Individual and Community

Istanbul, Turkey
October 12 2009

erin writes:
We’ve made it to Istanbul and while the other cities were interesting and often beautiful, Istanbul is wonderful. Full of windy streets filled with children playing, merchants selling fruit and nuts, clothes, rugs,and everything imaginable, and/or mosques or historical relics. And it also a city of sounds. The prayer call is broadcast on loudspeakers 5 times a day. We have mostly just been wandering the streets. Yesterday, we were at a cafe under Galatia bridge. The bridge is constructed with the road over the top and then restaurants and cafes underneath. You can sit and look out over the water and back at the mosques and the palaces on land –so you have a mix of tourist, but also locals, many on dates. In addition there are tons of fishing lines hanging from the top portion of the bridge that fall past the bottom section and you can see the lines and the buckets being hauled up and down. During our time there we only saw one fish actually being caught and we watched the fish being hauled in. All of a sudden, when it was almost at the top of the bridge, it fell off the hook. This Turkish man, walking in a nice suit, with his date, got hit on the shoulder with the fish. There was a mad scramble for the fish. The waiters caught the fish and then gave it to the man—I guess if it hits you, it’s yours.

In the next couple of days, we’ll probably head over the the Asia side of Istanbul and spend some more time at the Grand Bazaar.

With the exception of the windy streets making it easy to get turned around, Istanbul has been fairly easy to negotiate. However, we have been lucky to have my brother with us at points. For example the street signs in Belgrade (and train announcements, etc) are written in Cyrillic script while the map was in roman lettering—not so helpful.

And, we are of course all fighting off or succumbing to various illnesses, but still managing to get out and explore.