To the right of the hotel, a family of stray cats is gnawing at scraps of raw chicken someone has fed them (1). They live in a little house that a tender-hearted shopkeeper has built for them out of bits of garbage. Across the street, a man sells mussels that have been sitting out in the sun in a tray for an unknowable length of time (2) wth nothing but a wedge of lemon to preserve them. Another sells cigarettes out of a sort of wheelbarrow (3). Up the hill, pedestrians and delivery trucks dodge each other on both the roads and the sidewalks (4).
In the Grand Bazaar, antique shops sell muskets (5?) and evil-looking daggers. In the surrounding streets, motorcycles and scooters push their way through the crowds (6). Some shops are on the ground floors of ruined buildings that, if they appeared in North America or western Europe, would be barricaded off and dynamited from a safe distance (7). One building has upper floors so rotten that several trees are growing out of the walls; at ground level, there's a row of busy shops. Others seem to incorporate bits of ancient Byzantine structures (8? Canadian law not clear).
In one of the narrow streets leading to the Galata Bridge, a fire truck is parked between two burned-out stores. Firefighters shovel out waterlogged debris, and locals help by carrying away bits of wreckage and scorched toy boxes (9).
Along Istiklal Avenue, a pedestrianized street much like a grand French boulevard, but rattier and more weatherbeaten, some of the grand 19th-century buildings seem to have been wantonly torn down and replaced by ugly modern ones (10). At the sides of the roads that lead down towards the Bosphorus, several of the city's lethargic stray dogs (11) snooze or mooch around. A pharmacy windows advertises Viagra, Cialis, and anabolic steroids (12).
South of the hotel is a stretch of fish restaurants clustered around a fountain that's undergoing renovation or repair, with bags of cement piled about and men working away among the tables (13). The fish restaurant Maitre D's murmur 'nice place' and try to sweep you to a table with big waves of their arms as you pass (but this kind of thing is not yet illegal anywhere).
Along the sea beyond this is a stretch of parkland where people have strung up hammocks (14) and set up barbeques (15). There's a path along a wide concrete breakwater that has an unprotected drop of four or five feet to the broken rock below (16). Here and there are toy plastic tables, each holding two rifles and a pistol (17!). These are air guns (still, 17). For a price, you can open up with them on bottles and strings of balloons that have been set up a few feet away on the rocks. Just beyond one of these target areas, a snorkeler swims (no extra charge is demanded).
At the end of this walk, there's a parking lot full of small motorhomes. In the water here, someone has dumped a truckload of bread (18), and a long, disgusting streak of bobbing loaves extends for fifty feet or so. Schools of fish feed on it all along this length.
Men fish all along the breakwater using ingeniously modified photography tripods that hold three rods steady at once (19). One group has a fire going on the rocks (20) and is cooking the catch and drinking beer, which a wandering vendor sells out of a battered styrofoam cooler (21). A group of boys swims in the sea as fishing boats just beyond gun it for the harbour (22). Now and then, a scooter or motorcycle tears along the busy, narrow path.
Goods and services you can buy from street vendors in Istanbul
The use of a weighing scale. Typing. Roasted chestnuts. Pomegranate juice. Grilled and boiled corn. Simit. Sausage. Use of a photocopier. Use of a laminating machine. Fish sandwiches. Freshly-fried, extremely oily doughnuts covered in syrup. Pastry. Spirograph kits. Whistled birdcalls. Mussels. Cigarettes.
