The sights

I spent my third day working on my blisters. As any of you who’ve traveled with me know, my MO is to point myself in a direction that looks interesting and continue that way until I find adventure. I caught a bus from school to Taksim (Istanbul’s Capitol Hill) and walked south from there to the old Genoese enclave and then crossed the GOLDEN HORN (I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to write that) to the old city where I traipsed around the Ottoman mosques and the Hagia Sophia. The great thing about the mosques (or camiler, as they’re know in this neck of the woods) is that, as holy houses of worship, they’re free to the public, provided you have the decency to take off your shoes and carry them around with you in a trash bag. Thus, I got to see the inside of the Blue Mosque with its gilded domes all ablaze in the golden late afternoon light. I nixed the Hagia Sophia when I discovered it would cost twenty lira. This isn’t negligent miserliness on my part, though. In fact, it almost pained me not to explore it, but every museum in the country will be free for me the moment I get my student ID card from the university in a few weeks, so I can bide my time. While tooling around a neighborhood of dilapidated wooden Ottoman villas a series of wrong turns left me on the wrong side of Constantinople’s sixteen hundred year old sea wall. I spent the better part of an hour walking around its perimeter while cars whizzed by on the freeway at an arm’s length. I passed the time mooning over the wall and pondering which tumbledown breach the army of Second Crusade might have poured in through.

I eventually made it back across the GOLDEN HORN and found that the stretch from Galata Tower (built by the Genoese 1348 as part of the fortifications of their enclave (you are dealing with a history major)) in to Taksim was lovely. Someone blocks off the street at night and thousands of people stroll the wide avenue between lines of classy boutiques, gourmet restaurants, antique bookstores, and the occasional tourist trap. I passed three gypsies playing music in front of a change-filled hat. They were accompanied by a rather goofy, overenthusiastic touristy-looking guy strumming guitar while wobbling back and forth on a unicycle, though they seemed to be trying their best to ignore him.

Turkcell kindly furnished the entire strip with a couple hundred rows of elegant icicle-like lights spanning the width of the street, the only catch being that they hung the Turkcell emblem at either end of each string. This wouldn’t be a problem if it were something innocuous, like a swoosh or Michael Jordan dunking. Instead, Turkcell felt that the singular thing that best summed up who they are and what they stand for is a vaguely ominous yellow Tella Tubby clone… that or some sort of malevolent yellow alien with two feelers rising out of its face. Suffice to say I wasn’t happy about having hundreds of the things glaring at me on my way home. The thing is, Turkcell has completely saturated Turkey, to the point that you can’t go a block without seeing a Turkcell booth, or building-sized mural, or child dressed in aforementioned yellow alien outfit (unless of course Turkcell has, infact, somehow obtained a live alien, which might justify why they’re so bleeding eager to show it off). Thankfully, the only thing more ubiquitous than Turkcell’s little urchin is the calming, stolid stare of Mustafa Kemal. Perhaps my favorite thing about Turkey thus far is that you can’t go more than a hundred meters without encountering a bronze statue of the omnipaternal Ataturk reading, or striding purposefully, or playing with children, or gazing piercingly into the future, or inventing the latin alphabet. Easily the coolest founding father of any country ever (Benjamin Franklin being a close second followed by Jean D’arc).