Turkish Delight
“Find us our next adventure,” we asked our panel of friends and family. A place where we can recover and build from the Camino experience. A place with new foods and smells and sights. A place we’ve never been and maybe wouldn’t have thought to choose on our own. Our fantastic five zoomed together, swirled a world of possibilities, and came up with… Turkey!
So we arrived at The End of the Earth on a Sunday to find out we had tickets to Turkey on Wednesday. We eagerly booked a sweet AirBnB in Istanbul for a full month to allow ourselves time to chill and slowly melt into what one blog commenter called “one of THREE great cities of the world.”
Slow melting it has been indeed! I finally break down and take antibiotics for the intermittent fever I picked up on the Camino a month ago, so the first week involves a lot of bad nights of sleep and slow tired daytime walks between naps. Then as that finally lifts, my hip joint explodes into It Hurts to Think About Moving pain for just one day. Evidently my body really needed some time to recover from 890km of Spanish torte.
Our souls too need a big Reset button. After 45 days of community, exercise, inspiration, simplicity and clearness, it’s a big thing to come back into the World. Bills and life logistics and Sarah’s work have waited long enough. A city of 15.66 million (largest in Europe, 16th worldwide) is about as far as you can get from the Camino and could be utterly overwhelming instead of exciting if taken too quickly. Relearning how to plan and cook and interact and cross busy streets and figure out What To Do is not to be rushed.
So for many reasons, slowly is the right way to settle into Istanbul. Every day we pick a different destination - veggie market, museum, fish market, mosque, restaurant, spice market, another mosque, curios market, sweets shop, organic market, movie theater, Grand Bazaar market... We orient to the day’s general direction then I bloodhound us there through back streets and treacherous stairways and endless (or dead-end) urban Beauty Cuts that open up the fragrant nooks and quirky crannies of this glorious city. In larger and larger loops we find our way out and back again, expanding our circle of recognition and appreciation.
After just two weeks I still don’t know this place well enough to write any grand sweeping statements about the East-West culture connections and women’s rights and stray cat hotels. Here’s a few things we have learned.
We live on Electric Avenue
.Istanbul seems to be an endless succession of steep hills, and each hill has a different specialty. Our side slopes down from the famous Galata Tower (constantly teeming with Turkish tourists posing for instagram photos) to the handtool sector below then the Fish Market (where we go every few days to stock up on fresh and cheap salmon, mackerel, sea bass, halibut, etc.) Our 8-10 blocks are the lighting district - stores selling every type of indoor light fixture, chandelier, string lights, neon, wiring. Yes mom, our neighbourhood is safe - it’s the best lit neighbourhood in the largest city in Europe.
And all these stores selling pretty much the same thing - they all do business. Traffic is constantly backed up behind a delivery truck stopped in the middle of the narrow cobblestone street to unload another set of boxes (delivery parking spots are just so western). Backed-up cars don't honk & yell, they just wait - this is normal.
I rarely see customers leaving with their precious lava lamps, but the stores keep getting more (and the trucks and taxis and everyday drivers unapologetically keep stopping in the middle of the street to unload and grab a coffee and greet friends), so somebody’s buying. And sometimes these boxes are still on the sidewalk after dark with no-one around, and no-one's taking them!
Turkish Food is ALL a Delight
Turkish folk like their sweets. And their mild-but-complex spiced foods. Our Things-To-Do list may as well be a Things-To-Eat list, we’ve enjoyed so many different tastes and dining experiences. We look at the out-of-the-way family-owned gems that Culinary Backstreet takes their tours to, then visit during off hours. And of course Sarah is researching menus then buying strange ingredients at the market and cooking them up at home.
By being careful, we can do this within budget, dropping about $25 at one restaurant per day, then cooking our other two meals at home. We choose smaller cafés away from the over-priced tourist strips. We don’t drink unless they have some curious experience to try (turnip juice, mulberry juice, some funky tea concoction with clotted cream). And we usually order just one appetizer and one main course to share - serving sizes are generous, they usually provide some free side dishes and bread, and the food is so high quality and well-spiced that it’s enough to satisfy our bellies as well as our salivary senses.
Ultimately, all I can share is that, in expanding concentric circles, Istanbul feels surprisingly comfortable and familiar. It has brought me back from the Camino, back to health, back to ready to explore and learn this base-of-western-civilization east-west-mishmash in new and gently unfolding ways.
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Currently in...
Philadelphia
Heading to...
Costa Rica (Monteverde) till Christmas, then Thailand (Chiang Mai), Vietnam (Hoi Ann, Feb-Mar). Please share any sites, people or ideas by email.