Catching up on Istanbul stuff: Day 3

I've caught up with Istanbul blogging!

Sarah and I have a lovely day of airport-sitting ahead of us (airport-sitting being like baby-sitting, only you sit on airports instead of on babies) as we head to Amman, Jordan, via Cairo… so I’ve decided in the meantime that it’s time to catch you all up on our doings this past week in Istanbul.  Some of the things we did day 3 we mentioned in the Christmas letter posted below but I’ll try to do more detailing here and add days 4-7 on to that, as well.  I’ll give each day a separate post so you don’t get overwhelmed by TMI and so that you can skip and skim what you would like…

On Wednesday, Sarah, Emily and I went to do some more generalized exploring, which included mostly just walking around.  We started out the day with a really good work-out, hiking up the steep hill that our hostel is located on, to the top where Taksim Square is.  We then walked down Istiklal Caddesi, the wide, ritzy boulevard that is usually crammed with pedestrians that must be parted like the waters of the Red Sea by the occasional street trolley making its way up to the square.  It’s a VERY Western-looking part of town; we could be in any major city in Spain, or France, or the U.K., or even the U.S. – many of the stores are the same, and there are plenty of places advertising “Gloria Jean’s Coffee”, “McDonald’s” and “Starbucks”, among others.  Istiklal ends at Galata Tower, which at the time of the Turks’ conquest of Istanbul in the 15^th century formed the highest point of Constantinople’s city walls on the northern side of the Golden Horn River (Constantinople did not include the Asian side of the Bosphorus – we checked).

It is also advertised as being the tallest original preserved tower in the world – I’m not sure how true that really is, but it was satisfying to go up and have such a spectacular 360-degree view of the entire city of Istanbul divided into three parts by the Golden River and the Bosphorus:

We then walked down towards the Galata Bridge (over the Golden Horn), which we could see from the tower:

…and crossed on foot so that we could walk by all the fishermen that line every square foot of the sides that are not used by boat traffic.  From what I can tell (don’t quote me on this), they catch little fish with small bait and then use those small fish to catch bigger fish that they sell to the fish-sandwich vendors on the two land ends of the bridge, and they sell the extra small fish that they catch to other fishermen:

On the other side of the bridge, we couldn’t find the pedestrian tunnel that goes underneath the major thoroughfare (which we have since located and used), so we crossed six lanes of Istanbul traffic, which was “fun” if you would describe near-death experiences as such.  This had its advantage, though, as it landed us right alongside a large local market (next to the tourist bazaars, but actually used by local people who want to buy normal, every-day things).  We wandered through, and enjoyed not being solicited as much by ridiculous things like “Can I help you spend your money?”  There were spices, dried fruits and nuts, sweets (Turkish delight, baklava, etc.), brooms, yo-yos, fish with their eyeballs gazing out at us, cow stomachs and hooves, dried eggplant and chilies on strings, cheap nail polish, every ridiculous item you could think of with the blue evil-eye on them (including sparkly, Styrofoam wands with ribbons), terrifying dolls and stuffed animals that shook their heads at passers-by in the creepiest way possible, and stores with “Spor Ceket” (sports jackets), among a million other things.  We bought some pizza-like Turkish bread and some lasagna-like Turkish pizza for our lunch and sat down to eat on the edge of a flower bed in a nearby square outside the Yeni Camii (“New Mosque” – actually 400 years old).

I was interested in going into the Yeni Camii, observing that it looked similar to the Blue Mosque on a smaller scale from the outside but that it was more frequently used for prayer by locals.

It was prayer time at the moment, so we sat in the courtyard for a little while, waited until worshippers were finished pouring out the front door, and then approached the entrance to take our shoes off and cover our heads with the scarves that were provided for visiting women.  There were other people in “line”, including two young women wearing very short skirts who appeared to speak Turkish, and a group of older women in scarves and robes who yelled at them and argued until they turned away.  The man in charge of dispensing scarves and regulating modesty in the mosque stood on the sidelines and let the female worshippers take care of it – it wasn’t, after all, the men who were regulating female modesty in this case, which I was struck by.  We entered the mosque and there were still a few men praying in the main room and women in the back behind a wall of lattices doing the same.  The mosque structure and style were very similar to the Blue Mosque’s but on a smaller and less grand scale.  We stayed for just a few minutes before leaving again – I was glad to have gone in but it didn’t really require much more looking.

We then headed for the Hippodrome, which was once a stadium in which chariot races and other such violent events like the murder of the entirety of the disgraced Janissary corps took place.  Emily and I were really excited to go and see this place and couldn’t quite understand why Sarah kept trying to dissuade us from going by saying “There really isn’t much to see.”  So we went to where the map said the Hippodrome was and realized that it really is just a big, oblong, rather uninteresting park and that we had walked through at least six times already.  Emily and I were disappointed, and Sarah triumphant.  Instead, we headed to the Museum of Turkish and Islamic art which was nearby and spent an hour admiring the amazing illuminated Qurans and the enormous ancient carpets before taking the tram back to our hostel.

In the evening, we went to a hamam, a public Turkish bath where you can pay a small fee to bathe and be massaged – hamams are apparently common throughout much of the Muslim world, and I had already been to a hamam in Morocco when I went with IES (stories that I shall hopefully tell another day).  This hamam turned out to be vastly different from the dark, steamy upstairs room I had squatted in with 20 other women to dump pailfuls of water over myself in Rabat.  We were greeted by a lovely Turkish woman who brought us towels and led us into a large, clean marble room.  There were faucets with marble basins filling with warm water and we were given bowls and left for a long while – enough to think we’d been forgotten about – to pour warm water over ourselves (i.e. have water fights).  The woman who had greeted us finally came back in and proceeded to scrub each one of us on a marble platform in the center of the room, ‘til we lost a layer of skin that came off in gross grey rolls, followed by some soap magic that produced mountains of suds that she covered us with and then bathed and massaged us.  I, unfortunately, am apparently abnormally ticklish, so I couldn’t help but squirm and giggle and she was confused as to why.  Despite the giggle-fit, I have never felt so relaxed and so (literally) squeaky-clean.