Travel funnies 2012 (6) – Istanbul items

Travel funnies 2012 (6) –
Istanbul items
Torrey Orton
Aug. 22, 2012


One background thing of note
Istanbul was a much better event than I had ever considered it could be. My expectations were discoloured by my resistance to new major cultural differences, mixed with a sense that I already have enough such differences well-lodged in various parts of my being. This is not new for me in relation to travel options going back years. My China world started this way 35 years ago. The only really foreign place I ever spontaneously chose to live in was France 40 years ago, and of them all (visited and inhabited) it's the most unfinished for me, so it's always on the annual travel list.



Shoe shine guy
On the afternoon of our last day we were returning to the digs we had occupied for five nights to do a quick shower and final pack. At the top of the hill we climbed to the hotel we started passing a shoeshine stand – a guy a bit younger than us perched on a small stool purpose-built for the height requirements of shining a shoe on his polish box foot step – and he offered his services for the third or so time in our five days in the area. He was certainly right that my walking boots were more dust than polish and more scuffed than smooth. Jane and I did a quick visual negotiation and I agreed. The polish was the best I've ever had, commercial or self-applied. Along the way he talked about his present life, numbers of children and grandchildren, enquired after ours, and went back to the life of a lifetime polisher…not at all good that day; nil clients until us.


Back to the box. It was an art work in its own right – each polish container topped with a well buffed brass mini-minaret and set in a wood-framed tray. The whole box was carefully oiled, modelling the service on offer.


The melodious muezzin
On our last day about 1:15pm during lunch at Pandeli in the far southeast corner of the Spice Market the call to prayer broke out with penetrating power from the nearest minaret (all projected with full volume loudspeakers) in the finest of the 10 or so such events we'd heard in five days…a tuneful and peaceful rendition of a routine most locals would know, of which the most we could pick up was the "God is great" punctuations for completed phrases… but the guy could sing a chant in tune and in time. Plato was right – music is the voice of the gods, or was it the demons?


Magna chartas at Asa Sofya
This grande dame of churches was taken into the Moslem fold somewhat after the conquering of Constantinople in the mid 1400's. She had already been in service 700+ years by then. Her conversion was simple. Declared Moslem it in the name of Allah, add some minarets and de-decorate and counter-decorate a bit. Now a museum, its history is all on view. Apart from some mosaics defaced and partly reconstructed, there was a stunningly large series of what would pass for billboards if they were promoting local fabrics or eats rather than the Koranic phrases they contained - massively larger than the same kind of verbals to be found in the purpose-built, much younger Blue Mosque just across the plaza.


Touts with taste
More than once I had the almost joyous experience of seriously competent salesmen of fabrics or edibles or visits to parts well known or post card representations of what I'd missed or seen but not noticed should be signalled to others. Many of these guys (a pretty men-only scene, the streets of Istanbul) had perfect first moves which personalised unintrusively what we all knew was a commercial dance. For example, the café owner who remarked, "Nice shoes", as we padded by his establishment around dinner time, directing my attention to their aged colouring (NOT the boots of the polishing encounter above!). There followed a three or four step natter about the virtues of shoe aging which tailed off into a pleasant reiteration of his unspoken introduction to dinner services and untroubled acknowledgement of our not being quite at the dining time ourselves. A really striking characteristic of the tourist area touts wherever we went…just plain competent and human(e). A case of an unexpected personal truth as the medium of relationship building


Afternoon at the baths
The baths we visited were 500 years old give or take a few decades. The marble floors were smooth and slightly carved out from the passage of feet all those years, much as the portals of the Aya Sofya and Blue Mosque were …smoothly rutted like an old unmade road on clay based soils, with something like the same danger of slip-sliding around when wet. I'd never had a Turkish bath experience and wouldn't have on my own initiative. Like most things I do under some duress (that is, because I can't be bothered otherwise), I find interesting and enjoyable. Such it was with this. The heat was dense and carried in all the media supporting our presence – floors, walls, humidity… Relief was startling. Water at 20 degrees is a slight slap in an ambience of 40+C and 95% humidity. I'll be looking for its equivalent in Oz, but preliminary searches are not encouraging.


Driving in alleys – everyone's cutting it fine
About the only scary thing in the whole Istanbul experience started and finished our time here – driving. Taxis are chauffeured with a manic intensity ramped up by two entwined factors: drivers' need for speed and proximity of collision opportunities. Around the central tourist parts where we mostly were, streets mostly dated from a horse-drawn era. Mostly one way and mostly bordered on one side with parked cars and 3 foot wide footpaths and packed with wandering masses of other cars and pedestrians, a fluxing tapestry of moving metal and bodies, the latter flowing in all directions across the roads with a minimalist approach, from our Melbourne viewpoint, to personal safety.


You know that experience in Melbourne of people who step off a curb to the edge of traffic and start moving into the space which hasn't yet actually appeared in the traffic, failing which they will be scrunched by the same actuality? Well, Istanbul was that multiplied geometrically. I'm sure locals learn to judge where the pedestrians are going by those slight twitches of preparation for movement. They take a lifetime to learn to the same level of unconscious competence as the pedestrians, usually by early pedestrian experiences of their own. Remember learning to look left first when you are used to looking right? That's the level of the challenge.


Being on the starting edge of that trajectory was not entertaining. For us here, it's usually a simple 90 degree crossing of our direction of movement. There it's a 360 degree potential. The people we could see, and those who hadn't yet appeared in view, could go in any direction at any time and come from any direction at any time. Or, so it seemed. I haven't done the Istanbul road accident stats research yet to see if our apprehension in the act of travel was warranted, for our sake or others'.