Scarf Store
Turkey (One)
September, 2010
We arrived in Turkey on a flight from Budapest--four hours late--and were grateful that the tourist info desk at the airport was still staffed at 9:00 at night. We got a map of the city and asked if he could show us where our hotel was. We knew it was near Taksim Square, and we knew the airport bus would drop us there, but could we walk to it from the square? Yes, he said, and drew the route. This turned out to be very helpful information when we dealt with our first nefarious taxi driver of the trip. He approached us as we waited for the airport bus, and offered to take us and two others to Taksim for the same price--twice as fast as it turned out. We were a little wary, but said yes, after repeating twice the terms of the agreement. 10 lira each ($6) to Taksim. So we get there after about 20 minutes and he asks what hotel. We tell him. He says it’s three or four kilometers south, and he’ll take us. No, we say, it’s only a couple of blocks, and we’ll walk. He is most insistent, and what do we know? But we resist and send him away. In the first of many such moments, a young man with halting English leaves his post at a sidewalk restaurant where he was making fresh juice drinks and asks if we need help. Where is this street, we ask him, showing him the map. He studies and studies, and decides he knows. He points. We thank him, but ignore the advice, as we think we know better. As it turns out, he was showing us a short cut, and we went the long way around--but at least ended up at our hotel after just a five minute walk with our packs. After we settled in, we walked back to thank the young man at the juice stand. Such generous help has been offered to us every day, which makes independent travel in Turkey possible, for not a lot of English is spoken, and not many signs offer help.
There are heaps of tourists in Turkey, but they tend to travel in flocks, great huge buses full, from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, each with a language specific guide. Few of them are wandering around looking lost. They are being well cared for. There have been times we’d have liked such comfort, but we like the cheap cost of doing it on our own, and we like the encounters we sometimes get to have with English speaking locals. A good example is Riza. He told me his last name, but I didn’t write it down, and now I’ve forgotten. He’s a guide in Cappadocia, or Kapadokya--the Turkish spelling. Kapadokya is an area of Turkey with several large and small towns that’s composed largely of volcanic tuff from an ancient and massive eruption. This stuff has eroded into what we’ve known as tent rocks--they call them fairy chimneys here. Centuries ago the local inhabitants started carving out the soft rock to make cave homes, and later the Christians here (10th century and later) made rather elaborate cave churches. Most of the towns have taken existing cave dwellings and enlarged upon them with stone cut from the same sort of rock, creating really charming small hotels with low doorways and roof terraces and carved stone details around doors and windows and arched gates. Goreme is perhaps the best of the lot since it is a small town and half the place has turned itself over to the tourist business such that you can find great little restaurants, pensions, guides, motor bike rentals, craft and rug shops everywhere. You have to walk up steep hills to get anywhere from the bus station, and mixed in with the tourist infrastructure are the locals, living in their own modified cave houses, with tractors parked out front and a load of squash just harvested from fields outside of town, which the women are cutting and pulling seeds from. Squash are grown by the million in this area--all the same variety, and apparently all grown for their seeds! In the neighborhood there were also vats of grape juice simmering on open fires, for all over the area are vines, sprawled on the ground, and loaded with purple and green grapes. Some are picked to dry for raisins--wouldn’t that be a seedy mouthful?--and others are pressed for juice, but we don’t think for wine--just a concentrated juice. There are even still a few pony carts around. One day we were hiking and a toothless old man pulled up and offered us a ride. “Rose valley taxi,” he exclaimed. We got in, but he turned out to be a stinker, agreeing to take people someplace, then dropping them much short of the goal and asking for his fare. We didn’t mind though. He was a lark. He and Geo had a dispute about the bill, and he pulled out a very fat wad of bills to show Geo he had no change.
But I got off track. I was to talk about Riza, a 30 something man who works for a small, local company. He was our guide for part of one day, and he took to George right away, as often happens. He wanted to talk to us, and on the 60 km minibus ride back from our outing, we chatted about a variety of topics. What is the average monthly salary in Turkey these days? About 1500 Lira, or $1,000. This is what most teachers make, he says. What about the headscarf issue? He had some clear and thoughtful comments: that it’s a freedom issue. He doesn’t think women should have to wear them, but he thinks they should be allowed to if they want. It is so complicated in Turkey, for the progressive government of the past banned the wearing of headscarves in public buildings and schools. But the majority of women in Turkey wear headscarves. So they wear them to the school or the court house, then take them off, then put them back on when they leave.. This is not a religious issue, Riza says, but a cultural one. It’s tradition. Most women wearing headscarves are not necessarily religious. It’s just what they’ve always done. He actually thinks religion is on the wane in Turkey. The mosques are empty, he says. Young people are not religious.
We liked Riza very much, and that night at dinner we thought of inviting him to have dinner with us, our treat, the next evening. We thought it would be nice to continue the conversation. We went to his workplace in the morning to ask him, and he was flabbergasted. He thought we were joking, and did not answer, but went off on his tour--leaving us puzzled. That night we went back to the office to find him, but he was late. So we left him a note and walked off to a small sidewalk restaurant. A few minutes later he saunters up--how he found us, we do not know. He sat with us for awhile, but he had to catch a bus to the town where he lives. We invited him again for the following night. He said he’d come, but he did not. We were sure he would come, but as we’ve puzzled about the fact that he did not, we think perhaps he was embarrassed, somehow, by the attention. So curious, and so difficult, these levels of ambiguity across cultures. One thing he said to us that stays with me. I asked if he had children, and he said he was not married, and that it was too late for him. He did not have a house or a car, so he had nothing to offer. He would never have a family. This surprised me, for in so many developing countries being a tourist guide is a prestigious position, and better paid than a lot of other work. Maybe not here, but we didn’t get to ask. At the time we just encouraged him not to give up, and I told him about a pretty and smart English speaking young woman I’d met in his town at the tourist office. Geo counseled him not to let rejection get him down. We tried hard.
In contrast, there’s a guy we met at a cave church. He was the caretaker, selling tickets, unlocking the door, giving explanations of the frescoes (there’s Jesus; there’s Mary; there are the magi). We’d met a couple on the hike up to the 12th century ruin who said they did not go in as it cost 2 Lira each. So we are thinking we’ll probably cough up 2 Lira--$1.25--and we approach the ticket man who comes out of his shady nook. Nice looking, short, grey hair and moustache. Eight Lira, he says. What, we say?! This is close to $5 and way more than the cost of a cold beer. Too expensive, we tell him, and start to walk off. He follows. Okay, he says, eight Lira for two. But we’ve got his number. He’s a rat, charging what he thinks the traffic will bear. Nope, we say, too much, and keep walking. He is desperate. Okay he says, free, and he grabs my arm and starts up the stairs. Okay, I say, we’ll make a donation. I assume he just likes talking about his church, but there’s more to it than that I guess. As we walk about the tiny, dim and cool interior, George is taking photos, and I am peering up at the chipped paint of the domed ceiling frescos, our man steering me about with a hand on my shoulder. This is a little unusual. Look, look, he says, kind of agitated. Here is the angel telling Mary. And here, more tugs, here is the baby Jesus. Suddenly I realize his hand is sliding down my right breast. Oh, no, I think, and take evasive action. I want to leave, and hustle George out the door. Now, thinking back, I can’t believe I actually gave him a 5 Lira donation as we left. I should have asked Geo to give him a punch in the nose. I’m 69, I rant to George as we walk away. Wouldn’t you think I’d be past having to worry about gropers?
We stayed in Kapadokya a surprisingly long time--ten days. But it’s like Paul Theroux says in his book Ghost Train that I just finished. Travelers, every once in awhile, just grind down to a halt, and can’t make any more forward progress. Here we could read, write, think, plan, walk, rest, sleep, and enjoy breakfast each morning in the crispy cool air on our roof terrace, balloons hissing overhead (it’s apparently a “must do” in K, to take a $150 balloon ride over the fairy chimneys), while we sipped tea, and chose our fare from a never varying spread: cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, fresh bread, cheese, salami, dried figs, yogurt, honey, jam, hard boiled eggs, watermelon, honey dew, tea or Nescafe.
Now we are restless in Konya. I’m getting tired of the monotony of the restaurant food. Almost every place you go in the whole country has the exact same offerings, and it’s very concentrated on meat. They only seem to know how to make about two kinds of soup (lentil, tomato), and we are served heaps and piles of bread at every meal. It is absolutely the core of their diet. Salads exist, but are not imaginative and consist mostly of tomatoes, parsley, red cabbage, rather bitter lettuce and sometimes shredded carrots. No lovely Greek salads! There’s great produce in the stores, so I am looking forward to a week in Istanbul when we will have an apartment and can cook.
In Konya, a good sized city of 762,000, we saw something we’d also seen earlier in Ankara. The vast majority of women are covered: headscarves and a sort of raincoat of varying lengths, usually in a rather drab color. In the clothing market areas, along side the drab raincoats and headscarves on display, were an array of brilliantly colored, ruffled, flounced, sequined, fussy, strapless, long gowns. Prom dresses a la Turkey. The contrast was arresting. We had enough contact with Ali Ulusan, our hotel owner/host, to ask about this. Where, why, who, we wanted to know. Turns out, for certain special occasions, the women really dress up. Weddings, circumcisions, graduations. And, Ali says, these dresses cost hundreds of lira--he had just bought his wife such a dress for almost $1,000 US dollars. He’d been telling us he didn’t make much money at his little hotel. Wow, we said, how can you afford that? You must do it, he says, even if you have to hock your watch. So when these covered women emerge, they do so with gusto. We also see filmy and brief underwear on display in the markets. Women are women everywhere, it seems.
A week later. We are having a rainy day in Istanbul--good for staying in, having tea and writing. It HAS been wonderful to have a kitchen, not to mention a tasteful and spacious apartment owned by an English woman who is seldom here. We’ve been sharing it with Ramah friends Mike and Chris, and we’ve taken turns cooking. Mike looks up Turkish recipes on line and we experiment. It’s been really nice. There’s wifi in the apartment, and both couples have laptops, so we’ve also been doing a lot of further trip planning. Travel has been made infinitely more manageable with the internet. They are looking at Greek ferry schedules. We’ve initiated a correspondence to discuss a boat trip off southern Turkey with the company owner based in Australia. The four of us will meet again for three nights in an apartment in Barcelona prior to our departure for Galveston on a mega ship.
Here in Istanbul we’ve been able to walk or take a trolley south across the Galata bridge over the Golden Horn into the old city and see all the major sights as desired. Even in October there are lots of visitors to the three biggest attractions (Aya Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and Topkapi Palace), but Chris and Mike managed to avoid the crowds at Aya Sophia by going during lunch time. Aya Sophia is one of those world renowned places it’s a joy to get to see: a huge interior dome/space that has stood since it was completed in, can you believe, 527. It was first built as a Christian church, and happily still has some of the intricate mosaics that were created during its first 1,000 years. After the Ottomans took over here, it was converted to a mosque. Ataturk sensibly said it should simply be an historic site in the early 20th century.
Shopping is part of the fun in Istanbul. One day on the scarf street (every shop up a narrow, steep, cobbled way had scarves flying like flags at its entrance) a woman in one wearing an “escarp” or headscarf, asked me where I was from. Her very next question was, “What religion are you?” In a real cop out, I told her I was Christian. Our Lonely Planet had warned us that this would be a frequent question, and that to tell a Muslim you are an atheist would be so incomprehensible to them, you would be sorry you had said such a thing. “What kind of Christian?” was her next question. “Oh, um, Methodist, Presbyterian--there are lots of Protestant denominations,” I fumbled. “Well, she told me, sounding professorial, “Muslims believe that Jesus was not God, but was one of the prophets, and a messenger from God.” “Oh,” I said, “that’s actually what I believe too”--thinking about the not-a-god part, but that he was a remarkably thoughtful human being. “Then,” she said, “you are a Muslim!” and she gave me a big grin. I asked where she had learned such good English. Turned out she was a retired biologist, and had taught herself English. “Peace be on you,” was the farewell she offered as I left, scarf in hand.
And, peace be with you.
