More and more often I run into confused, freshly peeled faces just back from a visit to Istanbul who they tell me, “Istanbul is really cool.” Maybe they mean it well. Maybe…

Because when you read between the lines, there’s more to this sentence than just what your eardrum can detect.

Here’s a look between the lines:

„I was totally surprised that Istanbul is such a great city, because most of the Turks here in Germany are kind of trashy.

If you look at the shisha lounges and tanned boys in Jack & Jones jackets, you can’t imagine that the Turks in Istanbul are modern and hip. They drink Moscow Mule and get tattoos with geometric patterns on their forearms. It’s incredibly mind-blowing!“

What’s crazy to me is everything that can make a city so modern and cosmopolitan:

Electronic beats, exclusive alcohol, expensive labels and patinised brass lamps.

According to that pretence, progress is something that you can buy. And modernity is something that we copy from Instagram accounts and put into our lives without knowing if we really like it.

A place like Wanne-Eickel can be quickly turned into a hotspot when social media personalities like Bibbi, Kimi and Gigi are photographed with a detox salad at a café and people like it 515,922 times.

Perhaps we should rethink our view of coolness. Those of us who apparently do not want to focus on the money and are more interested in culture as a cult are constantly falling into this trap, our view blurred by the daily specials written on the chalkboards.