« 10 Weeks in the Caribbean | Home | Known of The UnFear: The Rachael Ray Story »
Getting Lost in Istanbul
By Joshua Seth | August 20, 2007
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
As soon as I looked out of my cabin window this morning I knew that this port would finally provide the taste of old Europe that I’d yet to find on this voyage. Mosques and minarets dotted the landscape and bright red flags with the Muslin moon and star snapped briskly in the sea breeze. It was about 90 degrees already and it was only 8am.The first stop of the day was at the Hippodrome, the site of chariot races in old Constantanople that attracted crowds of 100,000 people. The Egyptian obelisk that still stands at it’s center is over 3,500 years old and I suddenly realized that I’d never before seen anything older than a few hundreds years that wasn’t locked up behind glass in a museum. This massive sculpture was standing right out in the open, just steps away from the equally impressive Blue Mosque. Men are forbidden to enter mosques with their knees exposed in Turkey and this is why I was now sweltering uncomfortably in my jeans as the temperature topped 100 degrees. It was worth it though, as again I’d never seen anything like it, not just in terms of size and age but in detailed adornment too. I took a great many pictures of the same domes and columns, trying to stitch together some semblance of the scope of the place.Afterwards I went to a rug making demonstration which was actually quite a bit more interesting than I’d anticipated, and not just because the place was air conditioned! Mustachioed men kept throwing rugs out onto the floor, one after another, bam bam bam, for about 45 minutes, saying as each one unrolled “This rug took 4 years to make. It’s silk on silk. All hand woven”. Bam! “This one took 5 years to make. It has over 600 stitches per square inch and is over 100 years old.” Bam! And they’d throw another one on top of that until there were dozens of carpets piled all over each other, covering the floor completely.Finally I entered the Grand Bazaar, home to over 7,000 shops and easily twice that many merchants trying to aggressively coerce passersby into sampling their wares. I used various accents and attitudes with the vendors and had a great time pretending to be from different parts of the world. I even posed as a Turk several times and tried to outsell the shop’s vendor, enticing the tourists it with Borat like enthusiasm. It was great fun. Eventually I just dropped my Turkish accent and did a flat out Borat impersonation. I’m sure the Turks don’t know who Borat is but they loved it just the same and invited me back behind the counter for green apple tea and Turkish delights.I got lost in the bazaar for hours and picked up a few oddities, like a bookmark made of woven Turkish carpet and a bunch of “evil eyes”. When it was time to go back to the ship, it took me nearly half an hour to figure a way out of the bazaar and back to the street where I’d started! I’d gotten entirely turned around in the never-ending maze of merchants and only managed to find my way back again because I’d noticed the particular design on the ceiling where I’d entered. It was an exciting adventure! I highly recommend getting lost every once in a while. It’s a great way to find yourself :-)All my best,Joshua Seth“The Globetrotting Hypnotist”——————————–Get Your Free eBook atwww.JoshuaSeth.comIstanbul
Popularity: 51% [?]
Topics: Travel |