"We should walk to Asia."

My husband's suggestions sometimes tend toward the ridiculous ("Have triplets! We'll name them Glimmer, Glimpse, and Glow!") but a week-and-a-half ago, inspired by the Walk Out, he had a damn good idea.

"Asia?" I squinted into the distance.

"Asia."

It was mid-morning in Istanbul. We had just finished a huge breakfast and were heading fast into vacation stupor, that baffling state of inertia that occurs when anticipation of a whole day off is compounded by pressure to see everything worth seeing.

A walk, however, sounded perfectly doable. A walk to Asia sounded perfectly doable and unbearably exotic. This was Istanbul, after all, the city where East once met West over a little something called the fall of Constantinople. This was the land of sultans, harems, minarets, and that song by They Might Be Giants.

I pulled myself into a wobbly stand. "Last one out the door is lokum."

The best thing about Istanbul, not including the food, textiles, natives, and Escher-esque staircases that connect Byzantine aqueducts to Europop nightclubs, is the location. The only city in the world to sprawl across two continents, Istanbul has been the life of the global party for centuries, hosting the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires while retaining a permanent air of mystery. Staring across the Bosphorus to the Asian side from the rooftop of our hotel had become a nightly ritual. What in the world went on over there? How did this whole "separate continents" thing work, anyway? The idea that we could just hoof it over never occurred to me.

And this, as much as anything, is the best side-effect of the Walk Out--the inspiration to walk anywhere I (or Jed) can think to go. Later that day, stumbling through a park on the more-manicured-less-frenetic Asian side of Istanbul, I kept trying to picture the globe in my mind, that span of water and rock we had crossed with our own feet (and a well placed bridge). While we've always loved traveling, walking through Turkey made us see the country in a way we never would have from the window of a vehicle. Are we super-walkers among pedestrians? Hardly. But as mere mortals in a foreign land, we managed to leap two big continents in a few reasonable bounds. Some day, the triplets will be impressed.

Mira

Brooklyn, NY by way of Istanbul, Turkey