Sat, 19 Apr 2003

author Tim	location Gen¨türk Cadessai 29, Laleli, Istanbul, Turkey (SULTAN)
posted 19:16 EEST	section Europe2002/Asia/Turkey ( all photos )

Looking around Istanbul ( 22 photos )

This morning I was awoken around 6am (still dark though) by the Call To Prayer. For those who may not know what this is, allow me to attempt to explain. Istanbul contains lots of Islamic people who generally worship at mosques all over the city. One of the five pillars of Islam is that they should worship five times a day - once before sunrise, again in the morning, after lunch, before sunset, and when it is dark. Each time this happens, the Call to Prayer is sounded from each mosque.
The Call itself consists of a heavily-amplified male voice singing a short verse, heavily embelished, in one of those voices which sound particularly grating to the Western ear.
Where we are staying, I counted five such calls this morning, each over-lapping by about a minute, lasting ten minutes, and totally ignorant of each other.
Exactly how Liz managed to sleep through all this is a mystery to me, perhaps I will get used to it. No matter, it is due to start again soon!
Awaking again at around 10, we did little but relax in our room for a while, before deciding that we should go find some breakfast, and look around this historical city we are in.
After getting some pastry-bread stuff that the many street touts have to sell (great advice for travelling - eat what the locals do), our first stop was the Grand Bazaar. This mind-blowing place used to be a bunch of streets with shops selling shiny things, carpets, and bascially anything you could ever want. A while back someone had the great idea of putting a very impressive roof over it all, and making it a pedestrian-only zone. The result is a labyrynth of good deals, rip-offs, good and bad products, but generally a very interesting experience.
It was here that it really became apparent that we stick out like sore thumbs. The bred-on-the-streets seller of wares can spot a tourist with strong foreign currency a mile away, and will stop at very little to get your business. Of course, they all speak Turkish here, but as we wander around, we have been greeted in German, Italian and English, just trying to get a reaction from us. The best by far, however, was a man who delivered the very well-rehearsed line "I have exactly what you are looking for in here" just as we walked past! He actually had no such thing, but it was all we could do to not giggle at him as we wandered off to push off more people.
Eventually, we bought two things for Liz - a beanie and a bag, both of which worked out quite cheap. For the beanie, we started by asking how much. "Fifty million" came the immediate reply. Using the convient rough conversion of one million TL = AUD$1, asking $50 for a beanie was a bit much. Very quickly his price tumbled, eventually letting it go for Twelve million. I wonder if anyone ever falls for the first price? I'm sure we could have done better. Similarly for the bag, where we were bargaining in Euros. Starting at 40, we decided we wanted to look around a bit more, walked away and increasingly low prices were hurled at our backs as we wandered away. A quick trip around the block, and we came back to pay 14 euros for a nice leather backpack/bag for Liz.
Besides the Bazaar, we have today wandered around the outskirts of the European side of Istanbul (since the river down the middle, the Bosphorous divides Europe and Asia), where we took a cold walk on a wall before a quick lunch/afternoon-tea stop at what turned out to be the pub where our tour group is meeting on Tuesday night.
Liz has just awoken from her sleep, proving even she cannot escape the sound of the 8pm Call To Prayer.

(More 14:18 EEST 20/04/2003, from Sultanahmet, Istanbul, Turkey)

Last night we wandered up Urdu Cudasai towards the Bazaar, looking for somewhere different to eat. We ended up at a small little eating place where we ordered a couple of pide, some Turkish Apple Tea and had a relax on the first-floor above the shop itself.
To order, we had to resort to pointing at the menu and trying to read the items back to the guy, so at least it was nice to be away from the tourist traps.

(customised)