On our second day in Instanbul, we ventured into the Historical District to walk and check out the Grand Bazaar, Hagia Sofia, and the Underground Cistern. Grand Bazaar is a sprawling indoor market filled with colorful, ornately decorated ceramic plates, stunningly gaudy jewelry, mountains of cascading scarves, pricey carpets, and over-the-top glass mosaic lanterns and globe lights. It’s a sight to behold. We sampled Turkish Delight (those cubes are an acquired gelatinous texture), and got invited in for tea while admiring Turkish rugs. One rug salesman caught my interest when he invited us in for tea and told me that he had actually been to my home state. I wouldn’t have believed him except that he specifically said he’d been to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he sold $120,000 in rugs, his best one day sale ever. He relayed the story about getting a business card in Turkey and calling it several years later when he was in New York (where there is an Aberdeen, but, as he soon discovered, not the same Aberdeen where they ordered all of the carpets). He had to drive 3 days to deliver the carpets, and he admitted being “a little disappointed” with the appearance of the town (there’s not much there).
At Hagia Sofia, Mark and I rented a shared headset that informed us about the historical particulars of the church turned mosque. I couldn’t help but think about my dad’s childhood stories of grandpa Lohan tying the siblings together after they had fought; it was his way of teaching them to work together and get along. Mark and I had been arguing earlier in the morning, and here we were tethered together by earphones. We laughed everywhere we moved because we had to communicate about every detail of where we wanted to move and what we wanted to listen to. It was exactly what we needed.
Our last stop was the Underground Cistern, which was my favorite. The Basilica, as it’s also called, is an underground room with 12 rows of 28 round columns. The 105,000 sq ft room used to be filled with the water supply for the Great Palace of Constantinople and Topkapi Palace. I especially liked the 2 columns that had a snake-haired, protective Medusa turned on her side and upside down.
I enjoyed the miles of walking around town, admiring the architecture and sampling lattes and tea along the way. I loved figuring out the metro (subway), bus lines, and franikular systems. I liked the trendy, attractive styles in the windows (skinny jeans, tall boots, high heels, flowing feminine tops, colorful felt winter jackets), and the sounds of the bread salesmen pushing their carts through the street each morning yelling “Gaverick!” I loved watching women lower baskets of money down from their third story windows to buy bread from the salesmen below. I loved hearing Evrim explain that they did this because they were “lazy Turks.” I loved going to buy vegetables from the friendly entrepreneur at the street corner. The only words I knew were “Marahaba” and “Teshekuler” (Hello, and Thankyou), but somehow we managed to make the sale work every time. I loved the feel of Istanbul, the small shops with big windows, the open doors (despite the cold), the location (sprawling unique apartments with winding streets through the hills by the sea), the décor (ornate, traditional, colorful couches, drapes, and place settings), the food (bread carbs, white cheese, olives, tiny cups of tea, bakalava, whole fat milk- the kind of eating where my mouth celebrates and my stomach says, don’t worry, you can eat less tomorrow). I like Istanbul so much that I could easily envision myself living here for a few years. I wish it wasn’t so far away from family, because that’s the one factor that keeps Turkey from being the perfect place for grad school.
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