September 4, 2012
Istanbul and the woman in black
WE ARE being tourists. We are doing things that tourists do, those who don't come by bike, those who don't have white feet and odd leg tans.
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Istanbul is interesting and sites like the Blue Mosque and the palace are worth every moment. But it is a shopping paradise - or hell - and exists entirely for tourists. That was something a giant Slovenian complained when we crossed on the evening we got here: 'It's all shops and hotels.' Even his wife, who looked more inclined to enjoy shops and hotels, nodded there could be too much of a good thing.
Steph's observation was that to get the best out of the city would demand arriving here suddenly, by plane, without previous contact or experience. The problem - in fact the advantage - of spending a long time arriving by bike is that by the time you reach Istanbul you've seen mosques and palaces aplenty and Istanbul's reputation as an exotic place 'where east meets west' fades.
We got an insight into this at the Gallipoli beaches. A woman told us her coach driver from Istanbul had detoured off the main highway 'and we saw people in horse-drawn carts.' And that was the point: that was the only time she had seen them, this symbol of real people's Turkey, whereas we'd waved to cart-drivers not only from our first day in Turkey but our first day in Albania. And so Istanbul came not as a disappointment, because it was far from that and always will be, but it didn't have the excitement of being thrown straight into it.
There have, of course, been unforgettable moments. We were looking round the palace, for instance, when my eye settled on a man in western dress sightseeing with his wife in a full burka. She was hidden in black except for a slit barely wide enough to see. They were tourists as we were and so he took her picture in front of something significant.
I couldn't help smiling. What is the point of a picture of someone you can't see? And that, I have to say, does show Istanbul is after all somewhat different, where east meets west.
To prove we were there, here are some scenes that caught our eye:
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