Monday, May 30, 2005

Paul and I arrived in Istanbul in the early afternoon, having left Boston the previous evening. Our hotel was built inside a renovated prison dating to 1914, back in the days when they put the prisons downtown. It seems to have been for political prisoners, and not the sort of prison depicted in Midnight Express.

We first visited the Hagia Sofia, a fabulous domed church built around 530 in the city's glory days as the capital of the Roman Empire. It was the largest ancient building I'd ever been in. A scaffolding in the middle let us estimate the interior height at 12 stories. The main areas were finished with fantastic pieces of figured marble.

Hagia Sofia

Me in Hagia Sofia

Mehmet the Conqueror

Conversion to Islam

Capitals, Ceiling, and Figured Marble

Inside Hagia Sofia

Leading up the gallery was a staircase without stairs, a gently sloping ramp with switchbacks. The materials of construction were evident: Roman-style long bricks in concrete for the walls, large river stones in concrete for the floors. The gallery gave a good view of the mosaics which were still in good shape after 1600 years. The faces all had the same artistic flaw of making the face too big for the head. The eyes were generally about 3/4 of the way up the front of the head, not 1/2. The Christ infant seemed to have been drawn from a boy; the head was too small and the limbs too long.

Hagia Sofia was packed with tourists, who seemed less restrained than in the mosques. That's a polite way of saying they were obnoxious. One of the oldest great buildings in Christendom was not peaceful sanctuary it should have been.

Crowds and Babbling Tour Guides

Flash Photographers

As a non-Turkish-looking tourist, I was constantly approached by people trying to sell me something. Usually carpets. Most of the time I politely waved them off, but I struck of a conversation with an fellow in a white suit whose English was better than average.He had 3 girls with him, probably around 16, dressed in ordinary Western fashion with jeans and sweaters. When I told him I was from Boston, he said he knew the place well and rattled off a list of surrounding cities. He said he had lived in Florida for a few years, and showed me a Florida driver's license. A bit overdone. He then said the girls wanted to practice their English, so I talked to them. They asked giggling questions like, "Do you like Turkish girls?" Soon, the conversation made its inevitable turn towards his nearby rug shop and I disengaged myself and continued on my walk.

One carpet store tout opened with, "Hello. You walk like an American." For the rest of the day I was self-conscious of my walk, but I couldn't see how the locals walked differently.

We headed out the Grand Bazaar, a huge covered space filled cheek to jowl with merchants selling rugs, pottery, ornamental water pipes, ceramic plates and bowls, brass plaques, statuary, leather jackets, purses, scarves, rolls of fabric, leather shoes, court jester shoes, baubles, Islamic inscriptions on pottery or cast in brass, cell phones, antique clocks and record players, spices, sweets, and a thousand other things. There were both good deals on fine things, like rugs and textiles, and cheap tourist junk.

Some areas were thick with the blue haze of wood smoke where vendors made kebab. The aisles were packed with people walking, looking, talking, bargaining, eating. Stores were all small and eagerly hovered over by merchants, the owners themselves rather than the low-paid service employees found in the US. As well as negotiating prices, they would modify the product to suit. For example, belts were stocked in long lengths and cut to size and punched by the merchant.

Spices
Main Street of Bazaar	Open-air Kebab Grill

In one remote corner of the bazaar I came across some kind of informal stock exchange. A group of 20 men, standing and holding telephones, were shouting orders at each other and responding with gestures. They weren't using cellular phones but conventional cordless phones that must have had base stations within a few hundred feet. It didn't seem like they stayed for long, as they were just standing around at a corner and didn't have anything other than their phones. I supposed they were broking bets on a sporting match.

Ball bearing stall

Out of the Grand Bazaar and wandering randomly, I happened upon a machinery and tools bazaar. At last, a place that sold useful stuff and was free from touts. The layout was about the same as the larger bazaar, but there were around 30 merchants selling drill bits, end mills, calipers, motors, lathe chucks, commutators and bearings, as well as common hand and power tools. Each shop had several clones, selling almost exactly the same assortment of merchandise. None of the shopkeepers spoke English.

Obelisk

I sat down on a bench in a small park for a snack. I saw a shoeshine boy approach an across the park American, and walk away after a few seconds. He came over to me and started his patter about shoe shining. I could barely understand his words; he had a lisp and little mastery of English. However, I got the impression that he would be glad to offer a full line of services besides shoe shining. I couldn't get rid of him. He sat down beside me, kept talking along the lines of "shoe shine is guaranteed." "No thanks," I kept saying. When he set down his shoe shine stand in front of me, I finally got up and walked away. I wanted to ask the other American how he had blown off the shoe shine boy so efficiently, but he was gone.

Ruined House

I freshened up at the hotel and decided to explore a different direction. This led me away from the tourist district towards a residential part of town. Houses were jumbled together with little order, all made from different materials. There were more wooden houses than other old towns in Europe. I saw two wooden houses that had burned and been left to the elements. Built along a cliff was an enormous Roman-era retaining wall built with traditional brick arches, perhaps 10 stories high. It wouldn't have been a defensive wall given its location. A number of the arches appeared to have passages leading into the cliff side. At intervals there were the remains of roofs anchored into the face of it, from long-gone medieval houses built against it. Rubble lay at the bottom. No restoration or cleanup ever seems to have been done to the ruins of the city. Pieces of brick lay where they fell anytime between today and 1700 years ago.

As I was admiring an old school, the fellow who lived across the small street started a conversation. He said the school had been built in the 900s and was a live-in philosophical school. His house, too, had been built in the 900s and he invited me in. It had been built on a Roman villa plan with a large courtyard containing a bread oven. He had fixed it up a lot, improving the walls and adding a water fountain in one corner. He proudly demonstrated the fountain, which required some fiddling with circuit breakers. He was, of course, a rug merchant and had a number of rugs lining the entrance to the courtyard. I said I wasn't buying today, but I might come back. He seemed a genuinely nice fellow, not just a rug hustler.

Picked Through

There was a lot of poverty, but different in character from poverty in America. I remember seeing only one beggar, a man in a wheelchair with mangled legs. Otherwise, the poor were working at something, even if they only had a scale and charged people a few cents to weigh themselves, or used a spirograph toy to make designs on paper and sell them. A lot of people fished off the bridge for food. After the shops shut for the day, a horde of boys went up and down the streets picking through the garbage the merchants had thrown out. A typical picker would have a wheeled hand truck with 4 very large canvas bags on it, and would specialize in a few types of recyclables. They collected cardboard, cans, plastic bottles, scraps of cloth. A few were looking for good stuff accidentally thrown out.

At the end of the evening the streets were left in an awful mess. Most garbage bags had been ripped open, their contents picked through. The ever-present cats were going through the restaurant garbage.

Shoe Shine

Spirographologist

Selling Bird Seed

Weighing Service

Later, Paul and I walked through the old ruined part of the city I'd explored earlier, then along on the main Roman roads towards the aqueduct marked on the map. The aqueduct was impressive. Perhaps 10 stories high, it had two levels of arches, each wide enough for a lane of traffic. A 6-lane road went underneath it. It didn't seem to have been restored; it had just been built so well that it hadn't fallen apart. It stepped down about 30 feet at one point, the water cascading down stair steps to avoid a rushing flood. Grass was growing out of most of the cracks. Many of the arches had a peddler operating under them.

5th Century Aqueduct

Ancient Wall, Hanging Carpets

Ancient Wall

Itinerant Knife Sharpener

Near the aqueduct we saw an itinerant knife sharpener. He carried a massive pedal-cranked grindstone on his back with wrought iron legs and a large flywheel. Though not built to be portable, he had fitted it with shoulder straps and a back brace. He bent far over when carrying it. We passed him again later as he had set it up in the park, next to a fountain for ritual ablutions. He was washing the grinding dust off his hands into it.

Nearby we found the butcher district, several blocks of shops with similar displays of sheep carcasses in the windows. Most had entire sheep's heads, placed upside down in rows, eyeballs still in them. After staring at some large, white, vein-covered blobs for a while thinking they might be cow eyeballs placed pupil-down, it dawned on us that they were ram's testicles. Most shops had a large stack of stomachs outside, probably used more as containers than food. As far as I could see, there were no cow parts at all.

We went to Beyoglu, the hip side of town, in the late evening. We were amazed by crowds unlike anything we'd seen in Eminonu where our hotel was. The guide referred to Beyoglu as the "pleasure district," and we weren't sure what to expect. In fact the places on the main roads were quite tame, though I think there were some dodgy places down side streets. The streets were throbbing with locals on promenade. We started at one end of the long main drag, walked to the other end and back over four hours. The street is over a mile long, wide enough for 6 cars, but crammed with pedestrians.

Main Drag
At Night	Performance Artist

There were scads of restaurants, but it was hard to tell what would be good. We decided to follow a recommendation in the tour guide, the Sofyalia 9. It took some effort to find among the unmarked streets, but it was worth the time. The atmosphere was friendly, warm, and unhurried. First they came around with a large tray of cold appetizers from which we took two bean dishes, two green dishes and something that looked like yellowish mashed potatoes. The mashed stuff was like nothing we'd ever tasted before with a unique texture. Rather pleasant. We eventually deduced, by eliminating other menu items, that it must be eggplant and olive oil. One of the green dishes was some kind of marinated seaweed, perhaps an acquired taste.

Security

At the next table, a woman had called over a waiter to extract her purse, which seemed to have gotten hooked onto a chair with a large carabiner. The carabiner was the standard kind for hooking up ropes, about 4 inches long. It took the waiter a minute of careful wiggling to separate it from purse and chair. Was the carabiner sitting there and she accidentally clipped her purse into it? The mystery was solved when we saw the manager walking around with a handful of carabiners. He used them to discourage purse snatchers.

Baklava

We continued to walk towards Taxim park, thinking of the shop where we saw baklava dripping with honey in the window. We found it, a nice cafe, though a bit too brightly lit. Paul theorized that as electricity had become cheaper, they were still infatuated with being able to provide a lot of light, as a display of wealth. They hadn't yet gotten to the point of realizing that there is a right amount of light, and for a tea and dessert shop at night the amount is rather low.

There were several street performances going, some attracting a crowd which nearly blocked off the street. The standard of performance wasn't very high. One juggler really couldn't manage his big finale, balancing a pole on his forehead and juggling flaming clubs. Not that I could do it myself, but in Boston or San Francisco I think the street performers would be more talented, or else not attempt things they weren't pretty sure they could master. It wasn't just that he had an off night; we saw him again Saturday night and he fared no better.

Street Musicians

Another street-clogging scrum surrounded two musicians playing oboe and drums. They played "Hava Nagila," while a third man danced like a madman, kicking up his feet as he hooked his thumbs under his arms. When the song ended the dancer melted back into the crowd. He wasn't with them, he had just been inspired by the music.

The touts were out in force on the street. One came up to us and said, "I can fix you up with nice girl. You like nice girls?" Quite a few tried to entice us into their bars. They weren't easy to brush off; they'd stay with you for a few hundred feet despite plenty of "no thanks." Later, I found that a well-polished "Hayir" ("No" in Turkish) was much more effective at getting rid of them, as it established that we weren't just fresh off the boat. I never learned to say, "Thanks, but I only like polyester wall-to-wall carpeting."

Tuesday

Turkey isn't the place for introverts. Everyone is trying to make eye contact and engage me in conversation all the time. Besides the touts, even the hotel staff always try to make eye contact. Walking on the street requires constant interaction. They don't believe in walking on the right here: people walk wherever on the sidewalk they please. Often the sidewalks are narrowed by cars parked haphazardly so pedestrians have to squeeze into the traffic. Cars and people interact too: crossing a road always requires making eye contact with the driver. The constant give and take of bumper and shin is as if cars were just especially large people in a crowded space.

"Watch out," I told Paul, "people drive like Turks around here."

The central part of Istanbul is mainly a pedestrian city. While most streets have cars on them, there are 20 pedestrians to every car. I later read that there are 3 million cars for 30 million inhabitants. Most of those inhabitants are poor recent arrivals from the Anatolian highlands. A curious old loophole in traditional Islamic law allows a structure erected overnight to stand. Thus, the outskirts of the city teem with shanties built in the dark. Apparently there are more than a thousand new arrivals every day.

Woman in Chador

In Eminonu, the conservative side of the river where we're staying, it was mostly men on the street. They outnumbered women by at least five to one. The majority of women had their head covered either with a chador or a headscarf. There may actually be more men than women, as much of the population is recently arrived from the country looking for work. Or the women may stay home with the children.

As we walked along a side street, a police car zoomed past with lights flashing. It pulled over in front of a convenience store where two men were waiting and the driver jumped out. He ran over to one of the men and gave him a big Mediterranean kiss on both cheeks while the other two stood back and looked on approvingly. Then the other policeman kissed the other man while the first two observed. They went through all 4 pairings, one at a time, each watched with interest and approval by the others.

The city is thick with wild cats. They are well fed by the locals who leave trays of food and chunks of meat out for them.

Wild Cats

"Ruh-Roh! My Rung is Ruck!"

One of our favorite simple foods is the borek, an eggy, cheese-flavored pancake. Several shops had people making them in the window. The process involves sitting at a very low table, dressed as much as possible like an Anatolian peasant, while rolling dough.

Big Borek

Borek Maker in Window

Wednesday

It's surprising how bad the coffee here is. Places usually advertise tea, coffee, and Nescafe, Nescafe being the most expensive. I assumed it was a misuse of the brand name for some kind of good coffee, but it was in fact Nescafe instant coffee flavor crystals at about 3 times the normal concentration, making an undrinkable cup of bile.

Bad Coffee

Thursday

This is not a city where people do things alone. People always seem to work in pairs or larger groups. I watched two old men salvaging some packing crates. One held the hammer and one held the saw. They sort of alternated working on one board rather than dividing up the work in an efficient way. Delivery trucks always had two or more people in them. Stores never seem to occur alone either. While the American ideal is to have some exclusive franchise in an area, I never saw a store with a unique kind of merchandise. There was always another store with similar selection nearby. This gives the merchants the constant human interaction they need: to compete, undercut, form cartels, betray alliances, and generally maneuver against each other. The adjective Byzantine doesn't come from nowhere.

Statues and posters of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the general who is credited with founding the modern secular state of Turkey after WWI, are everywhere. He is the center of a personality cult, but seemingly a voluntary one. When Time Magazine had an internet-based poll to choose their Man of the Century in 1999, Ataturk came in first in the warriors and statesman category. He also won as best entertainer, best captain of industry, and best scientist. Even mis-spellings of his name rose near the top of some categories.

Ataturk is usually painted with striking blue eyes. Some of the portraits are black and white except for the eyes. Most people here have brown eyes so lighter colors get a lot of attention. I saw the famous picture from a National Geographic cover of a Pashtun girl with striking green eyes for sale in a number of shops.

Ataturk at University

Ataturk Poster

Green-eyed Girl

Paul and I went out to a fine dinner at a place called 5 Kat Terrace, deep in the side streets of a somewhat dodgy neighborhood in Beyoglu. As there are hardly any street signs anywhere we had to find it by matching the layout of streets, made difficult by the imprecision of our map. We found it, sauntered past two imposing door guards who appeared to be for a raunchy gay bar in the basement, and took a tiny elevator to the fifth floor. We emerged to a sybaritic restaurant decorated in harem style, with draped fabric on the ceilings and red fabric lamps, and a view over the Bosphorus. The food was good and we were pleased with the Turkish wine. The local ones are cheap, while imported wines are slapped with a 400% duty.

Thursday

Paul and I went down to the dock to catch a sightseeing boat up the Bosphorus. While waiting I got a local breakfast, roasted lamb and French fries wrapped in a pita, wonderful salty comfort food. The sightseeing boat was about half full, all tourists. Only a third of the tourists spoke English. Some were Chinese, some German, but as before many spoke a language which could have been Turkish but I couldn't make out. For all I know it was Albanian or Romanian, or some other language from the region.

The Bosphorous is beautiful. The land rises quickly on both sides to create a lovely green valley with sparking water in the bottom. It is an active shipping channel, the only route from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. In classical times, Constantinople could control shipping through the channel and levy taxes. Today, several container ships proceeded down to the Mediterranean while a couple of empty oil tankers, rudders half out of the water, proceeded up to the Black Sea. I was surprised by the size of the bridge on the tanker. Four stories high and 100 feet wide, it could have held two dozen workers. The tanker also seemed to have a lot of its own oil pumping gear rather than relying on fixed infrastructure in ports.

Relaxed	View along Bosphorus
Village and Boat
Sunset over Mosque	Sunset over Golden Horn

We got off the boat at a small fishing village on the European side of the Bosphorous and walked around the town. We got roasted corn from a sidewalk vendor and were pursued by a dozen small children, hoping to parley their smattering of English into corn for themselves. We walked along the docks. Most of the few dozen boats were working fishing vessels ranging from 15-foot skiffs to 40-foot trawlers. There were also a couple of tour boats, idle despite the lovely day in peak tourist season. The benches at the docks were entirely filled with older men, mostly wearing wool caps, watching the boats come and go and gossiping. We saw hardly any women around, the few in sight wore burkhas and shepherded children.

Feeling the call of nature, I asked a man on the street for a toilet, making the most of my Turkish language skills. "Tüvalet?" I asked. "Tüvalet! Tüvalet!" he cried, and ran off with a knock-kneed, loping gait. I wasn't sure if he was showing me where it was, or was just reminded of his own urgent need. I followed him anyway and found a public restroom where for 20 cents I found a clean, modern, marble bathroom.

Woman Working

We ate at one of the several fish restaurants displaying freshly caught fish out front. The artful display had flounder and several other kinds I didn't recognize. The menu listed prices per kilogram. Inside we asked for sea bass, and were rewarded with half each of a small fish, freshly caught and delicious.

Rather than wait for the boat back, we boarded a bus heading back to town. It was the most third-world part of the experience so far. The bus, a clanking, grinding, smoking Soviet-era relic, averaged no more than 10 miles per hour down the coast. The fishermen on the bus didn't seem to be in the habit of bathing. At the second town we switched to a taxi which whisked us back to Taxim Square, the upper end of the main promenade in Beyoglu. We sought out a cafe described in the guide as filled with "intellectuals in furrowed-brow conversation." Cafe Ara was pleasant and had a good din of conversation. It was hard to tell whether the brows were more furrowed here than is normal for Turks, but the place did feel sort of studenty. We ordered some coffee. Forty minutes later, we inquired about actually getting the coffee, and they eventually brought it. While we were waiting, we tried to get a picture of "furrowed-brow conversation," but sleep deprivation took over. Below is a small sample...

"Intellectual with Furrowed Brow," take 17

"Intellectual with Furrowed Brow," take 40

At 6 pm Robert showed up, our rendezvous agreed 4 days and 5000 miles ago working perfectly. We went back to the intellectual cafe for dinner. Dinner was good, a salad with grilled chicken. For desert I couldn't resist the "milk with mastic pudding." It tasted like tapioca, milk, and Elmer's white glue, and was larger than any desert I've had in North America. Paul got a chocolate cake the size of a brick. These people like their sweets.

We strolled down the main promenade, the busiest we had seen it. We were much less harassed by touts than previously. I don't know if that was because the restaurants were less empty on a Thursday night than earlier in the week, or because we looked less like bewildered tourists.

Friday

While walking around the bazaar, I was beseiged by touts. "Sir! Special price today! Sir! We have finest rugs! Excuse me, Sir! Hey! You know what my name is? Flexible Charlie!" (I'm not making that up.) Tired of being always taken for an American and addressed in English, I tried to put on my most French of facial expressions. Lips pursed, eyelids half-lowered and one eyebrow slightly raised, I tried to get touted in French. It wasn't enough. I still got addressed in English. Next time I'll have to take it to the next level: the black and white horizontally striped T-shirt, beret, and a Gauloise dangling insouciantly from my lower lip.

We then visted the Cistern of some Byzantine emperor, built in the fifth century. Above ground there is only a small entrance building, but stairs lead down into a vast underground cavern, 500 feet by 150 feet. The roof, around 25 feet high, is vaulted and held up by classical stone columns at 15 foot intervals. The columns were all different, some plain and some very ornate. Why did they carve ornate columns to molder in the darkness? I don't know. Maybe they were rejects from other projects. In the far corner, the columns had elaborate pedestals with carved Medusa heads.

Medusa in Cistern

We went for a delightful dinner at Lokanti, a rooftop restaurant on the hip side of town. Both the food and the view to the South of the Aegean Sea were fantastic. We lingered for hours over tea, wine, more tea, and port. This place had fearsome bouncers outside who blocked my path until they found my name on the list. Clearly, touts=bad, bouncers=good.

Robert in Paradise

View from Lokanti Terrace

Saturday

Paul left for home this morning, so Robert and I went to do some shopping. Following Lonely Planet's recommendation we went to a tile shop selling Iznik tiles which have a wonderful color and luster. The paint involves ground-up gemstones of various colors, so they have a metallic sheen. He got one with a traditional pattern of tulips.

I wandered into a carpet store down the street and found an unusual Cicim-style rug, embroidered like a kilim but with both warp and woof visible. It had a lot of features that seemed like successful experiments as well as some traditional patterns. I bargained him down from $360 to $305. I was so chuffed by the experience that I bargained for everything that day, and usually got at least a little bit off.

Delivery

We then went to the Grand Bazaar to look for gifts. I got 4 nice pashmina shawls for less than $15 each. I felt much more comfortable in the bazaar than before, no longer trying to brush past touts but actually looking at much of the merchandise and saying what I did or didn't want. I also got a bag of fancy large pistachios, and some assorted Turkish Delight. The fellow explained that Turkish Delight is made from honey and gelatin, usually with nuts added. I got some with pistachios, some with walnuts, and some with hazelnuts.

I still haven't found the perfect gift for the kids. Other than Turkish Delight, none of the distinctively Turkish things would appeal to them. Clothing and textiles mean nothing to them. An ornate water bong wouldn't be quite the thing. They would be very happy to get some of the things sold here that are too unsafe to be sold in the US, such as realistic-looking cap guns or air rifles, but I can't do it.

Then we went to Topkapi palace, built in the late 1400s to do most of the business of running the Ottoman Empire. It was the highest thing on the peninsula and had wonderful views out towards the Aegean and over the Golden Horn and Bosphorus. Overall, while it didn't compare to Versailles in impressiveness, it did seem a pleasant place for a few thousand civil adminstrators to work. They had a room full of reliquaries, the most notable being the sword of the prophet Mohammed. They also had some body parts from the Byzantine era such as part of a finger bone of John the Baptist, thankfully sealed in a box. Mohammed's life was better documented than Jesus's, and it's likely that the sword is genuine.

Fountain at Topkapi Palace

View from Topkapi Palace

Robert and I visited the mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent, built by the great architect Nisir around 1600. We had to wait outside until the services finished, but we were rewarded with one of the most beautiful buildings we'd ever seen. Its only flaw was the crappy electric lighting system, probably installed in the 1930s, which was suspended 10 feet above the floor by hundreds of cables rising to the top of the vault and visually cutting the grand space into thin little slices. During the day there is plenty of light from the windows and the lights; during evening prayers it would be better to aim floodlamps at the ceiling. Well, when they make me caliph I'll issue a fatwa about it. Maybe a few others too, come to think of it.

Suleyman's Mosque	Sun behind Minaret
Mosque Courtyard	Cemetery at Mosque

While we were waiting we looked at life around the mosque. Mosques are much more integrated into daily life than churches in the West. This one, like most classical mosques, had a school, kitchen, caravanserai, market, public baths and ablution fountains. Kids played outside, watched by the women, while the men went in to pray.

Girl at Mosque

Man Performing Ablutions

Before going in to pray, men wash themselves at the taps provided around the base of the mosque. This is a much more complete washing than the Christian ritual of crossing oneself with a drop of holy water. Each tap had a stool in front of it. The men would hang up their coat, take off their shoes, and turn on the tap. From the dribble of water they would wash their feet, arms, face, and neck. I didn't see women washing. It's probably forbidden as too provocative.

Down with Creationism

Up with Communism

Walking around the restaurant district, I was stopped in my tracks by a book on display entitled "The Disasters Darwinism Brought to Humanity" by Harun Yahya. The cover featured pictures of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Darwin himself superimposed on a background of rolling tanks and dead bodies. The dictators were in their characteristic poses: Mao reading a speech and the others saluting. Darwin, bearded and wizened, seemed to look on the destruction with equanimity. Flipping through it, each section explained how Darwinism had led to some crime against humanity. Many pages had a quote from the Koran. The back cover promised that when people came to know the scientific invalidity of Darwinism, it will spell the end of the harmful ideologies that convulsed the 20th century. Well, I won't hold my breath. I asked the seller how much, and he said "Free, take it." I'll shelve it between "The Origin of the Species" and "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

Fresh Fruit

Robert and I took a cab out to Beyoglu where we had a fine dinner at a small, friendly restaurant on Sofyali St whose name I forget. Fifty feet away, in front of his second-hand art gallery, the world's very worst DJ was in effect. His equipment consisted of a cheap 1970s record player -- the kind with the automatic record stacker -- and small detachable speakers. There was just one turntable, so there were thankful pauses as he queued up each new song. He would occasionally use his hand to slow down or speed up the record, but not in time with the music or anything. Sometimes he would crank up the volume, sometimes down, seemingly at random. At one point, after a couple minutes of silence, he put on the theme song to "Happy Days," cranked up so loud that the distortion made it hard to make out the words. Robert and I had to speak up to hear each other. One of the other patrons at the restaurant went over and disciplined him. Chastened, he played nothing but sad, schmaltzy Lawrence Welk-type music for the rest of the night at low volume.

Cart Vendor

After dinner, as we were walking up and down the main pedestrian street, two fellows in their 20s who spoke reasonable English approached us, one of them asking for a light for his cigarette, and engaged us in conversation. They were Turks from Cypress, in the leather goods trade. They were excited about the soccer game that night in which Greece was playing Turkey. One of the fiercest rivalries in sport. After a few minutes of conversation they had, by walking at different speeds, got us separated by several feet. Mine talked about how the EC and the US should ease sanctions on the Turkish part of Cypress, since they were getting along so well. Then they brought us together again and asked us to join them for a drink in a bar down a side street. This sounded pretty much like the classic "clip joint" scam, where they get us to pay for a round of inflated drinks. We said we'd keep walking, and they seemed disappointed but not upset. Later I realized that the one who asked for a light had lit his own cigarette halfway down the street.

It took a us a while to find the desert that intrigued us yesterday, but finally we found the store (and its two twins nearby) which sold ice cream in a theatrical style. The ice cream was much stickier than regular ice cream so the seller, dressed in red and gold vest and fez, could pick up the large glob of ice cream from the freezer and twirl it around. He put a cone in my hand, scooped out a small blob of ice cream, and pressed it into the cone. Then he yanked and the cone slipped out of my hand. He flipped it around a couple times, then held it while putting another spoonful on top of the first. He did a few more tricks with it, shouting "Oh-pah" each time, and finally gave me an ice cream cone. It tasted like Japanese Mo-shi ice cream balls, probably due to added starch that helped it stick together.

Ataturk in Village

Just as I had gotten comfortable here, it was time to go home. At the Ataturk Airport, portraits of the dear leader gazed down on me as I re-booked my flight back to San Francisco. A mere 23 hours of traveling later, I arrived home in Palo Alto. Istanbul is quite a bit farther than Western Europe, not to mention the extra 3 hours of jet lag. For travelers who have been to the usual places in Europe and don't mind a few rough edges, I'd recommend Istanbul. It's less than half the price of Paris, has plenty of history and curious things to see, and has lovely weather. Even though it can be hard to get a hotel in peak season, only a few parts of the city are dominated by tourists. And most of them aren't American tourists, so it feels fairly authentic. The friendly culture and slack attitude makes for fine evening strolls. There are some very good restaurants if you look for them, and the common food is tasty and comforting.

Recommendations

If you go, get the Blue Guide to Istanbul (which not every store carries) for the best historical, architectural, and sightseeing information. For current information like restaurants, we found the Lonely Planet book to be better than Time Out. Don't miss Lokanti Restaurant. You want to sit up on the terrace. The Sultanahmet Palace is a fine place to stay, at around $100/night.

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