. The famous, infuriating titer test for Midnight (which I took care of in Athens, thank the heavens. I cannot imagine what that process would have been in Turkiye and the very special foreigner price). DHL shipments stuck in customs over a national holiday no one warned me about. A rental car I planned to drop off at Ankara but extended until Istanbul when Ankara revealed to not be a digital-nomad-friendly city (and the smoking, my God. Inside cafes. I was dizzy from the toxicity and I’m still detoxifying from it in Asia as I publish this). The visa clock ticking the entire time.
It was, without exaggeration, one of the most stressful exits of my life. And I still can't fully believe it worked.
But it did. We picked up the titer test two days before my son flew after I demanded the “manifest amendment” no DHL employee I spoke to knew about (Thank you AI! If you’re here for nothing else is to overwrite the pendulums of mediocrity and middle management we deal with every day to make us hate life). The crate arrived the day before which my son so brilliantly handled. He found a place to board Midnight twenty minutes away from where he’s staying, not hours. He flew to Seoul with the dog in the rip off that is Turkish Airlines. I flew two days later in Korean Air, one of my favorite airlines, landed with five hours to spare, held Midnight as he cried at me for leaving him. At the Istanbul airport on the way out to Seoul I booked a flight to a Vietnamese island that would let me land without a visa. I had just found it during visa searches only the day before.
That's how Istanbul ended. Not with a monument. With an escape that became a beginning.
Looking Back From the Other Side
I'm writing the final version of this from a forest resort in Phu Quoc, Vietnam, I refuse to name for reasons I’ll explain in my next post. Phu Quoc is where I've spent a month doing nothing but less work and more relaxing and decompressing — and where the full weight of those three months has finally started to lift. Except, well, you’ll always encounter woman assholes and the man-child type. I absolutely loved Phu Quoc and I plan on returning many many times over the years. Those that didn’t offer a relaxing stay- which was only one stay out of three by the way- will not get my money ever again. I boycott ugly people. And you know what I mean by ugly.
From here, Turkiye (Turkey) looks like what it was: a necessary madness. A chapter to be endured rather than enjoyed, and one that — against everything it threw at us — left every one of us more independent than we arrived. Jovan came out of it with a business taking shape. Josiah came and went with his own momentum. I came out clarified, emptied of some old weight I'd carried for years without naming it.
Istanbul cost us a great deal. But what it bought, it turns out, was the final decision to never return to Europe again. Yes, I said this before but this time I really mean it. Not unless there is a very specific thing or place I want to see before I die urgently that if I don’t will alter the rest of my life (very unlikely). I mean now I know why there are so many Europeans and other caucasians in Asia. They don’t want to be in their own countries.
And there was a spiritual layer running under all of it — those three months were some of the most active of my life in the unseen, the universe doing work I could only feel the edges of at the time. That story is its own piece, and it's coming. Not here. This was the travel. That will be the transformation.
Practical Notes — A Month in Istanbul
If you're going to base in Istanbul for a stretch:
Kadıköy (the Asian side) is calmer than the tourist core and a real place to live rather than visit. A high floor genuinely changes your relationship to the city's noise.
If you have a pet to move internationally, start the titer test and paperwork far earlier than you think you need to. I did it 4 months ahead and still- bureaucratic Turkiye customs fed their need to think they’re superior and have actual power by making it extremely difficult to collect this test shipped by our Athens vet.
Confirm rental-car return terms in writing — check your car, report any maintenance lights, secure everything ahead of time online if you can so they don’t scam you. Look at the car insurance fine print. Compare local and international brands. What works in one city or country doesn’t work in the other.
Learn the national holiday calendar before any time-sensitive logistics. A holiday week shut down everything I needed at the worst possible moment.
And know your real exit options. I left for an island I'd discovered could be entered visa-free only the day before I flew. Stay flexible enough that a door you didn't know existed yesterday can become your way out today.
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