I booked an airport transfer to my hotel in Istanbul while waiting for my flight at Heathrow. So, at Ataturk Airport, one of my longstandng ambitions was realized when I walked into the arrivals area to find someone holding a sign with my name on it.
Queues at Ataturk airport were long, but quite fast, because the visa clerk just gives out stickers, and the passport contol officer just stamps them, and neither really looks up. And there's not much visibly going on in the customs area, either. For all the queueing, I felt I wouldn't have had trouble getting into Turkey had I been a crude robot made entirely out of crack carrying an explosive passport. (That probably isn't true. I probably would have had trouble with that.)
The drive into Istanbul goes along the Sea of Marmara. This coast is a very long stretch of parkland, with brightly-coloured plastic playgrounds and soccer fields enclosed by high green fences. It was Sunday evening when I got in, and the parks were full of families barbequing; when the car stopped in traffic, there was a strong smell of charcoal briquettes. The road divides the park from blocks of tightly-packed low-rise apartment buildings with peeling paint.
We stopped in traffic beside a wedding party. Women with babies in slings walked from car to car, begging. One of them stood in front of the bride and groom's car, a brand-new Volkswagen Passat, talking at the driver through the windshield. when the car in front began to move, he waved her away. We passed through the Theodosian Walls, which have been heavily reconstructed; they left a gap for the road.
Inside the old city, the driver paused repeatedly to talk to people on the sidewalk. It was obvious he was asking for directions, but I couldn't believe at first that he was hailing total strangers in this very casual way. I thought, how lucky that he keeps running into people he knows.
The hotel has a rooftop terrace. They advertise views of the Blue Mosque, which may once have been true, if the building across the street is newer than it looks, or the terrace used to have a trampoline. Far more reliably, it has a view of an elderly Turkish gentleman in his underpants sitting on a couch in an apartment opposite.
My room looks out over the courtyard, where there is a strange, abandoned shack with a corrugated metal roof. Opposite my window, about twenty feet away, is a workshop where mustachioed men in their undershirts operate old sewing machines. They carry on working, and intermittently playing loud Turkish pop music, until late in the evening.
From my room, I hear the calls to prayer. There are 6 a day, but I've only heard those in the afternoon and evening. They're long, mournful chants sung over loudspeakers.
Down the street from the hotel is a square with a broken fountain that's being repaired by workmen with trowels and shovels. There are restaurants on all sides, and their patios have grown in towards the fountain so far that the square has almost disappeared. The rest of the area is a crazy jumble of old buildings. One has a thriving cafe at street level, but is a crumbling ruin above. One shack has been built atop another, entirely separate building. It's clearly inhabited, with chickens wandering around in an adjoining coop. Istanbul has been fought over, sacked, and rebuilt more than once, and, like Rome, you get the feeling that people eventually began to think, "why bother tidying up?"
Some of the buildings have been brightly painted, but look like they've passed through a war or two since. Side streets are dark and narrow, with laundry strung up across them. There are skinny stray cats everywhere. You see people (always men) actually working at trades: Sewing, or portering, or baking -- doing things that aren't necessary in richer countries, where most people work at desks and food and clothes just appear in the shops. Men push wooden carts of fish or fruit up and down the steep streets. It looks like something you might do for the tourists, but there are no tourists around.
Rush hour is extraordinary. The afternoon call to prayer is also more or less the signal for everyone to get into a car, drive it into the streets, park it, and start honking the horn.
On Monday afternoon, there was a fire in the neighbourhood. Three fire trucks parked on the street and soaked an already-ruined building with water. The street is on a steep slope, and the water formed fast streams at its sides, carrying some surprising things with them, including a high-heeled shoe. One of the firemen sat on the street against the truck, smoking a cigarette and chatting with the shopkeepers.
I haven't yet seen that many of the sights, but the Grand Bazaar is about ten minutes up the slope from the hotel. It's an enormous old labyrinth of shops ("over 1200", says Wikipedia), as though someone had asked Daedalus to design a shopping mall. Maybe to house a teenaged minotaur. There are tiny cafes and clothing stores, but most stalls I saw displayed jewellery, including huge spools of gold chain you can presumably buy by the length. Men darted about carrying trays of tea and snacks, both within the bazaar and out in the streets.
