Istanbul: The spice must flow!

A picture of a turkey. Taken in Turkey. Get it?
We saw everything, and I mean everything. Including wild cats and dogs. Not something you expect to see in a modern city, but there you have it. The dogs roam in mangy packs, napping on curbs, startling unsuspecting tourists and scrounging through the piles of trash. The cats are always watching but not as visible, until you sit down to eat. Then they join your party of two to make an awkward threesome. Making their presence known, begging pitifully and insolently dodging the kicks of the hustling waiters.


I can haz Ottoman clay pot dinner now?


On the last day we didn't know what to do so we pulled up one of those ”Top 10” lists on the Internet. After checking out some amazing bikini models we finally got around to a list on Istanbul. Did most of those our first day. "Top 15". Done. (Ok, we skipped the museums but that’s because we’re uncouth, uncultured louts, and we didn’t do a Turkish Bath because we already had our showers for the month.) "Top 25"? Ah, there's one we haven't done. So off we went to a cemetary.

A revelation came to me during the trip. By no means original, but new for me. There is this idea that everyone seems to have when traveling. They have to get off the beaten track in order to have the “best” experience. Escape the crowds. Blend in with the locals. Avoid tourist traps. And that approach has value and can lead to extraordinary moments. Christopher Columbus' cruise comes to mind. But sometimes, once in a while, it's worth it to stay on the path. Think about it. There’s a reason there’s a path. Not always a good reason, but sometimes, once in a while. it's because where the path goes is really cool. Like the Galata Bridge. Gaudy. Lit-up. The trappiest of tourist traps. But imagine one of Portland’s bridges with a lower deck that is all restaurants and shops and pedestrian walkways. The traffic goes by overhead but underneath you walk just above the river or sit and have a beer in a bean bag chair and watch the river and the ferries and the people stroll by. Tourist Moment 101. But totally cool.



What else did we do? We visited the mosques, we climbed the Galata Tower, we skulked through the Grand Bizarre (den of iniquity, cheap souvenirs and unconvincing knock-offs) and the Spice Market (why do people who never drink apple tea or cook with saffron suddenly feel compelled to buy so much of it here?), ducked underground to explore the Basilica Cistern, and we took a six hour tour down the Bosphorus Strait. We left the pier in Europe in the morning...


Europe in the rear view mirror.

One of two Golden Gate-esque bridges connecting the two continents.
Had lunch in Asia in the afternoon...


The Black Sea in the distance.

Luncheon in Asia.

Asia in the rear view mirror.
...and were back in Europe for dinner. Kind of a neat trick of geography that.


Pulling back into Europe.

So much to see and experience.










Bewildering and beguiling city. It's incredible how much ground we covered.


That's a lot of ground covered.
Mostly we just did a lot of walking. And avoiding. After a while you develop this ability to see everything and nothing. It feels like a super-power but it’s not. It’s a survival-power. No matter where you go someone is trying to sell you something. Anything. Everything. It’s all for sale. And it's all negotiable. At some point you just want someone to tell you a price, pay it, and be done with it. It's two Turkish lira to one Euro so I'd get to the point where I was haggling over five lira and realize we were talking about two euro and just be done with it.

It all looks authentic and it's all a fake (one guy admitted the jeans were fakes, but they weren’t fakes made in China, they were fakes made right there in Turkey!). Whatever. You can't stop to look at anything or you get swarmed. They start them young with boys who look no older than 8 or 9 manning the stalls or walking the streets with product, already masters of the come-on lines in multiple languages and unafraid to hear a “no” and totally convincing. As the Italians say: "pesante" which doesn't mean peasant although there are a lot of poor people. It means heavy. As in tiring. Wearing down. Constant stimuli (stimuluses?)


In front of one of the many gates into the Grand Bizarre.

Spices, get your sitting out in the open day after day spices!

Note the sign in the bottom, center of the picture.
The food was interesting. Very heavily spiced, but with a spice market that big I guess it has to be. The bread was amazing. Flat bread but not really pita but also large loaf French style bread. Served with every meal. Bottled water came automatically with every meal (in a cool mesh basket like the tee-totalers version of chianti), but so did a charge for it. Fish featured prominently but coming from Ancona, I wasn’t that interested in eating more fish. Lots of lamb and chicken in dark, rich sauces. And of course, kebab. Everywhere, anywhere, at any time of day or night, kebab. Cheap, expensive, wrapped, between bread, terrible, delicious, spicy, plain, lamb, chicken kebab.

Our first meal there, Sean tried to order some humus and pronounced it in the American way, "hoomus" and the waiter said they didn't have any. They brought the English speaking waiter and Sean carefully repeated his request along with the requisite hand signals. (Who knew there were hand signals for humus? Apparently there are.) Moments later a plate of butter arrived. We tried again the next day and again they didn’t know what we were asking for. I saw it on the menu so I pointed at it and the waiter smiled and said "humus" with the guttural, throat clearing sound on the first syllable like I used to hear in Africa. Pronouncing it that way the rest of the trip, we were set. One meal we had the Ottoman clay pot stew where they cook everything in a sealed clay pot and then break it open at your table to serve it. Ours had lamb, mushrooms, eggplant, and onions in a gravy over rice.


Don't be fooled. That's not our meal. It's just a picture I took from the internet. But it's a lot better than the one I managed to take.


Our waiter breaking our pot. Who was it that said, "You have to break a few pots to make Ottoman clay pot stew?

After a year of Italian food though, it was all pretty rough on my stomach. All Italian all the time makes for a wussy digestive track.

One of the best parts of the trip was the exchange rate. It’s basically 2:1 with the Euro so the whole time I felt like I was getting a 50% discount on everything. Irrelevant that the starting price was often close to double what it would cost in Italy so the discount just got me back to equal cost; it still felt good and in many cases it made things feel downright inexpensive.

So I lost another camera in Istanbul. Can you believe it? I really have a problem holding onto them. My first camera was stolen in Courchevel and then I lose its replacement in Turkey. At least I'm in exciting places when it happens. I think it slipped out of my pocket while we were having dinner in a bar one night. At some point, I come back from the bathroom and realize my right pocket is empty. My camera pocket. We look all over around the table but come up empty. Go back to the hotel at the end of the night thinking maybe I didn't bring it (but I know I did, I always do) and search everything. Nothing. Zero. No luck. Sean says maybe someone found it at the bar and turned it in. I say maybe but I’m feeling surly and starting to sulk and I think, “We've been getting ripped off by everybody since we arrived so what are the odds that if it was found it was returned?” Oh well, might as well go ask. Walk back to the bar, angry at myself and ranting the whole way about how unfair life is and why does this have to happen to poor old me. Quite pitiful actually.

Get back to the bar. "Bartender," says I, "perchance was a camera turned in this evening?"

"Maybe. What kind?"

"Black Lumix. It will have pictures of the Bosphorus Strait on it."

Some digging around in a drawer behind the bar with a goofy grin on his face and I start to think, "No way! He's got my camera!" He pulls it out and asks if it's the one. Yeah it's the one. Yahoo! Big thanks and hearty handshakes all around. Grinning like an idiot. No tip. I am an idiot.


My Heroes!
So, funny detail. Early in the night, I noticed a waiter taking goofy pictures of the bartenders and thought, “That’s weird,” but maybe it's for their website or Facebook or something. Looking at my camera later, I see those pictures. The waiter picked it up and turned it into the bar and I saw it happen but I didn't make the connection at that point. Ok, maybe I was drunk. Not my fault. Efes Beer, Turkey’s beer, is wondrous. I think it’s the same stuff that got Noah in all that trouble all those years ago. Without overstating matters, it’s one of the easiest drinking beers I’ve ever had.

So I got the camera back. Istanbul. I saw Ya and I'll be back. Maybe. It's all negotiable.