Beyoğlu, Istanbul [GP:Istanbul]. Partly Cloudy, low 30s
I am enchanted by İstanbul, but am still trying to figure out exactly how this place works. Once, maybe twice today I could almost close my eyes and imagine I was in Cairo, but that would probably have resulted in my being plowed over by İstanbulus hurriedly rushing somewhere. I don’t know where all these people have to get so quickly, but everyone always seems to be rushing somewhere.
Strolling through Istiklal this evening, hot, sweaty, and just sort of enjoying my leisurely stroll down the shady side of the street, I was struck by the sheer variety on offer in this city. So far I have seen more transvestites than I’ve seen anywhere else (including San Francisco); trendy Eurotrash boys in desperate need of a reality check; women wearing five inch heels attached to their feet with straps that have less substance than rubber bands; German tourists (wearing shirts, which is damn near overdressed for them); women in headscarves; women in niqabs, the face veil that leaves only a slit for the eyes; and lots of people riding on motorscooters hither and yon *ciao*. Yes, it’s a big crazy melange of the type that I thought only existed in Armistead Maupin novels or John Waters films.
Today’s tour program was of the minimalist variety. We started off in the Egyptian market, which was an immediate one hour break so that the shop-a-holics could satisfy their urgent desires. Much – much! – smaller than the Khan al-Khalili in Cairo, it was, nonetheless a satisfying stop. Rob and I bargained hard for a couple of gifts, which we then had to carry to our next destination: the Bosphorus Ferry.
The ferry – advertised in the tour program as a cruise, which was a bit of a misnomer. It was a local ferry that a lot of tourists use because it goes from the port on the Golden Horn most of the way up the Bosphorus. There was no deck on the roof, and since we passed most of the stuff I wanted to take a picture of within the first 30 seconds, it was a nice experience, but I didn’t get the stellar photos I had hoped for. (Although I’m running out of disk space, so that might not be a bad thing.) Wound up in Saniyar, most of the way up toward the Black Sea, for lunch. İstanbul is spread out – think New York. Cairo could easily fit in the downtown area with room to spare. İstanbul has 15 million people – maybe – in a huge area. Cairo is 20 in an area barely the size of the District of Columbia. Here I am telling people you can’t compare the two and I’m actually doing it. I guess I can’t help it, since İstanbul, Cairo, (and Tehran, which I can’t speak for) are the Middle Eastern megacities, and so far the only thing I’ve found in common between them is that they both have people, buildings, and water. Everything else seems to operate on a completely different level.
Free time this afternoon. Rob and I went to the Grand Bazaar and abandoned our plans to split up pretty quickly for fear that we’d never find each other again. He bought yet more gifts for his girlfriend (she better realize what she has in him – if they ever split up, I have a long list of friends to set him up with), and I dropped … well, a lot more than I planned to spend. Let’s leave it at that.
Evening stroll through Istiklal. I like İstanbul – will it become one of my favorites? Who knows. So far, though, I’m enjoying it.
Later. Dinner with Rob, boys’ night out on the cheap – the salad was a bad move on my part (or, rather, created some bad moves on my part… Always fun to go to bed with a Pepto-Bismol nightcap). Dunno where Laura wound up tonight. Others went to a local concert – sounded interesting, but not for that kinda money and not for standing room only. I don’t do that for artists I like, let alone ones I’ve never heard of.
I was reminded over dinner of something. When we were driving to the Grand Bazaar this afternoon, the road over Atatürk Bridge into Sultanahmet turns into a road that passes through the archways of an old Roman-era aqueduct. I thought to myself that it must resemble Rome, but then I remembered: it doesn’t resemble Rome. When the aqueduct was built, this WAS Rome – the new Rome, built over seven hills to equal and surpass the original. In the midst of all of the hustle and bustle here, even more than in Cairo, it’s easy to forget that this city has been here for 2,000 years. While walking through Istiklal this afternoon, I wandered through a group of old Greek women and remembered that Istanbul still has a sizable Greek community – the only city in Turkey that still does. I wonder if the reason that the Greeks and Turks don’t like each other is that they’re exactly the same. Same folk dancing, same food, hell, even the countries look the same. Like it or not, they’re two sides of the same coin. So many words went back and forth – the yogurt-cucumber-garlic dip that the Turks call jajik is known throughout the world by its Greek name, tzatziki. The Greek word limani, port, went into Turkish. It’s back and forth, forth and back, and then Turkish bleeds into Arabic and Persian, Arabic blends in the south to become Swahili, Persian goes into Urdu and Hindi and onward. Boundaries in this part of the world are as fluid as the water in the Bosphorus, forming that most arbitrary of borders between Europe and Asia – and those two entities are separate only because the enlightened Europeans who devised the maps couldn’t stomach the idea that they might actually share the same continent with the brown, uncivilized barbarians to the east so they drew a line down the Urals and the Bosphorus and split the world in two. Guess what, folks? It didn’t work so well.
Anyway. It’s late and I need sleep. No more philosophizing over Pepto tonight…
Tags: bosphorus, greeks, istanbul, late-night-philosophy, Travel, turkey, turks
