Give me humanity. Give me flaws. Give me an enormous bell with a massive crack in the front of it. One that I still hadn’t seen, despite all my trips to Philadelphia. On my last visit back east, I remedied this. I went to see the Liberty Bell.

If you go in the off-season, this is a very easy thing to do. There will be virtually no line, and you can walk straight to it. You can even get a photo of yourself standing in front of the Liberty Bell, with someone else crouching awkwardly in the background.

These are not perfect tourist photos. Philly is not about being perfect. It is not about having a chiseled jaw and a supermodel wife or five Super Bowl rings. No. Philly is about having photos that sometimes look like iconic pieces of American history are pooping out humans and that is fine.

The Liberty Bell was originally commissioned in 1751 by the Philadelphia Assembly to mark the 50th anniversary of the state’s constitution, and would arrive from London the following year. It was so brittle, it cracked almost immediately after being rung. This wasn’t the famous crack that we now see today on the bell – that would happen later (though it’s unclear when). The bell was recast twice more by two local metal workers (Pass and Stow, whose last names appear on it) in an effort to make it stronger and to make its ringing more pleasant to the ear. Success was middling.

Look, we’re all sort of fragile sometimes, okay, placard? No need to get judgy about it.

While virtually everyone is familiar with the bell, I realize that its significance was lost on me. When my niece asked about it a few weeks later, I fumbled for an answer.

“It’s … you know … it’s a big bell? With a giant crack in it? From the Revolution.”

“Did they ring it when we declared our independence from the British?”

“That sounds entirely plausible, so let’s say yes, but please do not ask follow-up questions.”

The truth is a little murkier than that. The legend is that on July 8, 1776, the bell was rung to announce the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence – an account that, while heartwarmingly patriotic, is pretty unlikely. By 1776 the State House steeple was crumbling – there’s no way that the bell could have been rung without bringing the whole damn thing down. But it likely rang in the years before then, to call people together for special announcements or important news, and oftentimes stuff that might have pertained to the revolution.

After independence, it fell into obscurity until it graced the cover of Liberty, an abolitionist publication, in 1837. It soon became a widely known as a symbol of the anti-slavery movement, and took on the name The Liberty Bell (before then it was simply known as The State House bell). It’s hard to say when it got its signature crack – but it was most definitely there in February of 1846, when attempts to ring the bell in honor of George Washington’s birthday failed because of the zig-zag shaped fracture.

The bell was not recast again. Measures were taken to make sure the fracture didn’t spread further. And now it hangs, silent and broken, with Independence Hall watching over it in the distant. And this is a good home for it, because imperfect things and wonderful things are not out of place in a town like Philly.

Also, I really hate Tom Brady.

They celebrate their anniversary on the first snowfall of the season not because they are romantics, they insist, but because they are bad with dates. The result is that they never quite know when it will be. When the snow starts to fall, they make a reservation, they uncork a bottle.

They insist they aren’t romantics, but when they tell us this, I swoon.

This year, we were in Philadelphia for the first snowfall of the season. We are from the Pacific Northwest; any precipitation that isn’t rain is always a bit of a novelty.

We walked through Philadelphia in the snow.

And I noticed how it stuck to his hair and his eyebrows.

And how the city looked like a model train set.

It never got dark. Deep lavender is the best that a night sky can achieve when there’s snow on the ground. This rebellion against darkness has always been my absolute favorite part of any snow day. Like the earth is defying its own bedtime.

We wished our friends a happy anniversary as they insisted that they were not romantics. We nodded.

They’re full of shit.

This was my initial reaction to Livraria Bertrand – the oldest operating bookshop in the world, established in 1732. I looked at it from a distance, through glass, and thought “how remarkable”, the way one would any other work of art. You marvel at it, but you do not touch. You certainly don’t step inside. But Rand was not limited by such strange hangups, and seeing that he was able to walk in without being yelled at by some unseen authority figure, I quickly rushed in after him.

Plus he’s super cute and his eyes are like, CRAZY twinkly.

The Bertrand smells faintly of old wood and vanilla. Sloping archways connect room after room after room. The inner rooms look modern and recently renovated, but every now and then there is a pillar, or an exposed stone, or a strangely uneven piece of floor to remind you that when this shop opened, humans thought our solar system ended at Saturn.

Pedro Faure – one of many French booksellers who began arriving in Portugal in the early 18th century – opened the shop in 1732, but it was destroyed in the earthquake of 1755 (which decimated much of the city). The shop was reopened not long afterward in its current location, and has remained in operation ever since, hosting poets, philosophers, Nobel prize nominees, artists, and, of course, writers.

It was enough to wander through and simply breathe it in. It was as quiet as church, and for a lapsed Catholic like myself it offered even more of a religious experience that any of the cathedrals we visited. If there is a God, she is here, in the pages of a really good book.

I’ve always enjoyed novels that are love letters to books themselves (Like Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore  or The Borrower, which are both delightful reads), and Lisbon feels like the city equivalent of that – an entire town made of tiny shops piled high with dusty tomes. In this respect, Livraria Bertrand is not unique – it is one of many, many bookstores. But it is the oldest, and there is a sort of ancient magic in its walls. You feel like you might round a corner and find yourself someplace wondrous. And then you realize – that was true the second you stepped in the door.

I asked the internet how I should spend my time, and the recommendations were all the same: go to the Walker Art Center and Sculpture Garden.

Endeavoring to write about art, I am met with the same hesitation that I always feel – it is, to paraphrase some brilliant uncredited soul, like dancing about architecture. I won’t dwell too much on the individual pieces at the Walker – by the time you visit, they will have changed, anyway. I will simply tell you to go, because the space is wonderful and the collection will make you feel alternately contemplative and sad and angry and joyous, and all sorts of permutations of those things.

I must have been in a romantic mood on the day I visited, because everything was heartbreakingly beautiful to me. When I showed this photo to Rand, I commented on how sweet and sad the sentiment was.

He nodded.

“You know it’s surrounded by butts, right?”

No. I did not.

Oops.

If it is rainy or cold or snowing, then you might want to simply stay inside the Walker, but if the weather is slightly more amenable, then consider wandering around the sculpture garden.

The collection is a little more permanent, because it is much harder to move a giant blue chicken than it is to, say, move a painting.

Admission to the Walker is only $15, which feels modest compared to many galleries in the U.S., but the sculpture park is free, since it’s remarkably difficult to put giant things outside and then somehow demand that people pay to look at them.

There were a few pieces that didn’t entirely resonate with me, though I’d like to think that I understood their message. For example, this sphere clearly has a vagina.

(Right? I mean, that’s clearly what’s going on here.)

My favorite pieces were these paranoid stone benches. It’s like someone heard my thoughts and then engraved them onto a huge slab of granite.

Minneapolis is underrated; a few short hours there won’t feel like enough. But even if your time there is fleeting, the Walker is worth it, if only so you can return home and say to your beloved, “I found a bench that understood me more than most people do.”

I have simultaneous loved Anderson’s work and resented it; it resonates with me in a way that feels like I’m somehow being manipulated. When The Royal Tenenbaums came out, my brother called me and we had one of those sparse exchanges that can only take place between people who have known each other their entire lives. He asked if I had seen it. Yes, I told him.

“Royal,” he said.

“I know.”

“Dad,” he said.

“I know.”

2009. One of my all-time favorite photos of my father, in which he manages to look pissed off while eating ice cream.

Therein lies Anderson’s brilliance – he creates characters who are often miserable and yet they are fine. Things are simultaneously bad and okay. That is a world I know.

I was angry that Anderson could pinpoint me – and so many others – so well. I’d like to think I was less predictable than that. My response was reactionary – I tried to resist his work. As years of Halloween costumes attest, this endeavor has not been successful.

Sam and Suzy from Moonrise Kingdom.

–

Steve Zissou and Margot Tenenbaum.

Rand tried to keep our visit a surprise, but I eventually learned of it. He asked me if I want to see photos beforehand, but in the same way that I refuse to watch trailers for Anderson’s films before they are released, I shook my head.

“I want to see it for the first time in person,” I told him.

A small part of me didn’t want to go, scared it wouldn’t live up to my expectations. Or that it would, and that the world then would seem dull by comparison.

The bar was on the edge of town, a 15-minute drive even from the Duomo at Milan’s center. We took a cab, and found ourselves in a industrial district, full of long white buildings and factories. Bar Luce resides in one of these, the only indication of its existence is a small neon sign along the front that reads “BAR.”

As we walked in I imagined that I could see us from afar, moving in-slow motion as music played.

My biggest grievance about the worlds Wes Anderson created was that they existed only on the screen, and I could never step into them. Even when I paid a pilgrimage to the house from The Royal Tenenbaums (up in Harlem), I could only stand at the curb and stare, the delta between his work and reality feeling bigger than it ever had.

I thought Bar Luce would change that. Alas.

Every piece of it has been crafted by Anderson. It is perfect execution of his vision, but it is not perfect – his work never is. Pants hemmed too short, rusted out cars, a penciled in mustache – there is always something intentionally amiss.

Above a sea of terrazzo, there are islands of Formica the color of Easter eggs.

The shelves behind the bar and the glass dessert cases look like they’re filled with props.

But the cake was real, and I couldn’t really ask for more than that.

The cafe was empty when we arrived, and the staff looked like they were suffering from a terminal case of ennui. We were unaware of the rush of people that would soon come through the doors, and so the sheer number of waiters and baristas looked excessive.

We sat down and ordered. I scanned the menu for a butterscotch sundae, eager to placing my order in heavy, bored Italian, but there wasn’t one. Instead, I got The Royal, a sandwich made with culatello, and literally nothing else.

This is the cafe’s signature cake – vanilla pan de spagna with a light chocolate cream and covered in pink fondant.

Supposedly Rand ordered it.

(He didn’t get to eat most of it.)

At some point I demanded that we abandon our lives back in Seattle and move to Milan and, specifically, to Bar Luce.

“We can’t; we just bought a house,” Rand said.

“Let’s sell our house.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“YOU ARE THE ONE WHO ASKED ME TO BUY YOU A HOUSE.”

“And now I’m asking you to sell it so we can move to Milan. Please?”

“No.”

“But it takes so little to make me happy.”

“That is patently untrue and you know it.”

He was right. But for a few fleeting moments, I was excessively happy, in a way that Wes Anderson’s characters never are. I endeavored to hide my delight from everyone because it felt thematically off.

Once again, I was not successful.

Along the back wall of the cafe sits a jukebox that mostly had Italian songs from the 1950s and 60s. It had a bunch of Rita Pavone, but no tracks that I was familiar with. So the songs were obscure even if you were familiar with the obscure genre.

Next to the jukebox was a pair of pinball machines.

Rand got up to play one of them, and came back to the table, his eyes wide.

“It only takes lira,” he said.

We laughed.

“I’m not kidding.” (100 lira coins are available from the counter – 4 for a Euro.)

This superfluous detail stuck was exactly what I had hoped I would find here. These little elements serve no other purpose than to you bring you into Anderson’s world. We met every little idiosyncrasy with, “Well, of course.”

This pinball machines features Jason Schwartzman. The other one had Bill Murray on it. Because of course they do.

At times it became hard to shake a feeling that this wasn’t a cafe designed by Wes Anderson, but rather what fans imagine a cafe designed by Wes Anderson would look like. It gave me everything I wanted and more, right down to the meticulously designed bathrooms.

But in doing so, it almost felt as though it bordered on parody. In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, which is often thought to be the bard poking fun at his own tropes, every single Shakespearean cliche is thrown at the audience: lost princesses disguising themselves as boys, buffoonish villains, an exodus into the forest. It’s an absolutely ridiculous play because it is so over-the-top Shakespearean.

Bar Luce had that same sort of feel. It feels like almost too much from a director who plays in subtlety and nuance (right up until somebody snaps and crashes their car into the house). Maybe that’s the problem. Bare Luce exists. And so it can never truly be a part of Wes Anderson’s world because it is a part of ours. We have cell phones and credit cards and top 40 songs that we all hate but still know the lyrics to. We do not walk in slow-motion. Alec Baldwin does not narrate our story.

I say this not to disparage Bar Luce – I loved it, and our visit. But as a devout Wes Anderson fan, it brought up a bit of an existential crisis: I’d always wanted to step into Anderson’s cinematic universe, not realizing that part of the magic lay in the fact that I couldn’t.

There are many things that I should tell you about Gibraltar. It’s a strange place: it’s a territory of the U.K., but it’s literally attached to Spain. The Spanish want it back, but the Gibraltarians are pretty happy being subjects of Queen. In a recent vote, less than 1% of the population wanted to return to Spanish rule. It all goes back to the 1700s and the Treaty of Utrecht where the Spanish ceded Gibraltar to the British and I will get to all of that in another post BUT FIRST MONKEYS.

Yes, monkeys.

They are all over Gibraltar.

Another thing that’s all over Gibraltar? Signs telling you not to feed the monkeys. There are even drawings which illustrate, rather graphically, what will happen if you feed the monkeys. The food can be harmful to them, and it makes them both far too trusting of and aggressive towards humans. The point is, feeding the monkeys is bad for everyone.

So guess what a bunch of people do the second they see a monkey in Gibraltar?

THEY FEED THE DAMN THINGS.

As you walk around Gibraltar (which is, as the Prudential logo promises, a giant monolith extending out from the sea) you will see a lot of monkeys. There are about 160 Barbary Macaques living on the rock. They are sometimes called “Barbary Apes” because they don’t have tails (they are still monkeys, though). They greet you almost immediately upon your arrival, and the entire experience is a bit startling – you are high up on the rock of Gibraltar, the views are dizzying, and there are monkeys.

They are fat and seem quite content provided you don’t get too close to them. That’s usually pretty easy except sometimes you’ll be walking down a path and there’s just a monkey just sitting there.

You suddenly hear the Clint Eastwood western showdown music in your head. Conceptually monkeys are like the coolest thing ever but when you actually see a live, wild one in close proximity to you, it’s quite unsettling. They have sharp teeth and are profoundly strong, yet there is something uncannily human about their appearance, and all of that is just a little bit terrifying.

Our friend Rob, and the monkey that wasn’t quite on his back.

Given enough time, though, and things cease to seem all that strange. This massive rock, sticking straight out of the ocean doesn’t seem that odd. The views cease to be so dizzying.

And the locals become a little less scary.

(But you still shouldn’t feed them.)

I find this charming. It’s fun to be interrogated at farmer’s markets with the same pointed questions you’d get if they opened their pantry and found out you were living in it.

You are a travel writer. You go to fancy places. And right now you are not in a fancy place.

“Listen, dear one” I say, as I stand in a dirt lot surrounded by animatronic dinosaurs. “You do not understand how miraculous this place is because you have seen it too many times. But I assure you, it is.”

If you spend too much time somewhere, it grows stale. I suppose that’s the advantage I get of being on the road so often. I’m able to see things with news eyes and so all of it remains delightful. Everything is new.

Everything at the Richmond Night Market certainly is.

Last weekend was our second jaunt to this technicolor carnival, which sits dormant on the outskirts of Vancouver, B.C., for most of the year. It is only from May to October, on Fridays through Sundays that it is open, and as the name would suggest, only in the evening. And even on our second outing, I noticed that it was slightly less shimmery than on our first visit. Newness is magic. But Wil and Nora had never seen it, and they stood, wide-eyed, while we calmly explained to them that everything we were going to eat had to be either deep-fried or on a stick (no bonus points would be awarded for deep-friend and on a stick, because that was just best practice).

Also, the above image of my husband reminded me of George Peppard on the A-Team so I spent 20 minutes creating this DON’T YOU JUDGE HOW I SPEND MY TIME:

It’s hard to know where to begin, so I recommend doing a reconnaissance pass around the market and carefully evaluating your options and JUST KIDDING – GO DIRECTLY TO THE ROTATO STALL BECAUSE YOU ABSOLUTELY WANT A ROTATO. It is what happens when you combine a potato with rotation. 

The rotato recently entered the zeitgeist after it appeared on Food Republic’s absolutely bullshit list of french fries, ranked (it appears under the name the Potato Tornado, which I find offensive, and yet that is the keyword that I am using to optimize this post). It is a spiral cut potato, created in a sort of alchemy that requires a drill, which was rather surprising, as I thought incorporating power tools with junk food was exclusively the domain of Americans.

The rotato comes with your choice of powdered toppings, everything from a brilliant orange cheese to ketchup. The future is now, friends: we have powdered ketchup, so I assume that colonies on Mars are forthcoming.

Here is Nora holding her ketchup rotato proudly.

While I love her dearly, if you ask me to define hell, it is being surrounded by skinny women eating fried food.

In truth, it was hardly dissimilar to a regular french fry, except for the dusting of msg-laden powder, the effects of which are somewhat psychotropic and addictive. I loved the rotato, I hated the rotato. I cannot stop thinking about the rotato. I can’t believe how many times I’ve typed the word “rotato.”

At some point, Nora apparently insulted Rand’s honor so they had to have a duel. Rand had chosen a mini-rotato, and so he embarked on the endeavor poorly armed.

Honestly, these two couldn’t even hold it together for the fraction of a second required to take a photo.

This is making my chest turn straight into a series of heart emojis.

OH MY GOD I LOVE THESE NERDS.

I absolutely adore the look of disdain this woman is giving them.

Girlfriend has mastered the “WTF are they doing” face.

My man in the coral polo shirt gets it, though.

He burst out laughing at them approximately .4 seconds later.

And there was takoyaki, which I can write an entire post about (and may, soon). We had them in Japan – little fried balls of dough with pieces of octopus inside, dressed with sauces and topped with bonito flakes. Oh, and also, I cut my hair (let’s focus on that and not on the fact that my backpack is pulling down my dress and you can see half my bra).

It is hard to tie the market to one specific country. Most of the stands are heavily influenced by flavors we encountered in Asia – we saw many of the same foods we encountered while walking through Osaka or Kyoto. But there are elements of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and French cuisines (the latter two often paired together, the long legacy of colonization available in gastronomical form).

There are many, many vendors, and supposedly the amount of food that a human can eat in a specific period of time is finite. But I feel like that fact is for quitters.

Wil has this tendency to not eat for an entire day (note: if I did this, there would be casualties) and then when he does, he puts away an entire cow. I find this strangely endearing. Also endearing? You absolutely cannot tell how he feels about something from his facial expression. Wil’s “this is delicious” face is identical to his “this is absolute” crap face.

He stared at his treat with a look that screamed, “Why do I have to deal with this shit?”

Or maybe that was because of something else.

(Also, this is apparently Wil’s “Holy shit this is delicious” face. Who knew?)

And because no visit to an outdoor fried food orgy is complete without a chance to hurl it all back up: CARNIVAL RIDES!

We did not go on these because we are not 11 and therefore we are well aware of the consequences of our actions.

And fair games where you can win anatomically correct stuffed toys! Wait, wat.

Note: I did not see a single person in the entire market walking around with a prize, but I’m sure the odds aren’t deeply, profoundly stacked against you or anything.

And … dinosaurs? The Canadians have dinosaurs?

THE CANADIANS HAVE DINOSAURS. AND SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE. AND TRUDEAU. THEY HAVE EVERYTHING.

We stopped by the churro stand before leaving, because at that point we’d thrown caution and humankind’s millennia-long practice of eating vegetables to the wind.

Perhaps a place becomes less luminous after a while. Perhaps if you see it too many times, it loses its sparkle. But then counterexamples so readily present themselves. I have seen this face nearly every day for almost 16 years now. And when he swears he didn’t bite this churro in two, and is OBVIOUSLY lying through his teeth, his eyes reflect the colors of the setting sun, and I decide to keep him around a little longer.

It’s hard to tell what makes an experience wonderful. It might be the newness of it.

But I’m inclined to think that the company you keep plays a part, too.

–

If you head to the Richmond Night Market:

• Check their calendar! It’s Canada, so it’s not like outdoor venues are open year-round. Also, they might be closed because of some weird French or English holiday that we’ve never heard of? Le Tour de Boxing Day or something?
• Bring a bottle of water – it’ll be cheaper and easier than trying to find one once you’re inside.
• Get a fast pass and skip the line! The queue to get into the market wound around the block and moved at a glacial pace. We were able to skip all of it with a fast pass (vendors sell them while you wait in line – the thing is, it seems like a scam, and so no one was buying them). The pass costs $25 and gets you admission for up to seven people (considering that regular admission is $3.75 a person, you could actually end up saving money if you have a big enough group).

I love this guy so much it hurts my brain.

From the outside some are entirely unassuming; others feature massive sculptures, beckoning you in.

This sculpture was just the neatest thing. Look how one of the trunks appears to be floating above the ground:

The galleries blur together in my mind now, the interior walls either a creamy white or a rich burnt orange, each one run by someone wearing flowy clothing and turquoise jewelry. We walked through several dozen that day, but the Thoma Foundation Art House was easily my favorite.

Visitors are encouraged to come in and look around – that is precisely the point of the place, as none of the pieces on display are actually for sale. While the entire collection spans everything from New Mexico Modernism to Japanese Bamboo sculptures, the works on display during our visit seemed to have a digital and electronic bent. I was mesmerized by a computer generated painting (the brainchild of artist Harold Cohen) that hung near the front entrance. I told one of the curators that it reminded me of the work of Egon Schiele, and she seemed delighted by my ostentatious art nerdery.

The gallery is not large and each room was rather sparse, with only one or two pieces therein. My favorite was this one by Daniel Rozin:

It took us a while to figure out what was going on with the piece. A camera captures your movements as you enter the room, and your image is reproduced in shard-like pieces on a digital screen in front of you. It works like a mirror, so it moves as you do. When we realized what was happening, we both began to wave our hands like conductors try to swat a mosquito in the middle of a concerto.

I love this one because you can see him taking this picture.

And inevitably …

I suppose that’s why I loved this piece and the Thoma so much. I’d spent the day wandering through decadent galleries, sometimes feeling out of place, and then the Thoma put us up on the wall, declaring us a work of art.

These are the mysteries of the world.

I keep looking for answers, even when there aren’t any. I suppose that’s why I was so bewitched by Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return. The massive interactive art installation was a winding mystery. Look hard enough, and some answers reveal themselves. But even when they don’t, the result is pretty magical.

When people found out we were going to Santa Fe, Meow Wolf came up frequently on the list of things to see. But when we asked people precisely what it was, replies were not exactly forthcoming.

“You just need to go,” they said.

And so Rand and I went with no prior knowledge and no idea what to expect, like our President plunging into the Middle East peace process.

Meow Wolf is a massive arts space, a mix of neon light and bright patterns that remind me of an early 90s childhood: of brilliant Lisa Frank stationary and mornings spent watching Mr. Wizard before heading to school. The current installation sprawling – part playground, part sculpture, it feels like a classic sci-fi novel and a choose-your-own adventure book in one.

The lobby and gift shop at Meow Wolf.

The building itself was once a bowling alley – it’s now owned by George R.R. Martin (yes, he of Game of Thrones fame – but fear not, despite some creepy undertones, the place is family friendly).

The premise is this: in a large, peaceful Victorian home, a child has gone missing. He’s disappeared into another realm after delving too heavily into a departed grandparent’s scientific research. And soon you, as a museum visitor, will follow suit.

The exhibit begins with the house, massive and meticulously constructed.

At first glance, everything seems commonplace, despite the fact that it feels like you are part of the weirdest open house ever – wandering through an actual home with a bunch of strangers.

But if you look closer, you’ll find that nearly every object inside reveals a clue to what may have happened to the missing child.

You rifle through books, you search through cabinets. You open up the fridge and find it’s a portal into another world.

At some point, may find yourself crawling into a dryer.

… or a fireplace.

And then …

It was part M.C. Escher, part Dali, part A Wrinkle in Time and The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

Rand, trying to figure it all out.

–

Every room is a work of art, everything is baffling, and all of it is wonderful.

–

Some parts of the other realm hearkened back to the house. Like this room of brightly colored coral …

… and the fishtank we saw earlier.

–

While other stuff seemed to stand on its own – spanning different genres.

–

There are helpers throughout – people dressed in lab coats who are entirely in character, mumbling facts and figures to themselves while reading clipboards, but who will help you should the need arise.

–

For someone who is always trying to make sense of things, Meow Wolf was a little frustrating. What exactly was I supposed to do? Was it a game? Was it art? HOW DO YOU WIN? The harder I looked for answers, the more elusive they became.

–

And I realized that there was no linear mystery to be solved, no clear end point. It wasn’t until I let go of all those ideas that I really started to appreciate the place.

–

Sometimes there are no simple answers. Sometimes life defies explanation. Sometimes, you just need to experience things for yourself.

The executive order is the manifestation of a multitude of shitty ideas. That all Muslims are terrorists. That denying refugees (many of them fleeing those exact terrorist groups we fear) into the United States will somehow make us safer. That Islam itself is the problem. And that somehow becoming isolationist will protect us.

It tries to draw a line of demarcation between “us” and “them.”

View of mosques from the upper floor of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul

Turkey was my first and only trip to a Muslim country. And I wondered if this line of demarcation – albeit a slightly different version – existed there as well. I particularly wondered if we would notice it more markedly as Americans, and, in Rand’s case, as a Jew.

Somewhat surprisingly, it did not, despite the fact that people rather instantly identified us as Jews (which I found jarring – a very, very small percentage of my ancestry is Jewish). Without preamble, the owner of a sweet shop walked up and offered me candies noting that they were Kosher; a tour guide looked at me for a moment, asked where my family was from, and the said, “You’re Ashkenazi, yes?”

I was dumbfounded. He explained that a large percentage of the population in Turkey had Jewish ancestry. New research suggests that Ashkenazi Jews descended from here. And while many Jews are leaving the country for Israel or America, it soon became apparent to me that the lines between “us” and “them” are greatly blurred in Turkey.

No where was this better captured than the Hagia Sophia.

No single religion can lay claim to it. It was originally built in 537 AD as a Greek Orthodox Cathedral, and remained so for nearly 900 years, despite a brief 50-year stint in the 13th century during which is was converted to a Roman Catholic church. It became a mosque until 1453 (after Constantinople fell at the hands of Sultan Mehmet II) and remained as such until the 1930s, after which is was turned into a museum. (In Turkish, the name is Ayasofya, a far more phonetic spelling of its name.)

Over the centuries it has been decimated by earthquakes, desecrated by Crusaders, pillaged by invaders, looted by the Ottomans. The copper roof cracked. The interior fell into disrepair and was damaged by moisture and decades of neglect. It was engulfed by fire and rebuilt, twice. Today it is in a state of restoration, one with an indeterminable end date. The building, majestic and massive, has been through so many incarnations that it’s impossible to tie it to one religion.

I suspect this concept resonated with Rand. He identifies as atheist, but he’s Jewish by ethnicity, and when we first met and he told me he loved Christmas so we put a Star of David on top of our tree.

Entering the Hagia Sophia, he was quiet and wide-eyed. When he finally spoke, it was to tell me that this was one of the most remarkable places he had ever seen.

The building’s mosaics harken back to its time as a basilica. There were saints and apostles, the virgin Mary and the baby Jesus.

Architectural details that looked distinctly like those I’d seen in Catholic churches across Europe.

Did I mention I’m a recovering Catholic? There is something strangely familiar about every church I walk into. Every representation of a Savior I inherited, or a saint whose name I could never keep straight, is like an old friend. One who I don’t call often enough, because we really don’t see eye-to-eye on a couple of things and have grown apart.

Alongside these mosaics are giants disks with Islamic calligraphy written on them – erected when the building became a mosque.

This was perhaps my favorite feature of the Hagia Sophia – the positioning of the disks alongside the Christian motifs seemed to acknowledge that its new identity did not erase its old one.

We all exist together.

There were other points of familiarity in the massive Cathedral. The six-pointed star (at the top of the chandelier) is a common symbol of Judaism, but does not exclusively belong to that faith. We saw it repeated time and again across mosques in Turkey, Rand pointing it out to me each time.

Today, different groups each have their designs on the Hagia Sophia. Some say that it should be be restored to its original function as a Christian Church. Others argue that it should be a Mosque. In the meantime, there is a small space designated as a prayer room for the museum’s Christian and Muslim staff. Twice a day the call to prayer rings out from the minarets of the Hagia Sophia. But because it is a museum, visitors may enter without removing their shoes, and women are not required to cover their hair, as we did in the mosques throughout the city.

In the present, the Museum straddles the lines of demarcation that so many are trying to draw in indelible ink. There is no us or them, there is simply a long and storied history written in calligraphy and mosaic.